P4

Week 1

The first week of production involved everyone in the group working together to learn how to navigate the Unity menu confidently. Fortunately, we had already did an exercise in creating a very simplistic game as well as looking at the program in our own time.

Once we felt as though we knew enough, I moved to Autodesk Maya 2018 and began working on the small assets that will be in game. These assets include a dagger, a chest, a pendulum, dynamite and more. All of these assets had to be modelled, textured and, in same cases, animated.

Week 2

A lot happened in week 2. After all of the assets had been created, we had to find a reliable way to transfer them from Maya to Unity. After a lot of research and trail and error, I found that you can export the abject as FBX files and upload them to Unity. This saved our group a lot of time and memory space as they only other way we found was to upload the Maya directly and that usually resulted in long upload times and corrupted assets.

Once that was complete, I began to exit my comfort zone a move towards character modelling and animation. Having extremely little experience in this field, I made sure to research whatever I could to make sure I knew what I was doing. By the end of the week, I had made our character.

Week 3

This week involve the lesser feared part of character production, animation. However, before I was able to start that, I had to first Paint Weight the character. Painting Weighting is a long process that tell Maya what part of the body has to move when each joint is rotated. It is a long and tedious task that can be very difficult to get right. In fact, I continued to make small changing to it from weeks to come so I make more animation.

Though, I finally got it to a point where I was satisfied and began animating. By the end of the week, I had made the idle, running, crouch, crouch running and jump animations.

Week 4

This was the week where we planned to create cutscenes and long dialogue. However, after discussing with our sourced artists who agreed to help, they decided that they were unable to help. With this in mind, our group came to the conclusion that it would be better to focus on the gameplay than to use our time to make the cutscenes. Instead, I went back to perfect and issues we found with the animations as well as make some tweaks to the assets.

Week 5

By this point, our programmer add made all the scripts to make the player move when the correct buttons are pressed. However, he did not know how to make the animation play when they should do (eg the running animation). Seeing that he needed as time as possible to make the enemy AI, I decided to take pause my role of artist and take the temporary role of secondary programmer.

I spent my time this week researching on how animations work within Unity as well as familiarising myself with the bare basics of C#. I managed to find a tool with Unity known as the Animator Controller. Having discovered this and researching upon it, I was able to work out how to layout the animation as well as how to code the animations to play at the correct times.

Week 6

This was feedback week. For a two hour lesson, students went round to play test each other's game and give their opinion. We made sure to write down all the feedback we got as well and relay it back to the testers to make sure our notes were correct.

A lot of our feedback came were about the user interface (UI) and the lack of some basic game features like a death screen and a collectable counter. We took all of the feedback on and summarised it into what was mentioned the most down to what was mentioned the least. This gave us an idea on what we needed to work on first. Having taken the feedback in mind. We sat round and assigned tasks for each of us to do. Mine was to create additional animations and code them into the game.

Week 7

This was the week we had off college which meant we had more time to work on the game but had to organise it ourselves. We immediately create and group chat in Discord which allowed us to speak to each other as well as show each other what was going on on our screens. This is when I worked on the additional animations like the death animation and hit animation. Once these were fixed, I uploaded them into game and coded them in using the Animator Controller and C#.

This was also around the same time Luke was nearing the end of his final, detailed level designs. So, I moved over to help out in the Game Designer role and created a basic tutorial level. I had to make sure that it involved everyone aspect of the whole game condensed into one short level to show the player how the game works. This included making adding space to let the player learn how to jump, attack, use physics props, use dynamic props and crouch. This is also where I created and animated a dynamic prop in the form of a target that, when, hit recoils and eventually falls apart. Once this was done, I handed the level over to Luke to add more detail.

There were a few more things I need over the week off. Things like, recorded a "hit" sound effect, uploaded my own images to use for the main menu and the buttons on said menu, as well as spend the better part of 4 hours adding and testing the colliders to allow the player to interact with their surrounds.

Week 8

The final week of the unit was an incredible rush. A large portion of it involved continuous testing a bug fixing to make sure the game ran as smoothly and reliably as possible. This involves testing everything I did in the previous weeks. I also decided to create and animate a title screen to greet the player when the load up the game.

Production Schedule

Trello

 Throughout the whole production of our game I feel I was putting a lot of contribution to make the final outcome. As evident in the week-by-week documentation, I worked consistently hard to make sure I completed everything my specified role required me to do and to a good standards. The documentation also explains that a lot of my work was new to me and had to be learnt as I went. This clearly illustrates how much extra time went into my work.

Something worth noting is that I didn't just work within the my role's parameters (Game Artist). As explained in the production schedule and documentation, I greatly helped in the programming department as well as helped in the level design. Personally, I think this solidifies the notion that I have made a consistent and successful contribution to the production team as well undertaken tasks that are not of my role.

Art/Programming Work

These are images are to showcase my work. However, what you see is not all of as some of the animations are very similar (crouching, crouch running, crouch punching, etc) and some of the assets did not make it into them. Despite this, I have worked my best to produce high quality assets and animations, a detailed main menu and buttons as well as scripts that are fully functional with the game.