MONDAY
1-1 Session
During my 1-1 session, I talked a lot about my worries going forwards with my projects. My main concern was filling skill gap. Ideally I want to go ahead with my project, and ideally I’d have a team with me, like I had last year. My games so far are all 3D based and created in Unity, however, I’m not a very confident programmer, and only a beginner in C#, whereas my games would need more high profile coding knowledge. I made them mostly because I wanted to improve on and show off my Technical Design skills. Also, they seemed… a bit ambitious for solo development, even if I did have months to make it.
On the other hand, I did really want to try. I’d managed to make the prototypes mostly by myself, and we had a Unity specialist on hand to help, as well as my more knowledgeable coursemates who I’m sure would be happy to lend a hand from time to time.
It was suggested to me to be very clear on what I needed from people in my presentation, and if there were no takers, then I’d simply have to do it myself. I left my 1-1 feeling cautiously confident.
Prototype 2
Despite the fact it was reading week, I’d also begin my second prototype – the emergency hotline officer for magical creatures. I only had a limited time to get all my prototypes together after all. For today, I outlined the tasks I would need to create a functional prototype:
- Camera Movement / Aesthetic Example (Unity)
- Office cubicle
- Desk
- Desk Chair
- Computer/Keyboard/Mouse
- Phone
- Filing cabinet
- Fax machine (?)
- Misc Decor
- Pencil Holder
- Potted Plant
- Narrative Example (Twine)
- Caller 1
- Caller 2
- Caller 3
TUESDAY
Tuesday I created the greybox and camera movement script in Unity. Again I used ProBuilider to make a simple block of office cubicles.
The camera movement didn’t take a lot of time – unlike the last one, this was a simple point-and-click, so there wasn’t much fancy code necessary. I had a greybox and simple movement in record time, and I didn’t even need to sacrifice my sanity for it!
THURSDAY
Now I wanted to give the greybox some better assets to help sell the idea when I presented it, however I ran into a problem: an office cubicle isn’t that interesting. With base textures, it just looked… dull. I wanted it to look unique, interesting – I was going to need a nice texture.
I fiddled around and came across a tutorial to create nice, painted-looking textures by painting over the normal map to recalculate lighting, and practiced on Blender’s monkey object. It looked really nice in Blender, but for some reason, I couldn’t get it to work to satisfaction in Unity. There was a loss in translation between the different render engines that made the Blender version stand out, and the Unity version look flat. After tweaking some factors, I got it looking a little better, but still disappointing.
I wasn’t ready to give up on the painted idea, although I ran out of time on this day.
FRIDAY
Friday had to be dedicated to the Twine narrative choice tree that would help demonstrate the type of choices the player would make and how phone calls would work. I came up with a simple narrative about a small, rural family being haunted, with a few options as to which ghost was haunting them with ties to real life narratives about how those ghosts haunt. The biggest challenge was trying to get a typewriter effect into Twine, as I have very little experience with html.
I also began to experiment with more textures in Unity. By creating a node system, I found a texture that created a fun, Van Gogh-esque style. Unfortunately I immediately forgot how to replicate this, and as I was working between two computers, that made everything more confusing. Additionally, none of the colour was coming through in the baking process. While it definitely found like I’d found my desired art style, it needed some more refinement and analysis – it was something to look at only if I took the project further.
Leave a Reply