Yesterday we presented the current state of our projects to our peers and parents. Seeing what everyone else got done in the time we've had to work on this, seeing a side by side comparison of our products, made me realize a couple things. Firstly, nobody besides me likes coding apparently, which makes me excited for my job prospects. If my future peers dislike coding, that means I get to be paid to make it so they don't have to. From what I've seen, everyone likes either 3D modeling or character design, areas that I'm capable of working in and understand, but am certainly not as adept in as my peers. I also learned quite a bit about how far my presentation skills have gone since freshmen year. If I make a complete fool of myself, I'm much more relaxed and capable of presenting in a fun and entertaining way. And, generally, if I treat a presentation as entertainment, rather than a serious production for serious people, I can actually get across more information in a much more comfortable fashion than if I stood up there awkward and stuttering. So, generally, a good learning experience.
0 Comments
The project is going great. I've been setting goals for myself, and I've been achieving them with my own skills. Be it coding, rendering, modeling, I've been able to power through and solve problems myself, and while my methods might not be the best, most streamline in the world, they work, and that's what matters. This project is going to prove that I know in ins and outs of every step of the game design process, and that is going to go a long way in the game design industry. Once it's done, I can add it to my portfolio, and actually have a fully fleshed out game to point to when people ask "Why should we hire you?". And honestly, I'm excited to see the final project. I've still got a long way to go, and the final project probably won't be exactly what I imagine it will be. Though, I will admit it's extremely satisfying to have everything exactly how I want it to be, and only settling for changes when I realize I genuinely just can't do what I set out to do, instead of having other opinions (as much as I should probably be asking people for those).
This quarter, outside of school, I've been focusing a lot on college and the future. I've been thinking about how the skills I've been learning here are going to help me get a job, and I'm really glad that I'm doing the project that I'm doing. It's not really going to help me get into college, but once I do get there, I'll have significant advantages over other people going into Game Design programs, which is going to make me stand out for apprenticeships and job opportunities. The project is also helping me hone in on what parts of game development that I enjoy and don't enjoy. 3D modeling, tinkering with settings, and problem solving, as frustrating as they can be, are fairly fun. Coding has been really difficult, and I think I really need to take a professional class on it before I can really say wither or not I enjoy it, but I'm definitely still looking to learn how to use it.
The project has been going fairly slowly. I've been running into a bunch of coding issues that have been slowing me down a lot. I'm thinking of taking a break from the coding and just work on some modeling instead, to get the scene better set. Get some trees in there, some buildings, get rid of the ugly mountains in the background, make it look a lot more like Durham. But beyond that, motivation has been running low. I'm sure it's just a slump, been dealing with increased stress and personal stuff, but it's just made tackling issues a lot harder. Hopefully I'll get back on the ball and get everything running again.
This week has mostly been watching tutorials and trying to work out coding. Progress has been difficult and slow, and it's really hammering in the idea as to why projects don't typically only have one person on them, and usually have a team of coders, writers, artist, etc. I'm still not going to ask for help, this is my project, and I'm going to see it to the end, but I probably should've put more effort in last year to learn how to code so that this process would go by a lot faster. Next week:
- Keep on figuring out coding. This week I got the car asset into unity, and made a few different iterations of it, and have delved into the coding for getting them to spawn. It's been difficult, but I'm slowly making progress to try and get a random car to spawn into the world every few seconds, and then drive down the street towards the player. Next week:
- Get the spawning script ready - Get the project ready for presenting Coding is difficult. I'm avoiding it for as long as possible, which I shouldn't be doing, but other stuff does need to get done and I'm focusing on what I do know how to do for now. That being said, this week I got another model done. Another obstacle for the game, a basic car template. Some texture changes, maybe some additions, and I can create a multitude of different cars to make the game more interesting. We're almost a 4th of the way through the year and that's actually kinda scary. Though, I'm confident that I'll get through this. Probably. Next week:
- Get this model into unity - Texture it This week hasn't been productive. Between my college visit on Wednesday and the various jobs I've been assigned and had to accomplish, it's been difficult to get work done. It also doesn't help that the damn animator in unity that I was working with deleted the animation of the truck that I was trying to get working, and the wheel animation got messed up since the last time I worked on it, so now only one wheel rolls. So, basically, squat got done with week. - Fix the animation
- Start coding the animation to work properly - Start coding on UI This week I worked on sculpting the area around the bridge to more naturally integrate it into the environment, as well as animating the wheels for the truck. Next week:
- Coding. Dun, dun, duuuuun! So far, I've only really worked with modeling the characters for my game, and shaping the environment. But, I'm genuinely proud of what I've done, and it's starting to look like an actual game. I'm excited to no end about this, that I'm actually making a game. But, it's not all been pretty. I've learned a good lesson about importing and exporting assets. That lesson being, avoid it if you can. In this case I really couldn't avoid it, because Unity doesn't have the extensive object manipulating ability that 3DS Max does, but it's really frustrating when you do finally import an asset and it doesn't go through right, and you have to figure out what the issue was, and then remodel around that issue. Specifically, I figured out Unity really doesn't like the mirror function that 3DS Max has, so I had to remodel a large section of the truck. Though, in honesty, it was probably for the better, it helped me rediscover soft selection, and I got a much better product due to it. That's another thing that I've been running into, rediscovering a lot of old features that I'd forgotten about that really make modeling so much smoother. But, once I get the bridge done, which shouldn't take more then a day, I'll have all the models that I need for now, and then I can move into the coding and animation part of this project. And, oh boy, that's going to be interesting.
|
AuthorI am 17 years old, and currently enrolled in Durham School of the Arts. Within the Game Design field, I'm looking to become a game writer or a programmer, preferably a combination of the two.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public School Archives
June 2018
Categories
All
|