This week we had a guest speaker, Dan Emmerson. This was very exciting as I am a huge fan of his game Shutterbug. He spoke about game art and the different pipelines that emerge.

He covered in simple steps the game art pipeline

Step 1 – making the assets

• Start small and simple with greyboxing and functional assets
• Software choice does not matter just stay consistent across the project

Step 2 – Exporting

• Use naming conventions like Rock_Large_Mossy to easily keep track of your assets.
• Sprites should be in Po2 format like 512, 1024 etc
• Spritesheets should be used
• Do not be lazy and make sure you are sticking to the rules you have set

Step 3 – Importing

• Once things have been imported still keep track of them and organise them within the project such as grouping by type or by asset
• Constantly test how assets look in game against each other.

Playtest Thursday 19th March

We spent the morning workshopping bugs and ensuring our game runs smoothly. I worked with the mechanics designer to implement the visual effects for some reason I could not get them to work using the URP so we sought help form the technician who showed me another way to access the same effects. Then for the particle systems we just downloaded them then reimported them into the different branch on Github.

During the playtest we took notes and observed the players to pick up on things they might not mention. Our Mechanics Designer took all of the feedback and transcribed it for us here.

Things that I need to work on are: the character leans left too much when facing left on the idle animation and the deers walk cycle is stilted.

To fix the character I opened the frames in Photoshop and selected all of them together and used the skew and distort tools to fix the issue. This was the easiest way I could find, to avoid this in the future I need to work on my anatomy and find ways to flip the drawing whilst I am creating it.

I believe that the issue with the deer has happened because we took the smear frame out for the playtest as it was too fast and looked weird to fix the walk cycle I just took the smear frame and removed the effects so that it’s head was normal.

Next Steps –

Next week is Easter break so I will be prioritising resting over the break and simply using the time to organise and update my website. I will also be working on my entry for the macmillan illustration competition.