Starting the Big Game Project

Hey, I am back here again.

We started this course called Big Game, where we present our concept ideas and try to get it greenlit in order to start the project. So these posts that I am going to post these weeks will serve as diary and also help me write my future post mortem writing.

The thing I will do here is not to talk about the concept idea, but rather about how we go about with solving problems, working around new ideas and the actual project progress. I will be posting some pictures on how far we have come with the art and hopefully with the game.

So my role in this project is being the producer and the lead designer, the first week we started I requested to do a quick prototype to work out the animations and the ability to shoot. We did not come too far the first week with the prototyping as our programmers where trying to learn how to use Unreal Engine. But they still managed to get the animations in and they implemented a lot from the tutorials like setting up HUD, controller movements and mappings. The second week we received our third programmer a lot more things got started like enemy AI, locking onto targets ant switching between them and more.

Regarding the graphics we had already loads of stuff done from the earlier course in 3D, where we had our main character (“Mokhtar”) modeled, rigged and animation ready for games. I assigned roles for each one of the artists (even though they already knew what they wanted to work with), we also had a new artist join us too and he directly sat down and started working on visual effects and level design.

The lead artist got the role of keeping the art style coherent, he follows the style that was already set and is working on it greatly. This week he worked on doing the concept art on the antagonist and this is how it looks:

Our 3D artist made the base mesh to start animating on and also added a lot of props for the level to be done.

Regarding the design all in all, I have been sitting down with the design document and nailing down the details for the group members, I asked them to write down all their questions so that I can answer them in detail. I have put up a list of needs for everyone to get done and put up milestones for our alpha, beta and final. I planned everything with two weeks earlier deadline so if we run into trouble we have two weeks to come up with a workable solution.

This is all for this week, more updates will come each week as we progress and for the final the game will be revealed and hopefully it will be a great creation. Stay tuned and I will write a lot more for you to read.