Attempting art

So I'm trying to dabble in a bit of art so I can understand it and maybe even do it. I have created a bit of concept art which SUCKS but the background turned out okay I think.

The problem is making the planets look... well... good. It looks too terrible. The blue line in the background was also a mistake which I couldn't undo so I had to make the best of it with lots of layer editing >.<

Thinking...

Onto another week developing the idea of our game and I've spent some time thinking about what gets me to keep playing an app I play on my phone. 

Using my real life experience with addictive games I mainly pin it down to having to collect enough money/points to unlock cool or ridiculous advantages or visual aesthetics! With this I suggested we implement a money system to allow the play to keep saving for upgrades and the continuation on playing. Using mini games to acquire the coins the player will have several different places to find these games, some of which will be very difficult while others easy with less reward.  

It's an obvious and simple idea but I feel it should fit well into the game. 

Another idea I liked is placing the player in a solar system rather than just a planet. Each planet will have a mini game to collect coins with (same mini game just more difficult ect) and each planet will have a shop with upgrades to your ship. This will make the playing field look much bigger and suggest that there are more options but the problem comes when we need it to not look shit... and space is cool... so we have to make it look simple but good at the same time! 

This is just the doodles that I used to get some of the ideas while I draw a story for myself so I can immerse my self within. 

The Final Stretch... Kind of.

Towards the end of last year I had felt beaten by a lot of the pressure and stress so it felt good to have a long 1 month off uni. 

Now back at uni, much has changed. 

We have a new room and have lost two tutors, James and Ben who were both really great people and teachers and it really sucks to not have them this year. It was especially nice to keep getting updates of Ether every lesson with them and I wasn't too happy with this turn of events. On top of that I felt the whole "choose your own group" was irritating but what can you do eh. 

We had our first "Production" lesson tonight with our new tutor Peter who seems really enthusiastic and just a really nice guy overall. 

I am also looking forward to next production lesson since Peter said he would try to give us a Q&A testing lesson to help us prepare for the industry and to just help give us some knowledge about it! :) 

Anyway... back to today... 

I'm part of the "The Cloudy Lime" Group:

Darren: Programmer

Will: Programmer/Designer

Me/Max: Designer

We have a game concept called "Escape from Rygon 5" which is about a person whom is wrongfully accused and placed in a maximum security prison in space, with the objective to escape. The way of escape is by collecting parts for your spaceship off several planets near by and when attempting to collect these parts or travelling to the planets there will be little puzzle mini-games to entertain the player. 

The Game is to be made for Android and seems to be are solid concept so far. 

That's about it for now anyway... Till next time!

The End.

Here it is. The End.

Hand in has been done. In the end David did work very hard with programming, textures ect and got the level looking pretty. Unfortunately just before we burned the game onto the disk... our matches stopped working so the game is literally unplayable. That sucks. But it's more than I expected to have.

This project was half a failure because we fucked up. The successful half is that we can learn from this.

Work HARDER is the biggest thing here... earlier on in the year there wasn't enough work being done for design or art. No matter the case we could have gotten more done but I think a lot of people are still in the student mind set and un-motivated. The lack of art through out the entire project was abysmal but this is a learning year so hopefully that won't happen again and I know I'll improve on my following up and even assisting art.

I will keep saying this that I am also at fault, I am no way near perfect and I slacked off too through out this project, by just being lazy and that's not happening again.

For hand in though I made this which was pretty cool:

 The hand in case looks really cool! ready for the shelf in stores... just without the game.

I have been very negative through out this post but I must commend people too. David was really good in the last few weeks and did a lot of work and it wouldn't have looks as good as it did without him. Its a real shame it can't be played because it was quite fun to play and he did an excellent job taking over for Darren.

A title with meaning.

So I'm just out of breath now, I'm as unmotivated as I've ever felt on this course because we're so late in and we don't have a level. Not one level. It's been on going like this for so long and it devastates me that I find it so hard to care for my own project.

To go from having this image in my mind of the game and I know it was never going to look the same but I expected something to look at. Everything has taken far too long for the art. The character, the level, the textures and it's just worn me down. I have tried chasing these up and motivating and demanding and requesting and speaking about it and saying "it's not good enough" and here we are. With no level. I honestly hate this.

All I can do now is convince my self not to stress because I know we are not going to be able to hand anything worthy in. It's going to be worthless because of my bad planning and a horrific progression of work although I fully exclude Darren in this since he's been the hardest worker and very professional with getting it done and managing to enjoy life too :)

It just saddens me to finish below my already low expectations.

Mission Impossible?

So deadline even nearer now and I know we are not going to hit it at all... alls to do now I feel is to try and get the best out of what we got and try to get as much done! The other thing to do is look back on how I can improve, as the team leader I have made errors, many of them and I need to learn from them if i'm to lead again next year. 

1. I need to be more confident and assertive - I feel that I needed to be that guy who meithers everyone for work and keeps bugging people just so we hit the deadlines and milestones. I need to follow up and motivate people to get work done. 

2. I need to do more work my self - I need to set the example and I have been messing about with design for too long, it should have been done years ago. I need to help other little jobs like doing more textures and maybe even learning 3ds max to do some modelling. 

3. I need to stick to my plan - At the start of the project I had such a perfect layout for design and art and when the vertical slice arose I postponed so many tasks when we should have worked through them and just worked harder. I feel that I have clumped all the tasks at the end and this is my wrong doing for that. 

On another note though... 

BAM... cool texture... 

Limbo

So we arn't really moving anywhere at the moment. We're stalled on the art and programming is having to be done within the vertical slice but it is still advancing and the code is getting better and better :) I'll have to start doing some textures to help out but I'm not too good!

In the mean time we're just getting closer and closer to the deadline which is pretty worrying...

I made a kinda shitty texture to begin with, even though it isn't great I still feel a bit proud.