One class that is proving to be useful this semester is our Production class in which we are studying Maya. While I will probably never be a professional modeler, I’m happy to learn the tools in Maya despite how daunting it is. It’s nice being able to understand how modeling works for the artist and it gives me more insight into the art production pipeline. I think my biggest challenge in Maya is the whole process of unwrapping UVs so that I can texture them. There’s some process and workflows within that where I have the hardest time mastering that skill.
Unity, as always, is full of little roadblocks. The engineers are working on getting our track system programmed and laid out. However, since we are approaching the game on a modular sense (ie creating tile sets that we can lay to create the track for the player), we can at least get the map laid out quickly. Once the programming magic is laid out, we should easily be able to create levels for the game.
So far I have finalized the poses for the games and have worked alongside engineers like Anurag as we place obstacles and collectibles in the game. He has started to give me mini tutorials on how to use the program to play test, so that has been very helpful. I’m learning a lot from him, and using Unity is a skill I can add to my resume.
In addition to showing me how to use Unity, Anurag is developing a programming tool that actually makes our level one that we can easily edit. One issue we encountered last semester was that when our characters turned along a path, it was never smooth and not conducive to a fun user experience. Thus, that was the reason our game was a straight-forward track that had no turns present in the gameplay. This issue affected the design greatly – even though people at EAE Open House had fun playing the game, we could sense that if the entire game was just a straight path, it could get boring very quickly. The levels become a bit lifeless. Here’s the secret though – even though the majority of the game will be played on a straight track, the addition of curved and forked paths give the player the illusion that they’re turning and give the level a new life. It seems simple, but there is so much work ahead of us to get the game to that point.
Anurag is crunching through heavy math to figure out this tool’s development for implementation within Unity. It makes me see how interconnected our skills are when we are making a game on any platform. We have rough drafts of level designs that we’re shooting for to test with these tools. However, those levels can’t be made until the tools have been completed and tested. Meanwhile, art is being created and iterated upon so that when the level design is ready, we can place the animals (with animations) to test bugs within the level. But there’s more – because we need the new poses implemented. That part isn’t too hard – Jorge and I partner and I do the poses and he sets them into the Kinect. However, we can’t efficiently test them until there is a working example of the game where the animated animal is running along the correctly tweened path. So as one can see- there are sooooo many elements to this game’s production. I haven’t even touched upon the production tasks that Karratti works on (powerpoints, scheduling, touching base with everyone). Our game falls heavily upon well-designed programming, which in turn needs solid art assets, and those parts need a solid level design for them to run upon. It requires that we are in constant contact and making sure that we run as a well oiled machine.
Josh Lee 