Sleeping At The Lab

So this is the weekend before we have to turn in our project to IGF. There is still a lot of work to be done in the art side of things, and there is not enough hours in the day to get everything done. This is mainly due to the trouble that our project has been in over the last few months, and why the other two teams are in much better shape than us. So I have brought one of my sleeping bags with me and a pillow to get at least some sleep at night.

At the end of last semester, we had to go back and think about what we could do about our game since the feedback we had from many people was that our game wasn't entertaining or appealing the way we wanted it to be. So over the summer, the producers of the team got together and came up with Dead Drop and we thought we had nailed  it. We worked really hard to get a playable demo during the summer even if some people had traveled out of the state/country and we couldn't count on everyone to work on the project. We presented our ideas, but then a few weeks into the semester we were told by a guest professor from another school that our project would get disqualified at IGF.

This really brought our morale down, and we struggled for a few weeks on what we could do to salvage the game so we wouldn't have to start from scratch. But this was probably not the best idea, since I was able to witness our team slowing deteriorate from internal fights due to stress and anxiety. This eventually lead the professors to make us vote on a new project, which because Drop Drop. From then on, we had to go back to pre-production stage and try to plan everything so it wouldn't happen again. The only thing is that we didn't have much of a level designer and it wasn't until recently that we got told what type of models the artist need to build for the game to make interesting ways that the player could fall through the city.

I had a list of assets to work on, but all the stuff on the list was mainly as props for the level once it was built which is what I belief our first mistake. We should have focused first on level design and once we had all the shapes of the buildings that we wanted, that's when we could start working on props and everything else to make the city look the way we wanted it to look. This has led to a huge crunch to the art team and I don't think that we are going to be able to finish all the 16 building models that they wanted us to do.

So for now, I will continue to work throughout the night (it is currently 1 AM as I'm writing this blog post) and try to get as much stuff done for the game. That is all for now, thanks for reading.

Utah State Capitol Building - Model Done

So I finally manged to get the model done, and I managed to get it just under 3K triangles. It was harder than I thought it would be to try and add some of the detail without going over the limit, but the texture will be the hardest part for me. I will have to find a way to tile my textures to make the most out of my 1024 x 1024 texture limit.

I will hopefully be able to finish the texture before the next weekend. Thanks for reading. 

Utah State Capitol Building

So this next week is going to be Fall break and it will give me time to catch up on a lot of work that I've been trying to do all semester. For example, on Monday nights there is an art class for the new cohort that started this semester, and I'm sitting in on that class to try and have more experience with Art. Unfortunately  I haven't been able to finish many of the assignments from that class because there is always something that I need to do for my other classes where I am going to be getting a grade.

One of the last assignments that was due this last Tuesday was to work on a replica model of a building in Salt Lake City. I decided to work on the Utah State Capitol building and I managed to get most of the model done, but not enough to move on to doing the textures for it. Here is a quick render of where the model is at:

The rules for this project are the following: 3000 triangle limit and a 1024 x 1024 texture limit. So far my model is standing at 2034 triangles, so I still have a lot of tri-count to add detail and I still have to do some face reduction where it needs it. Hopefully I will be able to finish this since I think it has the potential to be a really nice portfolio piece. That's all for now, thanks for reading.