Starting off the second week of the game has started off well as the first day we had a group meeting which we have made them weekly. So we can discuss where we are at and where we should be at the end of this week. Allowing us to set goals for our selves and each other. For myself I carried on with working on completing the assets list which I communicated with the other asset artist on sorting out the important assets so we can get the level block out sorted and make sure we don’t end up making the same asset twice. Other than that we all had our own tasks to work on this week. With the second day (Tuesday) we had a team meeting with Chris and Kaliegh to discuss our game idea briefly and what targets we have set for ourselves for the week. Which turned out that we are sort of behind in that this week is play testing our game by the end of this week at the very least so we don’t fall behind. To sort this out we had another team meeting to discuss this issue and how we can solve this. To solve this we planned to have the first alpha of the game done by Friday which Roma has sorted out some play testers for the game where upon playing the game they will fill out a feedback form to see what bugs there are and how we could improve upon our game in a variety of ways. From game play mechanics either sorting them out or adding more in etc.
With this issue sorted, the next day (Wednesday) we had another issue within the dev sub group in that Marc had merged his work with the main game file without johns or the rest of the groups approval which resulted in the main game file being broken in so many ways as Marc messed about with the Characters code causing more issues than we needed. This intern stressed out Cameron as he had to sort out the mess due to john being ill. With this issue spiralling out of control we had to defuse the situation in which Roxi (Group Leader) and I calmed Cameron down and talked to him on how we could sort this issue. In the end we called a team meeting on the matter to sort out this issue. Which we calmed the dev team down and to set down some clear rules on what you should do when completing your task which is to consult the group about your work for feedback and ask what you could do next. So we don’t end up running into this issue again. Other than that we put this behind ourselves and moved onto getting our tasks complete for this week so we can get our game play tested.
For myself I carried on with completing more of the important assets which me and Roma sorted out and refined the asset list in most important to least important. Just to make it clearer on what assets need to be done at this time. So we can block out the level quicker and get an idea of what other assets we need. Overall we creating the assets I’ve done rather well with how much I have produced this week. As I expected that I was going to do less due to last week but I proved myself wrong which has improved my motivation. I have still got to improve and finish them as some of them haven’t got their UV maps sorted which I will do next week. I can set this as a target for next week whilst carrying on with more of the assets from the list.
When it came to Friday we sorted out the issues from Wednesday with the game being even more buggy than it should have been. Making the game ready to play test for the weekend. Whilst going over the game Cameron spotted a bug with one of the houses I have made where for some reason a section of the roof had glitched out making it see through. To solve this issue I went back into the Maya to sort out the issue which I tried deleting the polygon and replaced it. With this it didn’t work so I used the quad draw tool to which I reduced the polygons and readjusted them. Which solved the issue as it was just they way the polygon was angled causing it to clip through the rest of them.With this I imported it into my own unreal engine to check for any more bugs. As I don’t want to upload a broken asset to the Dev team.
Over the weekend we got some feedback which highlighted a lot of bugs that need fixing. From this we made a list of bugs and improvements for the devs to sort out. With the feedback was very useful however we could have done with more feedback in that we only had a couple of forms sent in. Which is something we could improve on which we could solve by getting more play testers or to have a deadline for the forms to be sent in. Which I will bring up with the group next week in our group meeting. Overall looking back on this week we had some ups and downs with working on this game. However by having these issues we can learn from them and add them to our experience. So we don’t have these issues in future and we can sort them out earlier before we have them. For me I am proud that I have found a workflow that allows me to produce a good amount of assets. With this workflow I am more relaxed with what we are doing and what needs to be done/expected.
Thomas Morphew Games art 