My Contribution to the Pinch! Game
As we Move on from the Pinch Game, its always good to look back and find out what we've learnt, in this post I talk about my contribution to the team, how well the team went, what we can learn from it and look at how past post mortems have helped me during this process and other process's in the future.
My Role in the Pinch Game largely revolved around the Visual Aesthetics of the Game as well as Audio Feedback and Music.
Concept artist
At the beginning of the Project I was tasked with creating the Concept designs for our characters as well as a general illustration of how the game will "feel" towards other people as well as the animators we took onboard. As my Future ambitions was focused more around designing the game in terms of visual aesthetics this gave me a lot more knowledge in communicating visually how we want our game to look to clients,players and within our team.
At the beginning of the Project I was tasked with creating the Concept designs for our characters as well as a general illustration of how the game will "feel" towards other people as well as the animators we took onboard. As my Future ambitions was focused more around designing the game in terms of visual aesthetics this gave me a lot more knowledge in communicating visually how we want our game to look to clients,players and within our team.
3D Modeling and Level Design
One of my most prominent Roles for pinch was the creation of the worlds objects using max as my program of choice. Creating Box's/Walls/Corridors/Loot and many more things that were later put together by me and Blake for the pinch game.
modeling for pinch gave me a lot more experience when it comes to environmental creations, from scale to how it will look for the player, this prompted me to create a test scene in order to make sure objects looked how we wanted to as seen from the eyes of the player. This Experience also helps better prepare me for the future, being more art focused I understand the need to have some solid foundations with creating objects both for 2D as well as 3D and with pinch found myself building upon lessons I had learnt previous to pinch.
Along with Creation I also created the Textures for the models and with gold learnt how to use cube Maps in order to achieve an awesome shiny effect and then tested them within a lighted environment to ensure they looked the way we wanted them too and tweaked from there.
One of my most prominent Roles for pinch was the creation of the worlds objects using max as my program of choice. Creating Box's/Walls/Corridors/Loot and many more things that were later put together by me and Blake for the pinch game.
modeling for pinch gave me a lot more experience when it comes to environmental creations, from scale to how it will look for the player, this prompted me to create a test scene in order to make sure objects looked how we wanted to as seen from the eyes of the player. This Experience also helps better prepare me for the future, being more art focused I understand the need to have some solid foundations with creating objects both for 2D as well as 3D and with pinch found myself building upon lessons I had learnt previous to pinch.
Along with Creation I also created the Textures for the models and with gold learnt how to use cube Maps in order to achieve an awesome shiny effect and then tested them within a lighted environment to ensure they looked the way we wanted them too and tweaked from there.
Audio Asset's
With my main goals focused around conceptual and visual creation of the game, i've also been doing research in audio creation (Mostly for character voice acting for Cartoons and game characters) taking that aboard and creating a "Sound Studio" to record our guards reaction to the goblin, although minimal I was pretty happy with the results and hope to use this as a stepping stone in being more audio savvy. |
Things that went Right!
Great group communication
The Pinch team had really well structured communication, having weekly meetings to catch up on what was going on, as well as daily skype calls to give more dailey feedback on work that was being put forward for the game
Solid work ethics among team
The whole pinch team brought forward all they could to bring the pinch game together, Chris as team leader pulled the team together and made sure we knew what we were doing, Luke putting together all the back end Code/Hud/Setting up BitBucket accounts and making sure everything was running smoothly, our animators bring out very polished animations and textures and our game designer Blake who put the level together.
Positive Atmosphere
All the pinch team with work ethics also created this positive attitude as we all worked together, assets were getting done on time, everyone was getting along and the whole experience was very positive.
Less Time management Stress
With Chris keeping everyone on track, a solid Gantt chart to work with, and solid work Ethics among the team, constraints for the game, largely time did not affect the project as much as early projects would have.
The Pinch team had really well structured communication, having weekly meetings to catch up on what was going on, as well as daily skype calls to give more dailey feedback on work that was being put forward for the game
Solid work ethics among team
The whole pinch team brought forward all they could to bring the pinch game together, Chris as team leader pulled the team together and made sure we knew what we were doing, Luke putting together all the back end Code/Hud/Setting up BitBucket accounts and making sure everything was running smoothly, our animators bring out very polished animations and textures and our game designer Blake who put the level together.
Positive Atmosphere
All the pinch team with work ethics also created this positive attitude as we all worked together, assets were getting done on time, everyone was getting along and the whole experience was very positive.
Less Time management Stress
With Chris keeping everyone on track, a solid Gantt chart to work with, and solid work Ethics among the team, constraints for the game, largely time did not affect the project as much as early projects would have.
Things that weren't so great!
Project Organising
Although the team knew what they were doing a lot of blank spots had to be filled in terms of world scale, lighting effects, polygon counts, small things that would have been easier to have written down in documentation. These little things that had to be reaffirmed was taken care of during group meetings, but to get everyone on board took longer due to it being a weekly thing and having the documentation ready would have taken 5 minutes to read instead.
Asset Organising
Integration between the Final level and the Assets created became problematic, needing to tweak certain model scales that were created before a set value was made, creating more work to readjust the objects first in Max then within Unity.
Larger Tasks Done At the end of Project
With all tasks being done fairly early on some key tasks that was essentially to the game didnt get done at the same speed, The games Final level being finished 2-3 days before posting. This then meant that more than one person had to be working on the level in order to get it polished enough for presenting instead of finishing other area's of the game.
