Hey hey everyone! It's check-in time. This is going to be a very brief check-in seeing as my activities last week were more or less the same as the week before it, and most likely will be this week as well. The biggest difference seen this week was resolving creative differences between different team members, which I hope to see less of moving forward, considering the little time we have to polish everything to a certain degree. I at least have to count myself lucky that such issues have been minimal up until now but let's at least hope to keep it that way. Regardless, the plan remains the same for me, and I am now more confident that we can put something together that is worthy of submission. The hard part of that plan is making sure it goes over well with the rest of the class, seeing as turning in an unpolished product can be seen as a bit unsatisfactory. But this is senior year after all. Plan for the week... Monday: Team check/brief Tuesday/Wednesday: Animation work Thursday: Speaking with 3D modeler and programmer for scene construction Friday: Departing tasks for team
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Here we are again with the daily check-in, featuring your friendly-neighborhood team lead! This week in particular served as a continuation of last week, with the creation of a few more sprites and the process of implementing them directly into the Unity engine. This not only provided a few more assets for the final product but helped begin the process of a full team transfer onto a shared file, which will be my focus for this week as well. I also feel that this week was a little slower in comparison, at least in terms of making individual assets. The reason this is the case, however, is because I spent an extra amount of time helping my teammates with various issues, as well as spending more time as the team lead rather than the 2D artists, which is going to happen every once in a while. Regardless, I believe that I am making good progress in both areas. The plan for this week is as follows: Monday: Move entire team onto shared Unity file Tuesday: Continue animation and imports into Unity engine Wednesday: Further animation work Thursday: Implementation of animated sprites with respective player and enemy scripts Friday: Addition of whiteboxing for 3D environment.
This, my friends, will be the first of many updates that I will post as part of our development process for our final team game. The production of Zenith will require a clear timeline and detailed path as to where the project will head. As of right now, I have started with simple animations to remind myself of the process, as well as knock out a number of essential enemy types early. My creation of a number of idle animations is a clear and simple example of my role as the resident 2D artist and animator, and the addition of these animations will aid my teammates as the overall world is flushed out and brought to life. Overall, I ran into very few problems, which is good in this particular aspect of the team project. That does not mean that this will not be a long and arduous process, as these are only a few of the many animations that I will have to move forward with making. I believe that the relative speed that I made these animations with is a very good sign, meaning that I can pump these out without too much risk of falling behind. That and my ability to do them in this manner after a long hiatus from animation fills me with a newfound level of confidence. My future plans are now to focus on the animations custom to the main character, mainly so the programmers can then move in to programming him in to make the gameplay functional to a degree, which then allows for the development of the rest of the game.
Anyway, it's time I got back to it.
As part of the AGAD schedule, we must now move out of our PBM assignments and back into team work to finish our games by the end of the year. While I am eager to get back into this process, it does pose a few problems, mainly how rusty the class will be moving back into teams. The entire class has been away from team work for a number of weeks now, meaning that people will need to get back into the swing of things once the main project picks up again. That and people will have to refresh their memories on what their game overview even is in the first place. This does pose a number of issues when moving back in, but the experience provided by the PBM assignment will help soften the blow of this transition if just by a little bit. The skills we relearned in the Unity Engine and coding software should prove helpful when each team member moves back into their assigned roles. This is especially important in the coding sector, as almost every single person in the class had issues with coding one way or another. I genuinely hope that I won't find myself to be disoriented once this shift back into teams occurs, and I can quickly get back into the sector of game design that I specialize in.
After all this time, the parkour level is finally finished, and what a process this was. From start to finish, the entire project feels like it's taken years to complete, mainly due to the enormous number of steps in the entire development process. That being said, the entire process provided a good number of ups and downs, as well as an expectation of what is to come. The finished level design ended up being wildly different from the original drafts and concepts, especially since the original design just didn't function on a base level, with objects clipping into one another and floating in random directions. The process of making the game linear did fix this issue, as it limited the number of overlapping colliders and lowered the overall density of the environment. Although I still did find a good number of issues as I worked out the coding along the way. All in all, I think this worked out quite well for the timeframe I was given, and even could have done better if not for the setbacks encountered with the original design. I hope to take these mistakes and learn from them in a way that benefits my future projects and creations in this particular class, especially as we move back into team games for the rest of the year. This sure was a short post, but one that needed to be written for the sake of self-reflection and a clean conclusion.
After completing the pre-production phase of the parkour level, I moved into the editor to model out and create the entire level. This process came with a number of ups and downs, all of which will be explained in this particular post. As you can probably tell, I spent a fair amount of time modeling this castle level, so much so that it is the only one I was able to finish out of the two I planned. I was fortunate enough to find a castle building asset pack on the Unity Store, practically giving me a giant stone LEGO set to work with. I made use of this and the ProBuilder tool to make the castle my own, complete with hallways and balconies for the player to run along. In terms of modeling, I'm extremely pleased with how it turned out, even more than I expected. Sadly, this is about where the positives start to end. While I was glad with the overall appearance, functionality took a backseat for reasons I cannot explain, mainly the fact that random surfaces are not solid and can be easily walked through. The reason I find this irritating is because I set each and every object with a modifier that makes them solid to walk on. So why don't they all work? My honest answer is this: I just don't know. I was running low on time to work this out in the first place, so I fully plan to work out the bugs after this school quarter ends, and my schoolwork enters a brief reset period as the new quarter begins. This project has yielded many accomplishments and irritations, and I plan to take advantage of each and every on when I find the time. I will finish this level in time for the PBMs.
