This will probably be my last entry for the unit, the thought of going to INB380 and the amount of work that have to be put seems daunting but interesting nonetheless. I

Still have the video and storyboard to fix as well so yeah this would be the wrapping up for the blog.

Game Description and Critique

Overground ideas was based simply as "the future sport of rollerblade racing game". These rollerblade itself would have a sort of "boost" mechanicsm attached to it for instant surge of speed. Players would be racing around the game world trying to outskill and outrun their opponent. Instead of doing this alone, like most racing game, players actually have to cooperate with another teammate using the grappling moveset. This actions can be used as both offensive and defensive style of play.

The gameworld is pretty vibrant and cartoony so that both children and adult alike could enjoy the game without actually focusing much on the graphics.

Area 1

Area 2

Area 3

Some of the objects such as rail and boxes are meant to be interactive where player could actually interact to it and even as a meant of hindrance to them.
The ultimate goal is to give the player a simple yet pleasing look of the world that match well with the character they were controlling.

In terms of critique, character lack of facial expression and missing of ingame powerup would be the top of my list. 

Granted that the player will constantly be looking at the back of the character, still it feel a little off when the camera was facing the front of the character (or if the player actually lose the game), yet the model will still be seeing stand and smiling his life out. 

Regarding powerups this have to be discussed again as we do actually wanted to implement an item to help the players (nothing fancy like in Mario Kart) with a sufficient quick boost. Unless we could find a way around it, the game pretty look just like a simple "car race" where player doing it repetitively.

Conclusion (Reflections)

Question taken directly from the Assigment 1 pdf file.

 What was your overall assessment of the process, and the outcomes?

All this time, for the past 3 years, we were learning the pipeline and process of game development in theory and memorizing some of the terminology for exam. Those shit doesn't really counts till an individual actually sits down and actually bring those theory to the ground and use it to practice. It's has been really an eye-opener, getting good feedback week in week out and fixing things accordingly not because of an individual satisfaction but for the game.

Working with people with different language and diverse skills just make things better, Everyone have a role in the process, going back and forth just to make everything looks right. At times it could be so frustrating when you had to re-do a certain process all over again and again till you get it right.

An artist should not just be drawing without understanding the limitation that programmer facing due to the engine and vice versa. 

Think this process that Laz and Alex had set up for the team really shown what we had now in the game. It really feel "real" to the real world work experience if that even make any sense.

 What role did you play/tasks assigned that was least satisfying to you?

This might sound a little strange but given a choice,  I didn't even want to be the Lead Artist or anything to do with drawing actually. I would prefer the role as a game designer and helping a little of the artist stuff here and there. I was also actually aiming for the PM role as well but after looking at the team composition and the team skill-set I knew right away I had to do it and take the lead in terms of art. 

The thing that annoyed me the most was "babysitting". I know its not part of the process in the game-development but it does feel like I am doing this to an individual. I love to help and share the skills I knew with the team so that we could make the game better. 

Disabilities is not a mean of an excuse to not understanding and learning new stuff. I seen and work with people who has it worse and yet doing stuff better than me. 

Granted he wasn't an artist at all but that is the same for our game designer who actually learn asap by himself just to ease the artist burden. Thats teamwork.

This happens throughout the whole semester and i mentioned it in details on the blog itself.

While I do not want any of my team to fail, I can't be wasting time next semester fixing and unwrapping others shit stuff over an over again. The best thing is each time a question was asked the reply I will get "I cant...blah blah.." to an extend it peeves me  a little when I ask for an assistance to download a simple mp3 background music!

 What were the tasks undertaken that most used your skills and abilities?

UNREAL engine. No brainer here. New stuff, new platform and really confusing. Thank goddess i do have a little understanding in scripting and could actually work things out on my own without troubling the programmers too much.

Another worth mentioned off is getting back to 3D. I have not been doing any 3D works for the past 4 years, this was why I started the job earlier than my other team members as I need to retrieved all those skills and shortcut mantra back to my brain.