Task Updates
The Pinch Team for the Most part Kept everyone updated daily on things they had finished, done or were about to create and thus kept everyone in the loop, however with the level design aspects of the game not much posting had been done and become problematic in the end when integration came around.
Although the team knew what they were doing a lot of blank spots had to be filled in terms of world scale, lighting effects, polygon counts, small things that would have been easier to have written down in documentation. These little things that had to be reaffirmed was taken care of during group meetings, but to get everyone on board took longer due to it being a weekly thing and having the documentation ready would have taken 5 minutes to read instead.
Asset Organising
Integration between the Final level and the Assets created became problematic, needing to tweak certain model scales that were created before a set value was made, creating more work to readjust the objects first in Max then within Unity.
Larger Tasks Done At the end of Project
With all tasks being done fairly early on some key tasks that was essentially to the game didnt get done at the same speed, The games Final level being finished 2-3 days before posting. This then meant that more than one person had to be working on the level in order to get it polished enough for presenting instead of finishing other area's of the game.
Task Updates
The Pinch Team for the Most part Kept everyone updated daily on things they had finished, done or were about to create and thus kept everyone in the loop, however with the level design aspects of the game not much posting had been done and become problematic in the end when integration came around.
Learning from it all
Learning new Skills
Prior to Pinch! I begun to do research on what it would take to become the Visual Artist within the games development pipeline, understanding what was needed behind these different area's and then starting working to either learn these needed skills or improve upon these skills to become a better member within a team. Pinch! involved the creation of 3D assets for game, and prior to pinch I understood that this would be needed and so developed a foundation to work upon and as we moved on from concept art to actual asset creation these skills proved to come in handy and I was able to improve upon what I learnt. These gives me great incentive to learn a whole list of skills so that I can later apply to other projects that I work on.
Need for more Communication
One of the main issue's that came with creating pinch was the lack of communication between certain team members that I feel i could improve upon, apart from letting the whole team know what I have been working on, members who will later be working with this assets weren't sure of certain scales or which textures were needed for certain objects.
Need for more Organization
Although i'm always super excited creating all kinds of lovely things for games, the excitement can get the better of me, where id negate organising my files or not give proper instructions on how to apply these assets into the game which can cause more problems then there needed to be, this is an ongoing issue however as I have had the same issue in past projects.
Prior to Pinch! I begun to do research on what it would take to become the Visual Artist within the games development pipeline, understanding what was needed behind these different area's and then starting working to either learn these needed skills or improve upon these skills to become a better member within a team. Pinch! involved the creation of 3D assets for game, and prior to pinch I understood that this would be needed and so developed a foundation to work upon and as we moved on from concept art to actual asset creation these skills proved to come in handy and I was able to improve upon what I learnt. These gives me great incentive to learn a whole list of skills so that I can later apply to other projects that I work on.
Need for more Communication
One of the main issue's that came with creating pinch was the lack of communication between certain team members that I feel i could improve upon, apart from letting the whole team know what I have been working on, members who will later be working with this assets weren't sure of certain scales or which textures were needed for certain objects.
Need for more Organization
Although i'm always super excited creating all kinds of lovely things for games, the excitement can get the better of me, where id negate organising my files or not give proper instructions on how to apply these assets into the game which can cause more problems then there needed to be, this is an ongoing issue however as I have had the same issue in past projects.
Past post mortems and taking it onboard
Past projects have helped me alot so far, Time constraints being one I found I improved on, where I didn't find myself working on a single object for too long before I moved on and this helped generate a lot more content instead of having maybe 1 really detailed object instead. This ability to recognize view porting to some degree helped in pushing me to help with different area's of a game, with pinch I was able to create assets with enough detail as well as find suitable music without having to much pressure from time.
Pinch! has also highlighted a few issue's that were present in older projects that I still need to improve on, proper organizing and communication being the main issues. As I learn to manage more time better I will need to learn to take the time instead in organizing my work and files in order to ensure smooth integration, as well as separating my work files with finalized assets.
The main Lesson that I learnt from Pinch! was Prior learning and its effects, in older projects I found a large chunk of my time was dedicated in learning entirely new skills such as animating within flash, with Pinch! skills required would be using Max in order to create 3D objects, be able to Unwrap them, and Texture them as well. Since I took the time to learn these skills before hand I found that I was improving upon skills and learning new techniques to help streamline creating objects rather than learning entirely new skills altogether and taking this aboard as having more initiative to learn all kinds of relevant skills prior to any project.
Pinch! has also highlighted a few issue's that were present in older projects that I still need to improve on, proper organizing and communication being the main issues. As I learn to manage more time better I will need to learn to take the time instead in organizing my work and files in order to ensure smooth integration, as well as separating my work files with finalized assets.
The main Lesson that I learnt from Pinch! was Prior learning and its effects, in older projects I found a large chunk of my time was dedicated in learning entirely new skills such as animating within flash, with Pinch! skills required would be using Max in order to create 3D objects, be able to Unwrap them, and Texture them as well. Since I took the time to learn these skills before hand I found that I was improving upon skills and learning new techniques to help streamline creating objects rather than learning entirely new skills altogether and taking this aboard as having more initiative to learn all kinds of relevant skills prior to any project.