As part of our refresher course into the Unity game engine, my entire class was assigned to map out and create a personal parkour level. This process, like all others in the design pipeline, requires thorough planning and sketching in the pre-production phase, which is exactly what I ended up doing. A seen in the images above, the overall parkour experience is split into three separate levels, each of which lead into each other in chronological order. The order goes as follows: Starting in the main castle, the player needs to escape the building and run into the nearby woods, after some running in the woods, a nearby sewer grate provides the player with an ultimate escape into the sewer system. The overall gimmick of the level is that the player is pursued by castle guards at all times, meaning that the need to stay moving is critical, as well as find an escape route amidst the constantly moving environment. Typical controls are used as well, using WASD to move, and space to jump. The gameplay itself is very easy to pick up and understand, with the main challenge coming in the form of mentally registering pathways and constantly moving to stay ahead of the guards. This quick blog post was to describe the overall thought process that went into the design of my personal levels and will be followed by another post going into greater detail on the design process, as well as my accomplishments and issues along the way.
As part of the development process in AGAD, we were all required to take a refresher course on the Unity Game engine, as every team member will be using it to some degree with slight modifications. Now I have to say... this was much easier to understand than the last time we went over this course. Not only was the instructor far clearer on the directions, but he was just easier to listen to and understand overall. I say this because the last course we did, the one that introduced us to the engine the first time, was extra-long and very tedious to get through. All and all, most of the information was old news to me, but I was still in need of a reminder course like that, just to get the gears turning again. I did however learn a few extra techniques, like the use of a spotlight, which can be attached to a player and serve as a flashlight. Features like that I see being extremely useful as I navigate the engine again. As for my struggles? Well, I know for a fact that all of my issues are going to be in the programming part of the engine, which is a later unit for us. In terms of the interface and direct engine features however, I find myself set up quite well. Programming has proven to not be my cup of tea, but alas, I will have to learn it at some point.
Well folks, the time has come. As part of our game development process in AGAD, each team had to come up with a name and brand. And without further ado, I introduce to you: Studio Rust. With this newfound level of professionalism, we're now ready to begin production on our game. Having this title worked out, and our roles set, the stages of pre-production should be able to start fairly quickly on our end. While it did take some time to work out said roles, we eventually got everyone into a position where they would provide the most to the team and the final product. As for me? I just have to oversee it all, it was in my contract after all. In general, I have a lot of confidence in this team, as we have some especially talented people on all fronts. I hope that this talent will pull through and provide as much as possible to our final game. We hope to put our general idea for a 2D platformer to use, particularly with pixel graphics, and perhaps a Metroidvania gameplay system. These are essential questions that we will ask and answer as we move into pre-production. I wish the rest of the production teams good luck. And a special message to Butter Cow Games: This is not over
Our Team Website: Studio Rust - Home (weebly.com)
Now this project took a good amount of time to make, which is both a positive and negative thing in this scenario. I'll start with the negative: This was an extremely stressful project at parts. That concludes the list of negatives. As for the positives, I'm very glad with the way that this turned out in the end, as it achieved a level of detail that I didn't even know I was capable of creating. The variation in terrain, the spread of structures, and different ways that I made use of other students components, I just feel the effort was worth it in the end. And I'm glad I ended with this rather than a rushed product. To kick off the design debrief, I'm going to quickly talk about the buildings that I "populated" the island with. Aside from one, I stuck very close to the original design of the buildings themselves, only making slight adjustments here and there whenever there were issues with importing or resizing the pieces. The main difference was in the Mountaintop Abode, which I gave a derelict appearance by placing certain pieces of the house in awkward positions, almost as if they had been ripped off by some kind of storm. These same buildings were placed specifically in areas with different geological characteristics, meaning that the process of traveling to them leads the player through new environments and encounters. That being said, the geography itself does not resemble that of a typical island, which is entirely the point, as the "imaginary lore" behind the island is that it is completely unmapped, and often difficult to reach in the first place. This atmosphere makes it easy to fill the land itself with as many mysterious things as humanly possible. Outside of this general criteria, I stuck to making a generally mountainous terrain, with the only areas actually considered "mountains" being especially tall and rocky. I also made sure to take advantage of the ability to generate forests, with one of the main structures being placed in the densest forest on the map. Overall, I don't think I would have this environment any other way (I bet I'll come to regret saying that). For a first try, this is not bad at all! And I hope to keep this streak up as we move into team activities.
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AuthorI have a passion for creating things, and hopefully one day those things will be video games. You can check over on this blog if you wish to see any updates on my work or other subjects. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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