What did Sebastian DO?
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Hi! It has been a couple of intense weeks since my last post. The last two weeks of Slumber development were spent working very hard to deliver the very best game for Gotland Game Conference possible. As a result I forgot to blog. Ooops! That’s okay though! (For me at least, we’ll have to see what my professors say!). This allows me to reflect much more than usual on the process. I ended up doing a lot of different things during this project. Looking at the complete development period, My tasks range from desgin, to graphical art, and sometimes to programming! DesignOn the design side I defined and documented features. I also attempted to constantly look out for problems in our current design, and solve them. Beyond that I also designed and built Slumber’s world using assets created by our skilled artists. GraphicsGoing into graphics, I quickly turned into the Unity animator person. It was my job to animate the fishes to emote properly, learning to build and create a layered animation tree using Unity’s animator controller. Beyond that my graphical tasks mostly consisted of animating UI such as the relationship bar, the food bar, and everything in the reward screen. ProgrammingAs I said, everything went a bit mad during the last two weeks of development. Sensing we had a lot of features to finish with relatively little time, I decided to jump into programming and code some features. C# is relatively new to me so it was a bit of a challenge at first. Thankfully our programmers were very helpful and showed me the differences to C++ allowing me to get into the groove pretty quickly. My programming tasks were largely focused on the reward screen. After receiving a working base to work with from our programmer Emil, I developed the reward screen further to feel much juicier and more flexible in terms of how it displayed unlocks. I also implemented a system that actually unlocks things in the game world. Getting into code was also very useful for when something was not working properly – I could simply debug it and see what was up instead of interrupting our programmers. But wait, there’s more!Beyond this, I was also the general..tweak person. If a camera needed adjusting, if an animation needed polish, if the algae were to attract to the player more easily, if we needed a new game build, I was the person to do it. I spent a lot of time just tweaking a lot of different aspects of Slumber in the final days, making sure we had a somewhat polished product for the conference. So..where am I going with all this?I feel as though I did too many things for the game’s own good! Showing the game at the conference, several things in regards to Slumber’s design became abundantly clear;
So yeah, there were errors! So what? What I feel as the team’s dedicated designer is that I overlooked these things and favoured other tasks. I could have led the player much more efficiently by the use of landmarks, I could have tweaked algae spawning to perfectly encourage the player to explore the landscape and really utilize the different environments, I could have developed a balanced polished build if I had stayed a designer. Instead I was a graphical artis, animator, programmer, and, when there was time, a designer. At the same time, there were just a lot of things to do! Like, a lot of things. ConclusonI am a bit of a perfectionist, I guess. Slumber is currently not perfect, and so I grumble and wonder why that is and how I could have and can fix it. It’s easy to be captain hindsight and spot all of the issues in doing three roles at the same time. I think the key is to take a deep breath every now and then to look at your priorities and see if it’s truly the best thing you can do with your time. In conclusion, at least I had a lot of fun! I easily get bored just doing one thing, so getting to switch between all professions was truly a blast and a bit of a powertrip. I’m dreading and hoping to do the same in the next project, but perhaps in more controlled forms! Until next time!  |