Semester 2 Week 15-16

Drew Abegg
May 1, 2021
4 min read

Studio GOMP is doing another game jam so now it's time for tired. It's 12:30 right now so I might keep this short. I am sleepy. I wanted to make my work blogs a bit more in-depth but that ain't happening tonight. Haha sike I'm going to finish this tomorrow cuz I don't want to strain to remember the past week.

...Many days later...

Well, it's not tomorrow anymore. I'll combine what I worked on last week and this week, and then I'll talk about the game jam.

I'll start with Moonlight Sprinters. There's really not much going on on that front anymore. The team lead has now officially recognized that we will not be able to finish by the end of the year. The new course of action will be to kinda showcase whatever work we have made. That's pretty open ended, and means something different to everybody. The programmers are going to try to make a working version of the time trials. Our 2D artist will make some cover art. The designers will... I don't know. I may make a render of the cars we have; I think that's what they expect I'll do. But right now I'm doing something a little more fun. A bit more interesting. A touch more new.

I'm 3D printing my Platinum model. I think that's my favorite and latest, and also the best shape for printing. That's not as easy as sending a file to my printer, unfortunately. First, I had to combine some meshes and fill some holes to make everything solid. Then I had to separate others (the mirrors, spoiler, and spoiler supports). I then flattened the bottoms of each piece. I created brand new wheels and rotating joints for the axels. This was extra tough, and required several large scale prototypes. Then I exported and imported into a software called Cura that separates the model into printable layers. Then came my printer. My touchy printer. There are a myriad of issues that can and have come up. An unlevel bed, faulty export, broken filament, a ghost, and so much more. I have most things printed, including the joints that work like a charm, I still haven't gotten a good print of the main body. Final assembly coming soon.

Techno Towers. All's going well. We're effectively done with turret models, and we're good on environment models for now. So instead, we're making some new enemies. I made two; an alligator-bot and a bee-bot. I'm happy with the designs and have gotten some great feedback from the team. Standard process for the most part. The only new techniques I think I used are the "poke faces" tool on the gator's tracks (connects all vertices of a face in the center, and allows you to offset it as well. In the case of a quad, it turns a face into three tris, and offsetting makes a pyramid shape), and the gear primitive from the extra objects add on. It makes gears. There's a gear on the bee. Useful.

This weekend was Ludum Dare (pronounced, "???...?"), one of the biggest game jams out there. Studio Gomp and I had 72 hours to make a game, Danger Rat, from scratch. The theme was "deeper and deeper". Naturally, we decided to make a game about a badass rat falling through hell. The gameplay is similar to the game Downwell, except with a sword instead of a gun, and bouncier. Everything in the foreground is nice 2D, but the backgrounds are 3D. There's about 10 or so. You spawn with the dungeon background, which is my favorite and the most unique, but because of the difficulty, many people may not make it far enough to see any of the others. That's ok though, I'm ok with that.

As always, I prioritize efficiency in my models, but especially in a jam. Modifiers are so cool. The rocks are done procedurally with modifiers, of course, and I learned that the weld modifier is useful to give some texture to the rocks instead of/in addition to the decimate modifier. In the dungeon area, I used the previously mentioned gear primitive, but also the brick wall generator that (I think) comes in the same add on. This is by far the best way to make bricks when texturing isn't an option (texturing isn't an option in this case because we're using one of Riley Wood's world famous post-process filters). I also made chains using the always-satisfying combination of array and curve modifiers.

We're all very happy with how the game turned out. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from commenters. I'm happy people are enjoying it! We won't know the results for a few weeks, but we can see the number of reviews. At the moment, we have about 60 reviews, which is crazy! Somewhere around the top 3% as far as we can tell. Our game is download-only, so it requires more commitment from the player compared to the plentiful games with web versions. I don't know what we did right to get all these reviews (maybe it has something to do with how many reviews our team has given).

Go us!

One last thing before I wrap this up: with all the seniors about to graduate there has been some talk about a summer internship some of them are applying for at Serenity Forge, probably the biggest developer in state. A couple of them have encouraged me to look into it as well, and I'm interested. To get the internship, you (basically) need to be recommended by Compton. He seemed to be implying to me that I'm not ready yet, which to totally understand; I have a lot to learn. If not this summer, then I'll definitely apply the next. Serenity Forge uses Maya and Unity, instead of what I'm used to, Blender and Unreal. Experience in both could never hurt, so I downloaded both and now they'll stare me down from my taskbar until I learn them.

Look at that monolith of a blog post! I'll stop before this becomes a dissertation. Hopefully in the future I'll keep this level of thoroughness, but maybe with less words. Here's a bunch of pictures to accompany a bunch of words: