Well. As usual, it seems I have failed to stay up to date with my work blog following a game jam. Lets fix that.
The week of November first I ended up taking more time to work on the characters for the Fated Forest Project. I took a simple question, in this case what the character thought about the weather, and wrote a response as a sample of their speech patterns. I went through and did this with most of our existing characters. And in doing so, wrote some basic quest dialogue for our first playable build of the game.
In the same week, I also took some time to learn the first step in solving my texturing problems. UV maps. I learned how to create and edit UV maps in blender, and did some much needed practice to learn how best to use the system.
The following week was dedicated to a new project. We were given a chance to prepare for a game jam. We could take the week to form teams, make basic assets that we could use, and learn skills needed for the games. This was mostly for programmers, as they needed to learn the multitouch system that would be required for this game jam. With this in mind, I helped form a team that was interested in making a real time strategy game. Our initial theme idea was some kind of sci fi, however we did not know what the official contest theme would be. Despite this, I decided to use the week to make a few sci fi inspired assets that we could use. This would also provide a wonderful opportunity to continue learning better modeling practice, UV maps, and possibly even texturing.
The first model I designed was this relatively small ship. I imagined it being a frigate of sorts, with very little firepower but quite a bit of maneuverability.
Next I started on a rough carrier type skip design. I have heard no end of comparisons to the Venator from star wars, so I will likely redo this model in the future.
And last but not least in this week, I decided to make a sort of basic turret that could be used on larger ships and stations.
As you can see, all of these have only basic materials. Due to the necessity for speed on this project, I would elect to not complete texturing until a later date.
The next week the game Jam began. The theme was revealed to be "Mad". I decided that we could easily do our RTS game with this theme, going with the interpretation as Mutually Assured Destruction. This also meant that the assets I created the week prior could be used. But, I would also need to make a few more.
The first model I made this week was the railgun. This would go onto the carrier ship, and would be able to function as a prefab turret for anything else if needed.
The second was the players home base. In this case, a space station. Riley Webber created the initial concept, which I then took and improved on for the final product.
Most of the rest of the week was dedicated to updating these assets for what the programmers needed, and helping clean up and add materials to the assets made by the other artists. Quite Ironically, despite only recently learning this process I was the most experienced of my team.
And Finally, we come to the first week of December. Don't worry, you didn't skip a paragraph nor did I skip a week. Due to thanksgiving break I did not complete any more work until the 27th when we returned. With the game jam done, I decided now would be a good time to learn how to apply textures properly and began learning substance painter. It didn't take too long to learn the basics, but over time I learned everything I had done wrong earlier in the process and had to go back and fix. This included broken UV maps, too many material groups, wrong ID map settings, broken geometry, and a few others I have likely forgotten. But, I managed to get through it and after four days of work had a wonderful texture set to show for it.
Well. I certainly spoke too soon. I had written this entire blog and was actively rendering images to go along with it, when I discovered something had gone wrong. There was an error with my UV maps that distorted several of the shapes painted on the normal maps. So, I had to go back through and fix the problem. And here it is fully fixed.
And finally, the full progression of the turret
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