A New and Last Semester

Welcome back! Vacation went by too fast, as expected. But wow did I get some much-needed relaxation.

We pretty much immediately had to get to work, especially us leads. Last Tuesday, we got together and did our first sprint planning meeting. I have to say that it was odd for me, because I've only ever been the only artist on a team or one of only two artists. Having two (and a half) actual artists working with me is something new to me. There's no telling what we can do with that many! Not to mention I have never worked with these particular artists before.

What I did know is we got a character artist -- Sibyl. Doing characters is also a very big job, so she needed to get started on that as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I had no idea how she worked, so I could only put down "Get Started on Character" for her only task this sprint. Typically, you want to be more specific with tasks and break them down into smaller ones. For example: Start Character Base in Maya, Start Sculpting Body in Zbrush, Bring in Clothes Base Mesh, etc...

I also had to get an idea of how long the characters were going to take. Surprisingly, Sibyl said she could get them done much sooner than I thought. She estimated four or five weeks for both male and female. Then she would get started on animations.

Then we had to think of things for our environmental artist, Kyle. It's hard to think of assets to be built for our levels when we don't even know what they're going to be yet. The only task I could think of was for him to come up with a list of "sportsy" props to do and get started on them. The idea behind this is to make sure the space looks like it is populated by sports players, and it is a designated sports field for the mages.

Since I never posted these, I should now. As we were wrapping up last semester, all of us started discussing the new characters right away. I did the first new character design drawing.

The last outfits were too sporty and not magey enough. These were a better middle-ground.

After more discussion, I came up with another design that catered to each team. Instead of a texture swap, the models would actually be different, which would give each team more character and the outfits more meaningful.

We liked these designs, but ultimately decided that it would just be too much work to do four models (fire male, fire female, ice male, ice female). 

Chris has been wanting to put customization in the game since the beginning. We thought, by simply adding stripes, not only could the outfits be more sporty, but it would give the player a satisfying amount of customibility.