Month: March 2023

This week we concluded production on the game for the forseeable future, as we all have paperwork and other things related to the collab unit to prepare for submission next week, for me being the show reels and my critical reflection, we exported a build that anyone with a PC can play: Link here

This week was used just for final clean ups, code fixes and UI implementations. I made some final few adjustments to the Cat skin and made a cuter friendlier variant that could be used for the Kittens.

With the slowdown as the project winded to an end we had a final meeting where we talked with each other about the project, our hopes with it going forward and what we all did well and what could be improved it which will be reflected in my Critical Evaluation.

Critical Evaluation

Going into this collaborate project I was fully aware that it would be new and difficult for me. I had never worked collaboratively before on a creative.  In addition to this I’d be working on a game, something I had never previously done and this would impose new challenges on me as a modeller to think about how everything will function when ported to Unity which was our game engine. Now that the project is ‘completed’ there is much to look back on.

Communication is an important factor in any collaborative endeavour and in this project, while we had issues, overall it was very well communicated. Thanks to Sam taking on the role of producer and our weekly meetings we were always kept on track and up to date with what each member of the group was doing. The major hurdles for myself were modelling.  I am still inexperienced when it comes to modelling and as a result of that I made errors in my models that resulted in issues with their porting to unity. Some of my UVs required reworking, some vertices had not been merged properly resulting in a single space being occupied by multiple verts and faces. Of course these issues will occur as I learn and develop to avoid them though this project also revealed bad practices I had that I didn’t even realize. For example when making a wall that separated a balcony I would hide the wall’s face on the interior of the balcony’s rail, originally I thought this, while not ideal, would not result in any issues. One it was imported in Unity it produced lighting errors and when fractured for the game’s destruction system it would result in errors. it was also frustrating to restart work from scratch, like in my cat model, over and over and feel that I had wasted all that time and failed to meet the expectations of my teammates.

My teammates’ feedback largely mirrored my own identified issues that came from a lack of experience with modelling however they were very supportive of my communication skills. They said that I was very clear about my limitations as a modeller and when I needed help. They said that my ability to communicate my limitations but also to work on overcoming them was something that I should continue to take forward in my future work. They also complimented how effectively I took their feedback and implementing it into my re-works which is something I’m quite proud of. As I never had to take feedback from other creative focused peoples I thought it would be an issue for me but I’m glad to hear that I was able to handle it properly and incorporate it.

This project, while difficult, helped me move forward not only in my base skill set as a modeller but in my collaborative skills that are just as important as my technical skills when it comes to my future in the industry.

(496 word)

Showreels

Individual

Group

This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:

Sam – Updating documentation and crowd implementation

Noah – Level Design and Optimization

Anson – Bug Fixing and Cat Model implementation

Patrick – Music Tracks

Daniel – Foley Work

I was tasked with concluding my development on the Cat model. When I arrived on monday to class to finish it I was struck with a pretty serious blow by my Maya instructor as he informed me that due to the topology of my cat it would not function correctly as an animated model. He then suggested that I instead take the existing cat model that Maya has, which I was unaware of Maya having preset models, and modify it.

This was difficult for me as again I felt that I had wasted time and that my work was not good enough. However my instructor spoke clearly to me that with the way the industry functions making things from scratch isn’t always the smartest option. Instead I should learn to make full use of everything Maya supplies me with to create what I need. I struggle with this as I tend to think to own anything creatively and claim it as my own I need to do it all totally myself, from scratch. This is not a healthy outlook and something I need to address

Beyond that I spent most of my time this week in substance painter making the texture for our cat. I went through several versions as my team told me what they liked and didn’t like and what needed to be changed.

This was the first prototype and they pointed to me that the face wasn’t conveying what they wanted. I leaned too far into the cute and silly aspect and they wanted me to make the cat more aggressive.

With that in mind I created this new face and using the substance tools gave the fur more variation and texture via blurs and textured erasers to create randomization in the colored fur.

They then requested that the dark patches be white and that the cat be more orange colored. Lastly a suggestion was made to add a dark gradient to the fur from top to bottom.

This gradient was actually a brilliant idea as the darker head in contrast to the lighter body added more anger to the cat’s expression which contributed to our goal of making an angry mama cat. I was also tasked with creating a rubble pile that could be used to replace destroyed buildings so that players are not standing in an empty level and lack the sense that there was a city once there.

Using Mash Placer to place bricks that I got off of Quixel alongside a deformed flor and some basic shapes I very quickly created a generic rubble pile that could be used to indicate a destroyed building. It will be textured using the shader system in our game so that it can match perfectly the textures of our other buildings.