 What were the lessons learnt with regard to time management, task planning and team processes?

Crucial. Time and time again we found ourselves in deep shit because the PM didn't actually assigned us dedicated timing. In fact he did nothing at all. The team pretty much waited to get our ass-fXXX bad in the ass in desk critique, feeling miserbale, work like mad dude to prove people wrong on the next desk critique. That's pretty much how the team time allocation goes. I HATE IT.

I already told the team in the face now, we are going to plan for INB380 right after monday presentation. 

In fact I am actually thinking of taking dual role which already feel crazy enough but someone have to do it or we will face the same issues again where we wasting time re-doing task and even left unsure what to do next.

 What plans do you and your team have for the next phase of development of your project?

BIG. This going to be in steamlight and kickstarer!!! LoL.. nah I'm just pulling one leg.

In due seriousness there a massive stuff we need to redo. In fact some of it have to broken up again from the ground and build it up all over again.

• Character currently have certain holes that need to be fixed (i mentioned in details on previous blog)
• The character physics have its flaws as well so we will be looking in to that
• Networking
• Implementing 4 characters

Will have to work as really hard for this. I even was planning ahead that I should have all 4 polish characters model out before 380 even started with some animation for them

Reflection of the day: While some of this event occurs in the team seems maddening, I really believed I am working with a group of skillful people with "weird" personalities. 

The class conducted by both Laz and Alex itself is rewarding. The way the feedback was layout to each team had never been degrading but it feel encouraging and keep us on our feet to never slow down our progress even for a week. 

28th May 2015

Here we are reaching towards our final goal for  INB379, preparing for the presentation on Monday,and cleaning up everything necessary to be handed in as a group portfolio.

Had a great feedback yesterday regarding the video presentation but I would like to explain myself a little towards "the artist seems to have waste their time in making the dance animation" from Alex.

The dance was actually created for a test for the rigging, weight skinning check and exporting animations to FBX. That was why the range of movements from the character. It's shouldn't even be in the game initially but when I showed it to the group they liked it so much that they wanted that to be "taunt" actions for the character. 

I do agree that those time could be used to make more animations for the game but I had to say it wasn't a waste of time.

26th May 2015

Working on the video for tomorrow presentation and hope to impress both Laz and Alex. Still this not what I wanted to talk about.

During the last critique, Laz was saying I need to be more descriptive in the blog on WHY the character and the world end up like it is now. So here goes (again do note that this artstyle didn't just come in a day in fact it  took me appx 4 months or more)

Early stages Concept

The early planning stage itself, we already knew as a team that we wanted to make a vibrant-cartoony-looking game which artsyle closely follow Disney big Hero 6. Another reason was due to my own personal liking from the Pixar The Incredibles created by Brad Bird. and the other members obsession with the anime Air Gear. We compromised and I start sketching out drawing which looking at it now, it make me goes "WTF" and shocked how much the character changed compare to it was first initial planned up.

"WTF ART 1,.1"

"WTF ART 1.2"

We did actually follow the advise by Laz and Alex to look at other alternative style such as making things more realistic etc, still we believed this style work best due to the time we had and skills that each artist had. Still we decided to stray away from "toon shading" style after Alex was reminding us how does this make us different from the other game out there which were more well known and polished.

My initial blogging shows how I came about with the main character look, I was actually planning his character traits first before I actually designed him pieces by pieces.

Character Traits: Confidence, playful, childish and obsessed to get his love known

This are his traits and I was deigning based the main character based on this traits.

Early days Tecca

The color palette was later change to red, yellow and black to make him more stand out from the crowd, to give a distinct look for players and viewers alike, telling them this dude IS the main character in the game.

