WEEK 11 – POST-MORTEM

Last week I did not contribute very much to the project since the art production has been finished. I pushed all the changes to the master file, such as the textures of paintings and adding magnets and stickers to the scene . In addition, Ning and I are also responsible for taking screenshots in the game, so Anna can use it in the final presentations.

• Meeting ( 1 hour )
• Taking screenshots ( 1.5 hour )

POSITIVE

Thanks to our programmer Joe, now we have a functional game and the networking is working fine. On the visual side, the GUI looks cartoony and cute, which matches perfectly with the story of our game. So overall it has been a great experience for me and I’ve learnt a lot from all of the rest team mates.

NEGATIVE

I think what is missing in our team is a concept artist who can help design the basic looks of our game, including the environments. So everything in the game could be consistent visually.

WHAT DID I LEARNED FROM THE EXPERIENCE?

The first thing I learned from this experience is the ways of modeling in games. Honestly speaking, it’s my second group project of making a game. When I’m modeling for animations, I usually model those assets as more detailed as possible. While in games, when assets do not have to be that high-poly, there are some cheating methods that I can use to model objects. For example, instead of modeling the individual stitching on baseballs, I can just use a texture and a normal map.  By doing that, I can speed up producing the assets.  SCRUM is another thing I learned from this experience, which I’ve never heard before. But it turns out to be really useful in a group project. By SCRUMing, we can get everyone on the same page, and communicate better  as a group.

Week 11 – Post-Mortem Swat the Bug

This was an interesting experience for me because I had never been part of the art team on a game project before.  I felt pretty confident that I knew what I was doing but then quickly realized that there was still a lot to learn.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

I think the slack channel was really helpful.  The communication was helpful and everyone was pretty good about answering quickly.  Once we had Saturday Scrum meetings, things got off to a very quick pace.

WHAT WENT WRONG

I think if we knew the art direction a bit sooner, we could have gotten things off to a better start.  There was a communication gap early on beforehand but we solved this issue in the middle of the quarter.  I wish we could have included more game mechanics but we didn’t get those finalized fast enough.

WHAT I LEARNED

I learned more about Scrum.  I had done it previously in a project but I think the lecture and the experience really helped solidify the ideas behind Scrum.  I definitely learned more about modeling and learned about Maya’s new UV tools.  I’m glad I was able to use those instead of Headus.

As far as what I would change for the future, I will definitely communicate more and double check my work more often.

WEEK 11 – POST-MORTEM

Overall, it was a good experience. I really enjoyed working on art and the initial conceptualization of the game.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

I liked the fact that the team met regularly, and as much as possible, we tried to be on the same page at all times. Earlier on, the communication between all units wasn’t as effective, but, down the line, we were able to communicate better and that was good. Also, the game environment has a fairly polished look and feel, thanks to those who worked on modeling, texturing and lighting, it turned out looking nice, not withstanding the short period we had to create all the assets. Also, working on creating the GUI elements was fun.

WHAT WENT WRONG

I think we would have made a lot more progress if we had known much earlier exactly what our game was. It took us a lot of precious time to get to that point, and I feel like If the game design goals were communicated effectively across the board, much earlier, we may probably have had a more functional prototype than we do now.

WHAT I LEARNED

Scrum! This was my first time of actually seeing this development methodology in action and being part of a team that used it, and this is one of the huge takeaways from in this class. I think it’s a very effective way of keeping track of managing multi-disciplinary design projects. In the future, before working on any project, individually or as a team member, I’d definitely be asking , “What development methodology would be most suitable for this task?”. Also, the Silicon Valley clip that was shown in class made me fall in love with the series and aside the occasional vulgarity here and there, I’ve actually learned a lot from it.

Also, the importance of Team Communication at all points in the development pipeline proved an important lesson on this project. Things started moving forward quicker, once we started communicating more effectively. I’d definitely keep this one in mind moving forward.

Week 10 – Animator, Animations, Checklist

For the past week, I made a checklist of the things that we would need to have our game ready, animated the rest of Sleepy’s animations, imported Sleepy and Mosquito animations into Unity, set up Animators, checked through some assets that team members have and gave Teslim some confirmation on UI assets. I also spent a bit of time reviewing how the Animator works in Unity.

• Checklist (1 hr)
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pj4gNkhyFRQc2CVoUS-MBPOmNvawOS__gmMC1vvT7rc/edit?usp=sharing
• Animated Sleepy Animations (2 hrs)
  • Walk cycle
  • Idle
  • Left Swat
    • Low swat
    • Mid swat
    • High swat
  • Right Swat
    • Low swat
    • Mid swat
    • High swat
• Reviewing how Animator works (~1 hr)
• Imported Mosquito and Sleepy animations into Unity and set up the Animator (3 hrs)

Mosquito Animator Controller

Sleepy Animator Controller 

POSITIVE

The animations and animator for mosquito was pretty straight forward to set up and is working. The Sleepy animation on the other hand requires a bit more work. The whole team is working hard to finish up the game and have it ready for playing. There was a lot of back and forth communication for finding errors in the game and things that are needed to be changed.

NEGATIVE

Sleepy swats was not working with the current setup we have. Having the arm rig and the whole body rig separated leave errors for the Animator. Sleepy’s body will move while the arms will remain in T-pose. So in order to make it work, Jal and I decided that instead of having the arms try to aim at where the camera is looking at, we would just make animations for a high, medium and low swat and the animations would play based on the y-axis of the camera. So I reconnected the arm rig to the body rig and animated the different swat animations. Hopefully this will work.

