Term 7: Week 1

Another kinda slow start this term, which is all the more apparent as I see what the other tracks are dealing with.  Modeling and Texturing students are dealing with mountains of design work for sculpture 3 and the generalists have a lot to get done in the next few weeks if they want to do their own concepts for lighting and rendering.  My first week has been very chill, so much so I got a little restless and jumped ahead in game design... twice :p

For Hard Surface 2 we have to choose our vehicle for the midterm, draw a wireframe 'plan of action' and a quick block out to get the volumes correct.  I am pretty happy with my block in but I hope Max will be going over how to approach modeling a car with curves because the 'box modeling' way I used for the block in seems clumsy and slow. I guess I'll see next class.

So for the first Game Design assignment all we had to do was write a rough GDD (Games Design Document) based on the graphic novel Black Science.  We are all grouped into teams of 2 to work on this project which is a welcome change to the usually very individually focused assignments we get.  Honestly I would rather work in a bigger team maybe 4-5 since its better for bouncing around ideas but I am still happy in a duo.  We wont be doing a whole lot in these groups though just the early design and prototype stages.  When we move onto the realization and art style of the game we go back to individual work.

My team are working on a turn based strategy game where 4 players will compete against a 'game master' type role while they try to resource grab and survive against waves of monsters, all while the game master can change the game rules (using set cards).  I will elaborate more on the game mechanics as they begin to enter lock down.  As it stands now the whole game is kinda up in the air.

In week 2 we will be blocking out the game map and mechanics.... since my team got our GDD done so fast we just went straight ahead with the block in using 'Table top Simulator' on Steam.  I love this game/program.  Table top Simulator is a fantastic game development tool you can very quickly mock up levels and try out new mechanics very similarly to how you wold with pen and paper but with buttons like copy paste :D and not need for scissors or glue.

I would still like to play test this out a little to balance the difficulty and ensure each player has fun and of course being in a team requires a lot of back and forth so I don't want to jump ahead with too many mechanics that might be dropped after we test out the level.  

So since I found a little more spare time :p I jumped ahead again and designed one of the props for the game pitch document we have to compile for the final. This little guy is a deployable drone used by the engineer class.  I want to go for a lighthearted stylized look to the game, along the lines of Overwatch or Fortnite.

It also helps that my digital sculpting assignment is to just play around in Zbrush so I figured I would combine both assignments and try building this guy in Zbrush.

The Digital Sculpting final is to model a character.  Pretty open brief and I knew it ahead of time so I started this guy a couple of days before term started.  I now have him up to a good enough level for me to work with in 3D.  I have orthographic Y-pose drawings too but I like this one as an attitude painting to keep in mind the characters story.  

Brenin is a character I designed to fit into the Overwatch universe.  For those of you that play imagine a character that combines Soldier76, Winston and Warwick from LOL.  Brenin spends most of the game as an agile close range class with his SMG and tactical knife but when he activates his ultimate by opening an aperture in the middle of his chest armor and administers a mutagenic agent catered to his own DNA he transforms into a ferocious wolf like creature.  Much like Winston's ult this form has much higher health and sacrifices long range combat for hand to hand.  I have no way of testing out this build so it may not even work in the Overwatch game but I think it is still important to think about how the character would play as well as their back story.  That way you can try to communicate the play style through the look of the character as well as their choice of clothing and weapons.  I was going for a scrappy guerrilla style armor that would allow for greater mobility and of course accommodate the large size differences when transforming without breaking.  I imagined this character to be more of a mercenary than a traditional soldier and when I was working through his back story I wanted him to be a part of an abandoned military experiment much like the Omnic characters that became hostile.   In my mind the military would grasp at any straws they felt feasibly in combating that threat including creating unstable, animalistic weapons.  We will see how far I get this term with modeling this character but it would be awesome if I could fully realise the design and get it into Unreal in a few terms!

Anatomy of games was a very chill class, I think this will be my most relaxed class of the term.  We mostly just introduced ourselves and talked about what we will be covering this term.  Thankfully we seem to be moving away from game history and instead focusing on more immediately applicable information like game pipeline and the tools of the trade :)

The first assignment is to pitch a game you think would better everyone's lives by playing.  I picked SOMA not for the gameplay or even the visuals which are still stunning but for the experience!  This game is incredible! the way it makes you think about what consciousness or self really is.. wow! I have read a few books and watched films that tackled this concept but it is just a whole other experience to witness it first hand, be placed behind the eyes of someone actually facing these questions! It's why I love games!

Lastly I had my first Scripting class.  We will pretty much just be tackling MEL script which isn't a whole lot of use outside of Maya but still I think by week 10 I will have all the tools I need to build most of the little performance enhancing scripts that buzz through my brain when I'm up at 3:00am wishing there was a faster way to do something :p  The first weeks assignment was pretty light we just had to experiment with writing a script that automates a bouncing ball.  It mostly involved setting Maya to self record all its functions then copy pasting pieces of the MEL code and re purposing it to build the whole scene with a single button.  I am looking forward to the later weeks when we can approach some real scripting language with variables etc.