Semester 3 Week 6

Because of the odd schedule I have with these blog posts, I tend to post in the middle of the week. This is normally just fine but this week it's gonna cause an organization issue. That's because of a lil game jam we're doing! The first half of the jam will be in this post, and the second in the next.

Anyhow, on Thursday and Friday I kept running my prop pipeline. I got one asset through start to finish. It's an old mug, broken and filled with dirt. It used to be a makeshift flowerpot, but now the plant is dead. The mug was simple, no more complex than the Blender Guru donut tutorial one. I used a subdiv-surfed and noise-texture-displaced cube as a boolean difference cutter to make it look shattered. I put a subdiv-surfed and noise-texture-displaced plane inside the mug as dirt.

Compton had pointed out to me that my previous strategy of assigning different materials to different parts of an asset (e.g. separating the mug material from the dirt) resulted in far too many textures than necessary and would slow loading and rendering speeds. I'm now making one texture set per asset and just masking the dirt texture through the mug texture in Substance. It's more work, but hopefully it'll payoff down the line.

The weathering on the mug presented a couple challenges. For one, the inside had to be dirtier, as it's filled with dirt. I then made a texture for the insides of the mug, visible where the mug has chipped. I masked it out with generators and stuff.

Anyway, here's the good stuff: game jam. We weren't really aware that it would be happening until we walked in on Monday. We were given the prompt: Secrets and Hidden Truths. The 3D and 2D artists formed their own groups and the designers and programmers picked a team. There was also a third team of four people. I hear it's a visual novel, but they only have one artist. I wish them luck.

Our team's immediate though after hearing the prompt was to make a stealth game. We got going brainstorming and we arrived at the idea of a movement-focused stealth game with a bright, cel-shaded 3d art. To be honest, our team sort of ignored the prompt for a while once we got started. At this point, I'm not sure it's really a stealth game, but that's not a bad thing. Any sort of link to the prompt is kinda a stretch. The objective of the game involves retrieving little lucky cat statues with scrolls. Those could be secrets.

At the beginning of the week, the art style wasn't super clearly communicated. Many members of the team contributed to coming up with the style, but the understanding of it varied from person to person. I think most of the artists had a similar vison, but the programmers had a Tron-esque look in mind. They made some programmer art, so the first impression a lot of the team got was not what I had in mind. That's ok, it's not all about me, of course, but I had been working on a post-process material for a day or so at that point that was entirely incompatible with the Tron look. Also, nothing personal, but I don't think I want a programmer as art director.

I called a meeting and expressed my concerned with the team's structure. Most people seemed to agree, and we determined that Liam would act as both programming and design lead, and I'd be the art director/lead. I'm pretty happy with this, as we've started to create a cohesive look that I just love. Thus far, we have a good handful of models created and I've made good progress on the post-process material. I'll break down the specifics in the next post, though.