343sushiblog

[343sushiblog]

Overall reflection

Overall, I feel our group lacked in communication and direction from the very start, although I am pleased with how the game turned out I feel as if it could have been a lot better if we planned things better from the start.  

Myself I feel like I could have helped more with level and asset design but I was hesitant to because I knew there wasn’t much work to be spread out among 6 people. But reflecting on it now I think having more people working out the kinks for levels would have helped progress the game along faster than it went.

In hindsight I feel like others in the group were under more pressure than the rest with their work load and we should have planned the individual roles a bit better.  

In future group projects I plan to ask more questions to help establish a proper foundation from the beginning and try help in ways so the whole team understand the direction the project is going in.  

[343sushiblog]

To create the video I took the characters made of the course of this project (Brocks Tui, Mehaus Character and my enemy) and made simple animations in Maya with a green screen back. The purpose of the green screen was to fill in the background later but it didn’t end up working out like I wanted. From there I found copy right free effects and sounds to use within the animations to make a short trailer that fit the theme of our game. I then compiled them in a mixture of after effects and premiere and this is how it turned out.

[343sushiblog]

The Video..

For the video I decided I wanted to do it without much of an idea in mind.

Over a couple of days, I decided that I wanted a mix of a trailer and gameplay. I wanted to create a trailer with a more comedic tone to suit the style of our game. I also wanted to try include a piece of work from each person within the trailer.  

The brief idea for the video was to have a cinema style intro with laughable titles. Then a short sequence showing a transition from the prototype going into the new game and then gameplay from the game with our game music in the background. Finally cutting to the game name and a coming 2019.  

[343sushiblog]

Unfortunately, it looks like we will only be going with the tofu as an enemy now. This is because the scope of our game has been iterating throughout the project and we now think its best to only have the one enemy type and then have debuff obstacles around the map.  

Im fine with this as we have been using the tofu enemy from the beginning and it makes sense to carry this enemy through.  

After giving the animation and textures over to brock we realized that the enemy character actually needed a rig if we wanted to keep a moving eye on it (this eye was introduced to the game and to the enemy character by brock when he created it using Houdini). This left us with a couple options

Take the older animation and model with a rig and texture that or

Add a rig to the blend shapes animation.

We opted for texturing the old animation. This was because adding a rig and reanimating the tofu model would have been more time consuming and probably wouldn’t have looked much different to the older model.  

I took the older model and textured it using the same method as the other model I have.  

After being textured and re imported the enemy worked smoothly.  

However, I do wish I took more time with this overall process and tested it more in unity as I was going with my work. This way the end model and animation could have been my first choice and not my second  

[343sushiblog]

Riceball Textures

Next I went onto the riceball, For texturing this I used different shades of white and a fingerprint alpha and layers them by adjusting the normal map to give it a rice looking texture. I ended up being very happy with this texture because unlike the tofu it is more recognizable to what it is and I think it fits into the overall sushi theme better.  

[343sushiblog]

Tofu Texture

Here's the outcome of the tofu, I'm pretty happy with it as to me it looks like fried tofu. However I think I only think that because I know what it looks like. Looking back I wish I took a little more time and experimented more with texturing.  

[343sushiblog]

Texturing Test

In these i am using masking layers to work out how to layer paint and smart materials.

i also threw a smart material on the chopsticks because they are just wood. But i think we are taking them of since they were meant to be an indicator and the texture has taken the job and to me they have started to look out of place.

[343sushiblog]

Texture Reference

For textures I found Tofu more difficult because again, how do you make it look interesting?

I decided to aim for creating a fried looking tofu. I created this using a skin preset material in substance painter and then layered the different colours from a creamy white to a golden brown to attempt to give It a cooked look.  

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Animation Done

Here is the final product for the rice ball Enemy. Again, a simple model and animation with most of the detail coming in with the texture.

After changing up the way i did the animation i wish i had done this from the start. I was to busy doing things the way a tutorial on blend shapes instructed and didn't experiment enough with it.

[343sushiblog]

Riceball Animation

For this model, i decided to manipulate a sphere into my triangle shape. This allowed for a low poly well rounded shape. For the squash and stretch i decided this time to squash and stretch the whole model normally and the end result ended up a lot better.

[343sushiblog]

Riceball one

For this model/animation i focused to much on the vertices of the rounded triangle and the final product ended up looking really wonky.

I want to recreate the model and try something different with the animation as manipulating individual vertices created a messy model.

[343sushiblog]

Riceball

For the rice ball I am going to use this as inspiration

I like the rounded triangle shape with the seaweed at the bottom.  

For this enemy I plan to have it looking soft and squishy like the tofu. I'm also going to do things in a different order. I want to create the model and animation in one as I understand blend shapes and animating with them now and should have done this in the beginning.  

[343sushiblog]

This looks a lot nicer and softer. With the rounded edges it looks a lot squishier.  Now that im happy with this animation I want to move on the creating the rice ball.