Weeks of 1/3 and 1/10

First off, I'm ditching the previous naming system of the posts from the semester/week system to the date of the Sunday of that week. This might be more confusing, but as I get closer to applications for college and perhaps a job, I want to make everything appear a bit more professional by dissociating it from lil baby school.

Secondly, it's a new year and a new semester! Things won't be changing too much, but I hope to spend some more time on portfolio work. On this coming Friday, new directions will be determined for the new term. This means evaluating each project and determining if work on it should continue or cease. A surviving game needs to be playable and preferably playtestable. All the AM teams have decided to voluntarily terminate their projects because they weren't going to meet the deadline. Scary.

I think we'll be in the clear, though. The game is "playable", technically, although it's not really presentable. Once it is in a beta stage, though, the programmers won't have too much left to add on, so I think we're on pace.

I've been moved from focusing on the exterior back to the interior. I'm nearly done with task items, and there are a few more storytelling props that I want to push out before the deadline. Luckily, though, there isn't much pressure on me because those things aren't necessary for the build.

Over the break and into this week I've done the following work for this project: full pipeline for exit shaft/hatch, full pipeline for wrench, adjustments and additions to generator to fit gameplay needs, and outdoor scene blocking. Also, I found out about an issue with how I was importing AO/R/M textures (I had sRGB checked by default, which messes with rendering, particularly on metal materials), so I went through a few dozen and fixed them. I'm sure there are still others, but I fixed the most glaring ones.

Also, I did some more VR playtesting and found a few assets that need some rescaling, and a couple that need attention on their materials.

This semester, there has been talk about starting a brand new project. Potentially, this could include the entire class's collaboration. That's a cool proposition. To some degree, I think it piqued everyone's interest. But there's hesitation too. I and many others would rather finish our games rather than beginning a new one. As curious as I am to see what we could all accomplish working as a whole studio, I'd like to take the safer bet. As of now, the plan is to continue on Find Emma, and maybe contribute to another project later.

On the first few days of the semester, Compton allowed us to participate in a three-day jam. I wasn't really all about it, I kinda wanted to get back to Find Emma, but peer pressure made me do it. Unfortunately, only artists were really interested, so we only had one committed programmer plus a supplemental one. We were kinda doomed at that point, but we ignored it.

The prompt was "flood". After a lot of discussion, we settled of the idea of a game with the movement of a shoot 'em up game like Galaga or Twin Bee, but without the shooting, only dodging. You would play as a cliche angel representing the continence of a big crying monster. The cliche devil on his shoulder was making him cry so hard that he created a flood around the tower he sat on. You had to fly up to the top of the tower to comfort him, dodging tears and devil's pitchforks on the way up.

I was somewhat lukewarm on the idea (so naturally, I was elected team lead", but excited to see what the team could do with it. And that intrigue was fueled by some really neat concept work. We had all the non-lead artists draw some concepts, and we spent some time pulling design elements together into a cohesive sheet. Pretty cool. Our programmer was able to put together some gameplay functionality, also cool.

Ultimately, it fizzled out. Honestly, I'm a little disappointed. This is only my second truly failed jam, and I do blame myself, at least partially. I don't feel like I coordinated as well as I could've, and rather focused on my own work.

If I think about why the project failed though, I'm not sure I could've saved it, even if I was a perfect leader. For one, the jam was far less formal than past ones. The fact that it was optional and most people chose not to participate seemed to have dulled the enthusiasm overall, so that put a damper on everything. The true killing blows were the programming and animation. Both were assigned to one person each. Neither got to a usable state. We intentionally kept the scale small, but the individuals just weren't able to pull it off in the time frame.

The obvious solution would be to share the work, but for obvious reasons we could only have one person programming. As for the animation, the delegation was done by the art lead, so it wasn't my call. You could rightly say that I should've suggested that multiple people do the animation (because there were other people that could), but I guess I just assumed that it would be done by multiple people. I never thought to check.

I dunno. There's always something to learn in failure, so I guess I learned that being a team lead requires more micro-managing than I thought. I need to keep tabs on what everyone is doing so we never have an uneven distribution of work. But sometimes, even if you have a reasonable workload for a person, it just won't come together.

As far as my work as a 3D artist on the game, I was tasked with creating the tower. I had just started to dive into procedural modeling with Blender's geometry nodes, and this was the perfect application for it. At that time and for a few weeks before, it was an odd time to learn geometry nodes. The had just undergone a fundamental restructuring with the release of Blender 3.0, so almost all resources were out of date (including much of the documentation). Older resources were relevant but they required a working understanding of both the old and new systems to translate between them. I had neither, so things like attributes and fields took a lot of work to untangle.

I was able to get something going, including a somewhat complex cloud building system. I want to put together a little demonstration and process video, but I haven't had the time to put it together. I'm exited to use this new skill in the future. The possibilities are endless!

Finally, Compton challenged us to create concepts for 10 unique monsters. The goal is to make them plausible in 3D space, either by drawing with a sense for volume, or creating them in actual 3D space with sculpting. I'm not done with mine, so I'll talk about them next week I guess.