måndag 13 juni 2011

A recap of the project

We started the project 2011-03-28 and it went on to the end of GGC (2011-05-28)
Our game started out as a digital game but about two weeks into production we realized that the digital game we were producing didn’t meet our quality standards. So, we had to make a serious decision. Would we continue with the digital project, should we design something completely new or should we keep the design and make an analogue game instead?
We decided to make an analogue game.


High Concept

Set in the near future Carnage is a popular and deadly pastime. It is a race for life-and- death where you have to cross the finish line first or make sure that your opponents never get that far.


Vision

  • Reward: Discipline and experience of working under a high pressure as well as more 3D experience for the artists. 
  • Ability: Ability to work towards and to hold a tight and hard deadline. 
  • Challenge: To get the most out of the concept Carnage and to get it as well balanced and polished as possible. 
  • Strategy: Everyone takes responsibility for their own work, each one helps the other. 


Project outcomes and results

The Gotland Game Conference went better for our group that what we could have guessed. A lot more people than what we had thought played it and we got a load of positive feedback as well as some constructive criticism from both the jury and the public.
Some of the jurors did even say that they wanted a copy to take home with them and that they was prepared to pay several hundred kronor for it just as it looks now, if it ended up on a store shelf. I guess that you can’t get much better feedback than that.
So, the result of the long hours and hard work that we had put in to our project resulted in very successful conference for us and a potentially commercial product.


My role as Lead Art

My responsible areas
  • Making sure that the group is keeping a consistency of the art 
  • Making sure that the group is keeping deadlines. 
  • Keeping the artists motivated during the course of the project. 
  • 3D modeling, texturing and 
  • Rendering all of the art in the game 
  • 2D art 

I think that I did a good job as lead art. The art looks consistent and we did hold all of our deadlines both internal and external.
As always if we have had more time things would have looked even better and some of the design could have been more polished. I’m although proud of the artists; the three of us have made an excellent job.


Skill set improvements 

I entered this project with some basic knowledge of high res modeling, hard surface modeling, normal mapping and retopology. This project has been a great opportunity to develop that knowledge. I now am much more confident in my workflow and I work a lot faster.
I feel that I have a better understanding for how normal maps work as well as when you should include something in a normal map or when you should leave it as geometry.
I have also learned not only to hold deadlines, but to make sure that other people hold the projects deadlines.


Recommendations of best practices

I would say that my personal best practice is the modeling and texturing of the “front mounted spikes”, a weapon that you can pick up and use in Carnage. I did this model from scratch with baking normal maps and ambient occlusion and painting the diffuse map in about 7 hours. Here is a link to a summary of my work flow.
http://christofferakterin.blogspot.com/2011/05/3d-monkey.html

We worked in a small and tight group. We worked together every day and therefore we could quite easily keep our desired goals and quality. We now have a very well functioning communication in our group and we will work together again in coming projects.
With that being sad, we had a too small group to be able to produce a digital game. This is something that we want to change in the future. We would like to have at least two programmers as well as a dedicated 2d/texture artist.

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