Friday, December 14, 2012

Alpha!

Ok, so clearly I've been busy and haven't had a free second to post... which is no excuse.  So what have we been doing?  Well I got the Game Design Document all finished.  (Minus spelling errors).  I have it posted on gitwiki for my team so we can all stay on the main vision of the game.  As artists, we have been working on getting the alpha level ready.  It is finally done and we got to show it off at the EAE open house.  It went really well and people gave us some really great feedback.  It took some effort to get the art assets into the level, and it was a bit of a learning curve that I can't pretend to admit I'm completely over yet, but it is done, I this brings me joy. 

So how did my semester go?  Well it went amazingly well!  You scroll through my posts to see everything I have done for the game (well not everything...).  Next semester I plan to contribute to more aspects of the game.  We spent the most time doing environments and character design, but I also want to contribute in modeling, animating, lighting, UI, etc.  So now that we have a nice process for getting art into the game, we will be able to move at a much quicker pace.  We did a very good job to adhering to our scrum process and for the most part got everything done according to the time limits we gave ourselves.  Every once in a while we would have hold-ups and have to pastpone a few things, but we are all very proud of what we have accomplished so far.

We have a smooth art pipeline that we are all familiar with and plan to follow.  We want to make sure we are always doing things in a way that it can easily work with what the programmers require of us.

I learned a lot this semester.  I was VERY unfamiliar with the gray area where art meets programming.  I had no idea what format the programmers needed assets in or how animation would make it into the game.  I knew very little about sprite sheets and tiling.  Through our pipeline, I have been able to learn much more about this gray area.  I am learning how to better communicate with programmers to get the job done in the most efficient and effective way possible.  I also learned a lot of art gets thrown away.  I need to make sure to not grow attached to art that may never see the light of day.  It can be disappointing to spend time making art that gets the ax, but it is worth it to get to a coherent final product. 

We ran into the most trouble getting the art into the actual game.  Very few of us knew how to do that.  After closely working with the programmers, however, we were able to get it all in.  We still have a lot to learn, but with the established pipeline we are much better off than we were at the beginning of the semester.  Great semester, awesome current direction, we are going to blow this game out of the water.