The progress in the second week was fairly slow. I was just recovering from doing the global games jam where I had spent that weekend creating a 2D platformer. I continued some of my research as we continued to explore ideas. What concerned me was the lack of concrete details which I wanted to get ironed out as soon as possible.

I wasn’t present in the lesson but our team negotiated on a set of core values that we would adhere to throughout development. I try to operate on a basis of mutual respect and efficiency but I think there is some value in stating the obvious and even emphasising it.

First we decided on the engine. As Harry is familiar with Unreal Engine, we opted to use that. I have no experience within it myself. But having learnt from my previous experience working from game projects, my most recent developing a project called Hymera in December, it’s important to make life as easy for ourselves as possible. A 3D game that has a heavy emphasis on aesthetics would be a good candidate to create in Unreal Engine. This is due to its extensive systems that aid with visual effects and graphics. One of the most important aspects of Daydream that I gathered from the GDD was its focus on the visual style.

Hymera can be found here, there is only one scene: https://deadbeatgamess.itch.io/hymera-version-001

WHAT DO I WANT TO DO

Unreal engine, alongside Unity, is a staple within the games industry. Even familiarising myself with it slightly will be extremely beneficial towards my personal development as we head towards graduation. I want to explore its VFX and UI capabilities as well as its blueprints system. Blueprints allows people to do programming without having to learn code and navigate its syntax. There are also many other features built into Unreal (it’s 60 gigabytes big after all!) and one of the ones I want to explore is the particle effects.

Even though we have been assigned roles, it’s not realistic to adhere to them completely. This is especially because in practice, a technical artist does more supplemental and support work. I would like to explore the technical aspects that entail with my position as technical artist, however. Especially in-engine work. And if I get some time, I would also want to focus on some sound design as I’m really interested in the narrative potential audio has.

For some personal development, this week I did some more research on my job role. I watched a Youtube video of a technical artist explain the distinction between the job roles, as well as a lengthier video that explained it more in-depth.

I used Affinity to create a poster with a brief outline of the role using the sources I linked above.

I watched this video regarding scope to understand how to work within limitations, and in some cases, use that limitation to boost our creativity.  The video covers how indie games deal with scope in interesting and defining ways. This is a very important listen for this project, as we must create something that will be attainable in order to have a finished vertical slice that also covers the game pillars of the original GDD. 

While reading the Daydream GDD, it was very apparent to me that the mechanics and number of levels and puzzles were very out of reach for a team with 4 people and only a few months to work on it. Therefore, my first thoughts were how can we reduce the scope in a way that sticks to the game’s pillars.