Mid Concept

The world was planned in terms to make the character stands out. Simple and as i mentioned earlier, vibrant looking. It fall nicely to some of the concept I shown in the blog at the earlier stage. It was meant to be a "Boxy" busy world with cars moving around and area where players could glide and do tricks anywhere around the game world. There still a lot of stuff to work at but the current build we were doing starting to show the initial concept ideas. What we lacked is artist. Currently there's only me and John who were doing this texturing and it is really hard. John isn't much of a 3D artist as well and I am pretty much doing and planning stuff ahead so he could then match the style intended. This is the reason why we had so many initial texturing problem at the earlier stage, not until i show how to fit 1 building to the gameworld that he start to understand on how to get those assets up.

Initial concept proposal to the team

How the game look now

If you remember looking at my previous blog I was describing 2 other characters as well. A girl and a mask dude. HOW ARE THEY DESIGN? Simple, I was referencing everything back to the main character.

Risa - Main character love interests (thus his obsession)
Mask (Not given a name yet) - Is a character who were actually designed to be his close friend but soon become his rivals as I found him to be too cool later on.

Character Traits (Risa): Obnoxious, self-centered individual, assertive and always thinks she is better than anyone

First look

This is how she actually look like initially when i first actually talk to Stan, this is how I portrayed her in terms of design after our first discussion on how to attract other artist to join us.

She came along way in terms of design as she lost that "friendly" look but the goggle still stays with her

Character Traits (Mask): Secretive, mysterious, powerful yet dumb

Hmm..I have to admit I design him with the thought of "holy shit i have to model 3 diff character faces!" thus that the reason of the MASK. LoL. Strangely enough I like him straight away on 1 design. There's a little tweak here and there but nothing major. If you realised his hair was based from the villain in The Incredibles. His color palette was simple as well; a direct counter to Tecca

The final character was designed by John so I could not really described how he came about making her. All i knew she seems to fit pretty well with the Mask character due to her lolicon look

Johnson initial concept

Switching John's character to fit the style of the game

Mask man

Risa

tecca

Thats it! This was how I designed all the character and game art to fit accordingly to the style we had set earlier. It certainly go a long way in terms of how the character was initially planned to what they look like right now.

22th-25th May 2015

Spend most of the day doing some recording the video and actually played our game for the very first time together. I am not sure about the others, but it feel so fulfilling and proud to actually make it working. Yes there's bugs and the game seems broken beyond reason but we find ourselves enjoying the game, running around the world amok, grappling and pulling one another.

John was still sicked on that day while Miguel only came for an hour and bailed saying he had to meet his friend. Why he even came to the group meeting then is beyond my reasoning. This happen on the Saturday.

After reaching home to sort out the footage recorded, I realised some of the crucial shot was missing and we agreed as a team to redo some of it on Monday, 25th May 2015

Reflection of the day: It's pretty hard to describe the feel-good feeling seeing the character moving around the world jumping and actually did the grappling and other skills. Again it doesn't look polish, FAR FROM IT but it gave us an insight view and issues we have to fix for 380. 
Also i feel the longer we spend time together as a team the closer we get and knowing each and individual strength and weaknesses

Working on stuff..and stuff..and stuff

it feels like in the army, where brotherhood was bond from eating food together in a circle

22rd -23th May 2015

Here I met another hindrance to my progress; "How do i actually get a sprite to work in Unity like i want it to be in 2D world?" The arrows, as feedback from Laz and Alex, lack of textures make the world "dead". Texturing the cars wouldn't be a problem, the 2D sprite is. Spend quite a few hours in trying to figure out how does sprite works in Unreal and took me quite sometimes to get it working.

Once we get it to worked, Joe and Stan realised this was not really the correct way to do it as they need the sprites to be INSIDE a materials as they need to make  as a spline. I recommend you to look at Stan's blog on how he actually managed to get it done in the end. While i did the sprites he single handlely managed to solve this issues we had for the past 2 weeks!

After this was fixed, I had to get back texturing. What i thought to be an easy task for me turn out to be a frustrated morning once again. Woke up at 430am only to find myself to really start working on the assets at 730am!

Why you might asked? The lack of project and assets management. Again, I didn't want to sound like a bitch, but I had asked Miguel to check and clean up the assets needed to be textured ages ago, upon returning back to the folder all I found are files laying around everywhere.