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

There is still testing we would need to do and some last minute bug checks. I hope we can have a playable build functioning very soon.

WEEK 10 – POLISHING AND TITLE SCREEN

The production has come to the finals, and most of the art works have been done. So basically I don’t have so many tasks to do in the last week. Ning and I are responsible to bring some liveness to the environments. So I modeled and textured some magnets on the fridge, in order to add some personalities. In addition, I re-textured the paintings because we thought that some paintings in the old version are not appropriate for the environment. So Anna found some pictures, and I re-sized them in photoshop in order to fit the paintings’ UV. On the other hand, I also designed the title screen background. But it still needs to be verified by the other group members.

• Model and texture the magnet and stickers ( 40 minutes )
• Re-textured the paintings  ( 10 minutes )
• Screenshot and design the title screen ( 1 hour)
• Weekly meeting ( 2 hours )

POSITIVE

The game is getting better and better now, and it looks good aesthetically.

NEGATIVE

None.

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

We may find some other people play test our game now to get this game better.

Week 10 – Blinded by the light

Art-wise, there wasn’t much to be done in the final week in this project.  So all that was really left for me to do was polish the light in the scene.  I fixed an issue with the ceiling as well.  There was some light leakage coming through and caused some problems.  I tried to optimize the bloom and shadows as well.  Several materials needed changing so that light could properly come through.

Here’s this week’s breakdown:

• Lighting
  • Changing the adaptive light code – 30 minutes
  • Learning about new features with Light Probes in Unity 5 – 30 minutes
  • Adjusting light values – 2 hours
  • Implementing light probes – 1.5 hours
  • Changed several materials and incorporated new ones – 1 hour
  • Last minute lighting changes – 1 hour

 

POSITIVE

The bloom is looking pretty nice in the game and the apartment looks good.  I saw the mosquito earlier and I love the look of it.

NEGATIVE

None

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

None

Week 10 – Delegation

I continued  a dialogue with Kai-Lin on everything that needed to be done for the game before half the team leaves for GDC next week. Since art is basically done, I focused on looking for sweeteners that the artists can do without putting more strain on the designers/programmer.

• Review Saturday online SCRUM, the various channels, and Kai-Lin’s checklist document (0.5)
• Direct meeting and help with verifying assets so that everyone is actively working on something that contributes to the game or eases the burden on Ethan, Kai-Lin, and Jal (2)
• Class presentation (1)
• Help with audio (0.5)

Positive

Everyone was very willing to do things outside of their wheelhouse!

Negative

We’re at a point where we’re trading off the scene in order to make changes.

Solutions & Suggestions

For next week, since I will be away, we might want to schedule time to have with the build so that the burden isn’t on one teammate to make all the changes to the objects in the game.

WEEK 10 – WIN/LOSE SCREENS & SOUNDS

For this week, I spent some time creating and revising the win/lose screens according the needs of the game. I created different variations as well as a final stats page for the end of game. I also worked on shortening sound also, after Anna reviewed them. The summary of the weeks tasks are below:

1. Win/lose screens – 2.5 hours
2. Sounds – 1 hour
3. Meeting – 2 hours –  Total – 5.5 hours

 

POSITIVE

The team worked really hard and the game is in a much more complete state than it was.

NEGATIVE

Nill.

Week 09 – Texturing and Mosquito Modeling and Animating

It seems that our art team has finished almost all the art works in the last week. For me, I spent most of my time UVing and texturing some furnitures and some assets that the sleepy guy can interactive with. The cartoony wood texture and the reference of the bed texture is provided by Anna. In addition, I also modeled and animated Mr. mosquito. Basically the mosquito is made up of some spheres and columns. So it didn’t take me very long to get it modeled. As for the wing animation, I added two joints to the mosquito’s wings, and rotate the y-axis mainly through expressions in Maya. I think the flying animaiton turns out to be fine. But it still needs to be verified by Anna or Kai-lin.

• UV and texture samurai sword ( 3 hours )
• UV and texture bed (30 minutes)
• UV and texture bowling ball (20 minutes)
• UV and texture kitchen island ( 2.5 hours )
• UV and texture painting ( 40 minutes)
• Model the mosquito ( 30 minutes )
• Animate the mosquito’s wings ( 30 minutes)

POSITIVE

Finally we have completed almost all the art works in the past week, and it feels better that out game is getting prettier than before.

NEGATIVE

There are not so many tasks left in the art team. So I don’t know what’s next for me to do.

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

I can help animate the sleepy guy if it is needed. And I can also polish the assets and textures in the next week.

Week 9 – Pulling Things Together

This week I and Anna decided upon a color pallet, I continued to import models into the game, continued to put some basic colors on everything, redesigned the room for more maneuverability, fixed colliders, organized the folders in Unity (things got pretty cluttered), started to animate Sleepy before switching jobs with Kai-Lin, and wrote two sound scripts.

• Environment layout, fixes, and texturing (4 hours)
• Sound scripts and attaching (1 1/2 hours)
• Animating (1 hour)

New layout!

One of many objects that now has a texture in game.

Positive

The game is slowly but surely coming together into some kind of being. Building up the environment has been very satisfying, as was scripting. Not nearly on the same level as Joe, but still fun. The team seems to be communicating much more – big plus.

Negative

Having only one dedicated programmer is really becoming a weakness for us. Joe is working his butt off, and we still haven’t playtested. Discovering the Sleepy rig needed to be re-rigged was incredibly annoying, and not a setback that we needed at this stage.

Solutions & Suggestions

I’m not sure what else to offer up here other than everyone needs to work on this as much as possible over the next week.