MONDAY
Our Southampton presentation went okay. We were presenting first, and Josh’s train was late, which meant I had to wait for him (holding up the rest of the presentations), and also meant we’d presented most of our pitch before any students had even shown up. Of which there ended up being… two.
That being said, the presentation itself went well. Josh is a good public speaker, and we had a strong presentation, so I couldn’t feel too badly about it.
TUESDAY
On Tuesday it back back to the original plan, expanding on our Miro board.
Today I dedicated to testing the fur shader package and setting up a GitHub so I and Josh could work on the project from different devices. Once the GitHub was in place for me, I could share it with Josh.
The shader package initially came up with some error messages when I tried to implement it due to conflicting “Readme” files in a tutorial level. I deleted these, as well as a lot of other clutter that had stuck around from my other prototypes. In hindsight, I probably should have had the other prototypes on separate unity projects instead of different scenes.
The fur shader was easy to implement from there though. I imported the mesh and using the “fur fin lit grass” material on the dog, I tweaked with the settings until I had a satisfying fur look, and changed the colour to white with a black ambient colour to shade it.
The only problem with this method is that it made EVERYTHING furry… inside of the mouth included. I have yet to find a workaround for this.
THURSDAY
On Thursday I began work on the proposal document for Josh and I to fill out. I should have started a week ago, but I was anxious to try out more technical work in the meantime, to make sure it all functioned on the University computers before we broke up for the winter break. Now I needed to catch up for lost time. I created a google document that Josh and I could both work on, and started to make a first draft.
I also added to the moodboard to flesh out the art direction a little more, so I could get started on a human character design. I wanted their design to be able to fit into the world, after all.
FRIDAY
Friday I began to flesh out the first draft of the proposal doc. I covered the basic overview and our goals for the project, as well as some of the narrative. These were the pieces of the document I felt most firm on; much of the technical specifications and art design were subject to change as we delve into the project.
I additionally started drawing up some designs for this human character. I started on pen and paper to iterate out as many designs as posisble. There were a few criteria I wanted to hit: I wanted them to wear baggy clothes, I wanted them to have short hair (easier to animate), and I wanted their mouth obscured (also easy to animate).
The last few designs I started to iterate on their stomach wound (their main injury that sets the narrative in focus), and on a foreshadowed ankle-bite that keen-eyed players will be able to spot.
As the game progresses, the human should start to decay, turning greener while their wounds blacken – but this can be reflected in re-textures of the same model.
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