I always feel like I’m completely weird when it comes to working. I don’t like working with people I live with, there’s too much freedom in a project! But I do feel I have proper reasons. With too much freedom, I struggle to find a foundation to build upon. When given a brief in industry, there would be at least some structural start such as ‘Sci-fi’ or ‘80s’. With a project where we can run free, it terrifies me! Where do I start? What can look impressive? What’s original, believable? Brief starts like this tend to set me back due to the amount of research I had to amass and the topics I have to cover, this often involves looking at how something works in real life and apply the physics and mechanics to the game asset. For this project I looked into understanding how a machine gun and Gatling guns fires. Understanding this mechanic allows me to break it down and replace it with objects, materials or other suitable systems from that time period. This gives the asset a more realistic feel and look which keeps the immersion for the player.
The breaking of immersion can be a sign of poor game development, on both the artistic side and the developer, so understanding physics and laws in the real world can allow us to break and bend some of these rules without the destruction of immersion occurring.
This start has affected the flow of my work, with a lot of time spent on just research. This ate into my time for iterations and has set me back. I’ll have less time to model and texture, which is an issue for me as I’m not too good at texturing and wish to improve.
Outside of University work, I managed to do a study of Feng Zhu’s work which I’m quite happy about. I mainly focused on understanding how to make an interesting picture via composition and being able to break down the piece into simplistic forms. I also learnt a lot from his usage of values, where minimum amounts of black and white are used and a heavy focus on the greyscale colours. I did add some colour afterwards just to tidy up the piece, but I feel I need to get my greyscale foundations correct before I push into colour.
I’m going to continue on with the same topic as last week’s blog post about the issues that went wrong extending into a post mortem to help me grow into a better team member.
I personally found this group project to extremely difficult in comparison to the first one and I believe it all comes down to the issue that three out of the four members of the group lived together. This at first could be considered a bonus. Working together with flat mates means more time together to improve upon your work, but I found this to be untrue in the case of me. I considered myself to be an introvert due to my difficulty in being around people for long periods of time and liking to being left alone. Unlike with the first project, I could go home and relax away from work. This was something I couldn’t do with the second project. I would return home and my team members would be there meaning I had virtually no time away from them to have a break. We basically brought the work back with us, and we would only talk about that when we were back.
I also had an issue with one of the team members, who I felt complained about every decision that was made such as the implementation of asset swap to mirror industry as to get into good practices. This team member would also tell me I was wrong frequently, such as in the layout of the files which we were taught to do last year. I’m usually fine dealing with people like this but without a break this person became overbearing. As I’ve often dealt with people in the past like this, I was able to get away from them by going home, I was unable to with this certain member and it just became too much. Working with this same person in the future I’d probably go out after lesson for a while to get away.
For myself, I need to be more organised and produce a design document throughout the project so I don’t leave it until the end of the project. This caused a lot of stress for me at the end, having to write the group design document and the personal document. The recording throughout the project will allows me to articulate my thoughs on the project and allows me to think about how to push the designs and models further daily. Stepping back and being able to look at everything produced each day allowed me to write about how to tackle the project the next time I come to it.
