Advanced Game Art Design PBM

Self Reflection

I'm proud of my work in our game, but I also wish I used my time wiser throughout the year. I spent the entire year working through the set backs of one modest, when I could've put more of my energy into working on multiple things at once. This assignment taught me that multitasking is very important in game design development.

Unit 1 - 3D Design

This school year, I had a lot of practice with 3D modeling software. For my group game, I got comfortable again with the 3D modeling tools in 3Ds Max. Throughout the school year, I created a church building and a ghost model, which are both for my group game. I learned how to use the cloth modifier and I got comfortable with the physics of cloth animation. For example, I learned that the level of density and dampening greatly impacts the overall shape of the cloth, as well as different cloth presets such as Silk, Polyester, and many others. I also learned that texturing complex builds can be extremely time-consuming. While texturing the church, I learned that grouping can make texturing a lot easier if you want multiple textures on one object.

When creating this ghost, I went through a lot of trial and error. I wanted the cloth to fall around the human model in a natural way, so I played around with the dampening and density settings until I landed on one that I was satisfied with.

Unit 2 - Production Management

When creating a game in a team, It's important to know your strengths and your weaknesses in game development as well as the strengths and weaknesses of working with others. There are different elements of game design, which is concept art, 3D modeling, programming, and writing. and Once those are established, the work will be evenly divided amongst each team member. When you work at a game development company, it's most likely that you focus on the element you specialize in, but in groups of 3, you have to be prepared to work on things you aren't efficient in. In my group, I only worked in the art department. Elijah and I developed the concept art for the game, which involved sketching out the blueprint of the church building, and designing the enemies. as well as me modeling the church which is the building where the game takes place. I

Unit 3 - Pre- Production

Pre-production is so important because this is where the game conceptualization takes place. Games wouldn't exist without team members discussing their ideas about the game that's being created. There's brainstorming as well as a lot of sketching of diagrams and tables which lays out all of the teams' ideas. This is also important because this keeps developers from going into the production phase blind. It's great to have feedback from your teammates to eliminate what can or can't work. For example, deadlines. Will the team be able to get from point A to point B in this span of time, or will they need to sacrifice some things?

Planning the user experience involves the special experiences of your teammates. My team talked about the components of other existing games that we enjoyed, and whether or not we want to recreate them in our game. Examples of this are game transitions, visual style, and user interface. In the early stages of our pre-production phase, we studied the user interface of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because it has a simple but efficient user interface. We also conceptualized about what we wanted our message to be with our game. We want to teach our audience that not everything is what it seems at first. Our game concept is centered around defeating this ghost, but if we had more time, we would we give our players an opportunity to understand and sympathize with it.

Choices & Convexity

(Create a UI Prototype)In the process of creating our game UI, I learned that less is more. I learned that our players would want to have a UI that's easy to learn which would improve their user experience.

Unit 4 - Pre- Production

In my game process, I never worked in unreal. I was focusing on my work in 3Ds Max, but my teammates have told me that coding in Unreal is a lot easier than it is in Epic games. I didn't create our game environment. Over the course of this school year, I was the lead artist of our group, which meant that I had a oversee and create a majority of the 3D modeling, concept art, and game story development. I put a large amount of my time in class researching about 1800s Austria-Hungary. I looked into the culture, clothing, and architecture of the time and it really helped me to create accurate work. I also created our game location, which is the church that I showed earlier in my POL. I also had a part in conceptualizing our game. I was also the group leader, which meant that I had to check in with my group members and make sure that everyone was on the same page, and helping my team to the best of my abilities.

In my group game, I worked almost entirely in 3Ds Max. The church(left) and the ghost(middle) were both created in 3Ds Max, by using the cloth modifier, building, and texturing. When you enter the game, you will see a church at the edge of the map, and once you enter the building, you will see the ghosts I created.