Generic Weekly Update

This week's blog is my break from all of the sculpting in ZBrush I've been doing. For anyone who doesn't know what that means, just imagine I'm making a clay sculpture, except on the computer.

Last week was dedicated to the character (as you know if you read my last post). By Thursday I ran into a wall when Chris was looking at my topology of my mesh (arrangement of polygons that make up any 3D model). We decided to see a teacher about it to make sure it was okay for animation. The topology of a mesh needs to be a certain way for it to animation without too much deformation in the wrong places. With wrong topology, meshes often "pinch" in certain places and it just looks bad.

One of our professors, Joann Patel, was a big help and found a couple things that could be fixed to cut down on the polycount and also help animation. Unfortunately, by then it was already Friday and I had absolutely no time to fix it because I had to make my way to Maine to visit my family and go to the annual Fryeburg Fair (a family ritual I've taken a part of since I was born).

So as bad as I felt about it, Chris had to be left with fixing the topology of the character model. But after thinking about it, the animator should probably do the retopology for the animated mesh anyway. He did a great job of cleaning it up. He also threw a simple texture on to see what it looked like with colour.

 After a three-hour-long drive back from Maine, we all went to the game lab on campus to work together and have our late sprint review. I worked on the character some more...

Handsome fella.

Sculpted a new Rockwall...

This is actually only three rocks duplicated over and over.

And between last Thursday and today I've been working on environmental assets to put in our level. 

I heard you like rocks and volcano mounds.

I've also been gathering resources to figure out what I'm going to do for UI (user interface/health and mana bars, scoreboard, etc.). As it turns out, sports "UI" and UI for fantasy games like Diablo or World of Warcraft are incredibly different. Who knew? Any suggestions on how to pull of a UI that combines the two? 

So this week I'm in charge of getting the environmental assets done as well as several iterations of UI. 

By the way, I say "this week" and not "this sprint" because we're challenging Stage 2 next week. It seems like just last week that we passed Stage 1 (oh wait). We're confident about it, but we also have to because the week after that, we have something else going on so we can't challenge. 

But today was a real confidence booster because we got a lot done. Alex has been working his butt off on networking and integrating the Hydra controls into the networked game. Bryan and Chris have been coming up with new design ideas that are definitely awesome and have shown iteration.

Most importantly, I think, has been the field design. From QA they discovered that players who received the ball would chuck it to the other side of the field and it would be a race to get it. To fix that, they've come up with a couple of new field designs. And with that, more spells were added to go with those field designs.

Bryan has also been getting some audio done which makes casting Rockwall all the more satisfying when it bursts out of the ground with a "THUNK" and crumbles with a... crumbly noise. 

It's coming along great and I can't wait to see where we'll be a week from now, two weeks from now, and so on.

This is the first game I've ever worked on that I've been attached to. Hopefully our audience of gamers will feel the same way after this semester.