AH Week of 2-13

Well... I'm fairly sure that most of you saw my current fly-through last week. I spent a good deal of time working on that last week to be ready for Thursday. Friday Nate S. and I met with the programmers, of which one said he would for sure work with us. He is a grad student, so he should be able to give us quite a bit of help. I'm not sure how many of the other ones are interested though.

I also presented it to them that we could take this a couple of different ways, to allow them to really work on something they want to. Either way we will be primarily using the environment we have now. We may need to organize this a little bit differently, but I don't feel that changes the work any of us are doing currently. We will know in a few weeks how many programmers will be working with us, and we don't need to be able to give them anything to work with until then.

The next two weeks I'll be focusing on texturing and trying to take a chunk of the environment and texture out everything. So... no more modeling for me this week. I'm also going to try to create a more concise design document to hand the programmers over the next few weeks.

Now I'll go back to spending hours and hours in the dark room developing film...

Nate T - Week something something

Here's some texture work: iterative work with various forms of ice, some started in Maya for normal maps and some created in Painter. A Maya and Unity shot of my favorite texture. I don't know if it's going to work - might be too organic for the octagonal style that's been talked about; but, whatever. . . it was fun to paint. Self-critique: I have a lot of trouble keeping my ice, razor sharp, I keep smoothing it out way too much. I think if we go this route I could lessen the busy-ness of this texture, limiting the amount of chunks. That's all for now.




- Nate T

UI Update...

Not a ton to update today, as most of what I've done over the weekend isn't yet ready to be shown. I've been gathering resources such as typefaces and patterns and using them to do some experimental work on the overall visual theme of the UI.

The start screen I was working on is coming along, I can post a screen of that one.



Main menu screen is being designed to be displayed over a 30-60 second looping gameplay reel, I hope that's possible. If not, it'll be easy enough to alter.

Also, I've spoken with Rhaelene about possibly lightening the palette for the UI to better match the game's, as Andrew has a specific dev studio in mind to which he's hoping to present his portfolio. We can talk more about that today in class, and I'll make sure I'm using a color scheme that fits right in with what Nate and Andrew are working on.

The next few days I'll be focusing on getting a full workup of the in-game HUD finished so that the programmers can give feedback on Friday.

Week of 2-6

I don't have a video or screenshot today... I might by the time class rolls around, but I mostly spent my time adding detail to the different chunks that make up the section of the level I've been working on. I think I'm getting closer to being able to texture everything...

I also did some research into how difficult it would be to do multiplayer, and I think it wouldn't be that bad. Nate T. and I spoke briefly about how we can lessen the scope of the project as we just don't have as many people as we started out with. I think we will discuss it a bit more today during class and come up with a strategy that we can present to the programmers on Friday.

Nate T - Week #3

Not much to write about. I worked on modeling ice chunks that resemble the style found in the Star Wars movie. My 4-5 pieces are more unique and poly heavy than the ones I see in Andrew's video so I'll see where we stand on poly density before I make any more. But, the movie shows that the time for making my own test pieces for texturing is over and really isn't going to help all that much anymore.

None of my textures came out looking all that great this time around; so, no screens. That and my palette has a little bit of a wider variation, so I'll need to rework the textures, sticking to more blues and greens.

Anyways, that's what's happening.

- Nate T