Up until the first week of this sprint, development had gone pretty slowly, mostly due to design coming along very slowly as well as a general lack of direction for design. So to combat this, one of our biggest goals in the first week was to make a game plan. To finally determine the direction we wanted to take Bloom. As department leads, we decided to hold a meeting to discuss these topics and clarify details on what each department would be tasked with. We ended up holding two meetings because we the first one was starting to get really long and it was getting late. I was only able to attend the second one for about 30 minutes, but in total, I spent about 3 hours on these meetings. Fortunately, they were incredibly helpful and productive, successfully setting the tone for these coming weeks.
Our leads meeting that week was also longer than usual. We wanted to go through our lists of tasks and actually create the Jira tasks during the meeting so we could discuss dependencies and details between departments.
Because of these longer meetings throughout the week, I wasn't able to make time for my task of the sprint, which was to brainstorm ideas for interactive objects like levers, switches, and buttons.
Before we move onto the second week, here's the final time breakdown for the first week:
3 hours - design meetings
1 hour - department leads meeting
1.5 hours - studio-wide meeting
In total, I spent around 5.5 hours on studio work.
During the second week of the sprint, I was able to finally focus a little my task. I started by scouring the internet and my own collection of video games for inspiration, and here are the ideas I came up with:
One thing I've always struggled with is imperfect sketches. So one of the unexpected challenges I ran into while thumbnailing was quick iterations. If, while sketching one idea, I decided I didn't actually like it, I would oftentimes erase the sketch altogether rather than quickly finishing it and moving on. I understand that the point of thumbnailing is quick and dirty ideation; to iterate on the parts of each concept that I like and remove the ones I don't.
Another challenge I ran into while brainstorming interactive objects was taking game design into consideration. It was a little difficult to brainstorm ideas without knowing what each of these levers or buttons would do. If I knew, for example, that pressing a button would light all of the torches in the caves, I could take that into consideration and possibly include symbols that would help indicate the function of the button to the player. I was also worried that some ideas I had would change level design too much, or not fit in with the existing game design plans. Overall though, I'm pretty happy with the ideas I did come up with and after our critique session at the studio-wide meeting, I will at least be iterating on the pressure plate concept and breakable walls.
Other than my task for the week, I continued to learn more about Blender and 3D modeling. I ended up spending many, many hours working on the character I started in the previous weeks, but a lot of it was spent on sculpting. I didn't keep track of time too well because I did it over several days, but a rough estimate for the total time spent would be around 6 or 7 hours. To be honest, I'm not sure if these hours really should count toward studio time because I definitely wanted to work on this out of personal interest, but knowing that we have 3D tasks in our backlog, I know that this practice will come in handy.
A majority of the time I spent working on this model was on sculpting the face and modeling the hair. (I promise I'll fix the mouth and eyelids later oops). I experimented a lot with how to create hair, but for the strands in the front, they're all individual Nurbs paths that I added thickness to and changed the radius along the vertices to create a taper.
The ears also took me a decent amount of time and I'm pretty proud of the result, so I wanted to include some images for that too:
Finally, here's the final time breakdown for the second week:
2 hours - interactive objects sketches + brainstorming
~6 hours - Blender practice
0.5 hours - department leads meeting
1.5 hours - studio-wide meeting
In total, I spent around 10 hours on studio work this week.
Overall, I was really excited in this second week to finally be working on a task! It was fun sketching and brainstorming ideas and I'm looking forward to my task for next week, which is to ideate concepts for a ranged enemy.
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