If this has been done it make life easier for me and John to complete our task at hand. Nonetheless I managed to get the car that is needed for texturing but what lies after that gave me more headache.
Granted he isn't an artist, but so do Joe (our level designer), but he took an effort to learn when i pointed things out, with Miguel I am lost of words as i had mentioned him over and over to be careful of the "edge loop" when modelling any stuff. I didn't even asked him to model complex stuff yet it took me a total of 3 hours to textured and retopo the edge of his car model!

shit that i have to put it with 

.

after fixing the edge loop and unwrapping it nicely

Reflection for the day: I beginning to realise, while I know I am a patience guy but getting this issues repeated over and over even after pointing it out to an individual kinda tires me out

20th May 2015

Same critique feedback. In truth I was actually expecting those criticism to hit us due to the fact we did not implement stuff such as sounds and lighting etc in the game, Still I am not really concern (well I do but not that much) as this is easily fixed before the presentation. What i wanted to do now is to get the group together and conduct a quick short meeting, aka a Project Manager role, and show to Miguel what it should be like to plan things out for the team.

After a good solid 25min meeting, I'm pretty sure all of the group members understood WHAT we have to do for the next meeting. Assigning each individual member WHAT and WHEN I expect this to be done and be firm with the decision on dateline.

Md Rizal

May 20 at 12:14pm

Miguel u need to note this down as a PM in a nicer document format. In future meeting next semester you wil have to do wat i did just now. kinda like a scrum master

Riz: Promo Art, Curved Slope, Training Area, Crosshaier(?), Animated 2D(?)

John: Area next to museum segment, Sounds, ground pavement, traffic light(?)

Joe: Ligting, particles, Rails

Programmers: Networking, Countdown
Sounds needed: Grapple, jump, Bump to wall, railgrind and wallride

This was the outcome from the discussion and the goals that have to be met before next week presentation. I would love to a Project Manager but again it's not as if I had a choice to do this and overtake someone else role for the week; this was literally been missing since Miguel took over as a PM and I was to occupied with the workload of the game assets, character rigged and animation

21st-22nd May 2015

Well as I am the guy who did the planning for this week so I had to lead by an example. I get most of the 3D assets done asap because theses are the prioties that is needed for the game world. Johnson, the other artist ,was really hit hard with sickness and again I had to cover the load up to get things done till he recovers. Even when he's isn't fully recovering he still make an effort to get most of the stuff needed so that it could be used for the team.

Sprite Arrow/material

More Billboard designs

Working on the sprite

making it work

Reflection of the day: With all the tension going earlier, It actually make us stronger as a team. We are helping one another and crossing over each other path to get things done efficiently. Ryan returning to the team works wonders as well!

18th-19th May 2015

Working on more textures. Things that have been added in relation to Laz critique last week:-

• Added trees
• Game Object textures
• Overall color outlook (This was done by the level designer and the other artist, I was tweaking things to make the world more standardize in term of colors)
• Billboard

Tree test

One of the few textures for the billboard

This is where things get a little heat up. The team keep pointing out my mistake regarding the issues that was done for the character, while I admit I make those mistake it was more due to an unforeseen mistake. It get a little tiring to explain that the error was not due to the skeleton INSTEAD it was due to the cluster and vertices changes in the FBX files that literally cause this issues.

Ways to fixed it? I know how to do it. How?

1. Unskinned the character model
2. Fix the hole 
3. Reattached the skin and skeleton
4. Rebake all the animation to the character

This i believed will fix the issues we are having now BUT NOBODY is listening to me and thus it kind of irritated me badly.

Reflection Segment: I could not fix it now due to the time and the desk critique is tomorrow While I was actually telling my other members off, there was no malice or personal attack to it. It's just that no one seems to listen. People use the word "LAZY" or "I DONT CARE" really tick me off as here I am trying to understand both programmers and artist pipeline, getting those comments from the team members is infruating..
Again it fall down to communication and i will talk to them tomorrow to clear things up.