In the first week of this sprint, my task was still to work on art for the new ranged enemy. During the studio meeting, I was given feedback on my first design for the squirrel that the concept didn't fit too well with the overall concept of the game. As a result, for this week, I decided to explore my other main idea for the enemy: a sinister apple tree that throws apples at the player.
I ended up spending about 4 hours working on vector art for the tree. In the previous week, I was able to get back into the groove with Illustrator, but I was honestly never very experienced with the software. Thus, I actually began by watching a few tutorials on YouTube for inspiration as well as to learn more about the Illustrator workflow. Watching and learning took around an hour and it took me about 3 hours to actually create the vector art. One of the things I struggled most with was the leaves because I didn't know how to efficiently create a large number of them. It was also difficult to balance the level of detail to match the current style of the game because of the leaves. It was difficult to have not too many leaves that it's too detailed, but just enough that it looks good and looks like a tree. On the left is a very early stage screenshot of the work in progress. I'm currently writing this on my laptop rather than my desktop, so I don't have an image of the completed design—I may come back and add it in later.
The final time breakdown of the first week is as follows:
4 hours—Illustrator work
1 hour—studio lead meeting
2 hours—studio-wide meeting
In total, I spent around 7 hours on the studio this week.
The second week was the week of Thanksgiving break. The week was very hectic and I spent a lot of time with family and friends that were also back for break. As a result, I wasn't able to spend time sitting down and creating art. Instead, all of my hours were spent watching YouTube tutorials on Blender. My task was to work on 3D models of levers and switches, which would include unwrapping and texturing models. Prior to this week, I had essentially no experience with textures and materials so I spent 2 hours watching various Blender tutorials.
Then, more-so for my own sake, I wanted to learn a little about rigging so I followed a tutorial on Rigify, a Blender plug-in that helps in the rigging process. However, it didn't work. I think it's because my character has strange topology and the shapes aren't quite right. I gave up trying after about an hour because I'm not sure if I will even need to rig anything for the studio this semester, even though I personally would like to learn how to rig and animate a model.
Finally, the breakdown for the second week is as follows:
2 hours—Blender tutorials
1 hour—(failed) rigging practice
1 hour—studio leads meeting
2 hours—studio-wide meeting
In total, I spent around 6 hours on studio-related work this week.
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