BSA702 14/7

 arrays and lists

Quick and Easy Galaxy painting great tutorial I found when I was looking for a background for my pitch tomorrow. I want to incorporate this kind of background into my game too so this will be handy.

Quick 20min play around image

BSA702 7/7

 Game Design -Pipeline and Planning

This is taken from the assessment point of view, not accurate to real life.

Three main phases to the pipeline

• design
• concept
• production

Proposal 

• Elevator pitch(what makes ur game unique)
• Brief synopsis (more lore and gameplay loop info)
• Visuals(concept art, character art, mechanic visualizations)
• Research(similar games, steamspy.com for sales statistics, target audience - how big, where are u going to release it)
• Budget(how are u going to spend it?)
• Schedule of execution(key dates)
• Key Roles
• Gantt chart
• Marketing pipeline(how are u going to market during development, not just when complete)
• Health and Safety
• Risks(any parts of project that can cause major delays or non-completion, identify these early and have multiple plans of action as backups)

Pre-Production

• Building our concepts
• Take everything we just said and start developing it
• storyboarding(map out the rough steps you want the player to take from start to finish)
• Asset lists(working document to track progress of all art and audio)
• Whiteboxing
• Build elements to correct world scale
• Character whiteboxing
• How the character interacts with the environment
• Core mechanics(start coding asap)
• Get the core mechanics working asap(during pre-pro unless mechanics are complicated. good chance to discover if they will be possible or not
• Document everything(scale, settings, art pipelines, audio pipelines)
• end of pre-pro should have the narrative completed, core mechanics, core game loop, core whitebox and character movement(no "character will double jump but ill code it later")
• By now game should be in alpha state - playable

Production(development)

• start building the actual game for the expo
• by the expo we should be in beta(feature locked and moving onto polishing)
• make sure to have a priority column in the asset list for things u want ready for the expo
• Art(elements should be designed and rendered, by week 14/15 all assets should be ticked off)
• Code should be completed during whiteboxing stage
• bug fixing will be happening when final art assets are brought into the game
• Audio(game audio tells half the story, sets the tone and atmosphere, not as important for the expo but by week 15)
• UI(inviting main and pause menu ready for the expo, all menus and HUD done by week 15

Release

• Everything building up to week 16 handin
• Dot forget marketing (sshots and video clips as much as possible, twitter and instagram are must haves, twitch youtube facebook and reddit as secondary)
• Interact with your posts, be genuine dont act like a pr machine

BSA703 18/6

D-Day has arrived. Im gutted that I was too sick to attend the cast and crew screening but I did get a copy from the google drive to watch. Overall I think it turned out ok, I loved the 3D backgrounds and water sims. The 2D animations turned out nicely as well, Im just not sure whether Im a fan of the real photos that were included as part of the hyperrealistic sections of the story. I feel like its too much of a jolt and breaks the immersion in the story for me personally. 

Considering the issues we had at the beginning when deciding on the project, and the communication issues that followed us through the whole semester, I think we produced something that is 90-95% complete. If it wasnt for Ian, I think a lot of the 3D finishing touches would not have been completed, as we lost half of the 3D team for a good chunk of the last half of semester. 

I really liked how the water sims turned out once they were textured and rendered, almost worth all the time that I sunk into learning bifrost and long caching time each time I ran a sim lol. If I had more time, I definitely would have liked to try and get that cough splatter particle sim working but sadly there was only so much I could figure out in the weekend that I was given for it.

Im not 100% sold on the foam mesh(white blobs) but Max liked it so it stayed in.

Final textured bathroom set, Thomas did a great job with this although Im not sold on the yellow wood for the barrels and ship wheels.

This one I would have gone back and reworked if I had more time but Im ok with the sim that was used.

This sim was the bane of my existence and I am so glad it turned out this good. The water is far too chunky to be realistic but I think it fits the surreal vibe better this way anyway.

This was a really good lesson in working as a team, imitating a real world type situation for after we graduate and work in the industry. Despite being the most frustrating part of my job, I found figuring out the water sims the most fascinating part of this semester.(Not to mention its a good skill to add to my resume). Bring on next semester. 

BSA703 16/6

Due to falling sick and sleeping most of monday and tuesday, I wasnt able to work on the fish breathing animation until today, thankfully it was a short one since there is only 2 days left until the project is due. I had issues with trying to animate using the soft selection tool so switched to Blender. Turns out that was even more complicated so I ended up going back to Maya and got a working fish breathing animation. Thank god that Maya->Blender alembic files can be moved around and wont get all messed up unlike fbx.

BSA703 15/6

 After a couple days of messing around, I just cant get the sim to do what I want it to do, so I told Ian to use Edwins original one as it still looked decent enough. I have discovered nParticles can be just as frustrating as Bifrost, but I also believe if I had more time I could have come up with something that fit what we wanted better.

Most of the time was spent getting the particles to fly through the air and land nicely on the table, this was the stage Edwin got to also, his particles just looked more blobby than mine hence why I suggested using his.

My idea to try and add water was to use the particle mesh as a Bifrost emitter. Unfortunately my initial tests did not work due to the amount of water emitted. Even when I set it to only emit water particles in a single frame, there was far too much and it just looked wrong.

BSA703 12/6

Due to Edwin being busy with compositing and editing, I have taken over having a go at making a nice slobbery particle explosion for when Pavo coughs. Trying to make droplets with Bifrost isnt really an option so I started looking into nParticles and found this blog with some good beginning settings for making water(Quite different from Bifrost).

https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-maya-blog/pouring_water_with_nparticles/

Unfortunately there is not much at all in terms of current tutorials for nParticles but I was stoked when I found this youtube tutorial for a blood splat. The thumbnail caught my eye as the shape is similar to what we wanted to achieve for the cough. The best part is, there is a free scene download that I can use to follow along the tutorial video.

BSA703 7/6

We realised that the restaurant bathroom door didnt have handles, which would have been fine if the animation didnt include him ripping open the door to dive back in lol. Max gave me an image of what he thought would look good, so I modelled that and added it to the door.

After seeing this handle, Melissa didnt like it and gave me a new image reference to go off so I remade the handle from scratch for simplicity sake.

The other side of the door is a push plate so I just took the baseplate of this model and widened the interior rectangle, leaving the top and bottom point parts the same size as they are in this model.