Probably the worst thing that could have happened during this semester was my laptop broke (additionally, the breakdown occurred on February 21st, and it was repaired around March 15th). This immediately led to many problems.

• I couldn’t access the texturing course because my email was only accessible on my laptop.
• The templates I had been preparing in Substance Designer became unavailable.

I had access to computers at the university, and I partially took advantage of this, but it also presented many difficulties. From making numerous mistakes when exporting textures to Substance Designer, which led to numerous problems, to the fact that I found it very difficult to work in a digital space that I hadn’t organized. Before this situation, I never even suspected that I could have difficulty adapting to a different workspace, and this led to me working exclusively on texture creation until my laptop was repaired.

I told my teammates about this while they were preparing for the first playtest. By this point, the other team members had already decided on the mechanics they would try to realise on Unreal Engine 5 via Blueprint, and the world designer was working on the first version of the greybox. We decided that I wouldn’t have time to prepare the visuals anyway. At our final meeting, we discussed what should be included in the playtest and our responsibilities for the visuals.

To find an alternative to the course I didn’t have access to, I started exploring shaders in UE5, and I based my research on this rather detailed tutorial. At one point, it also became an alternative to the texturing course, as it partially provided a pipeline in Substance Designer. I thought a similar style would also fit well with the visual code of our game, although I didn’t try to copy the visuals exactly, opting for a brighter color palette and more realistic lighting.

I also created a common structure for our shared website so that everyone could then take a block related to their work and fill it out.

First playtest

We received rather mixed feedback on the playtest, particularly regarding the visuals, which led to disagreements within the team. As it later turned out, serious misunderstandings arose in many areas.

• Some team members, including myself, were not informed that Eric’s concept art was not included.

• Instead of the planned graybox, the overall level looked rather inconsistent and irrelevant to previous concepts visually.

• We deviated significantly from the original GDD concept in terms of mechanics, but this issue was not directly discussed.

• I was personally responsible for a situation where one of the team members claimed I did not provide assets, which also caused confusion. Missing assets could indeed have been a serious mistake on my part, but I personally couldn’t find the opportunity to create them in the short timeframe, especially when Eric’s proposed visual design and the final level design differed significantly and I wasnt provided with clear level design. While communicating with the team and encountering difficulties with the language barrier, I tried to create a document that would explain my position based on the teacher’s advice.