[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

[jordandevs]

Week Five.

So last Friday, we presented the game and other assets to some producers from A-Film and a lecturer from DTU. We got some really encouraging feedback, despite what my opinions on the game would suggest. I think I might just have had unreasonably high expectations from our first endeavor.

Week 5's time had been allocated for the polishing of the game and film, much of which was still in development. I wouldn't say what we have been doing this week could necessarily be described as "polishing" but we have certainly been attempting to salvage something playable from the project. The end result is not entirely playable without knowing exactly what is going on behind the scenes but is as close to a finished product as I think we could actually end up with. I'm far from happy with the results but I'm glad it's over. 

The reason this game didn't go to plan is exactly why we started this project in the first place. I'm not entirely sure if this was on purpose, but if you have read my earlier blogs, you will know that this task was primarily set to identify problems in the content pipeline. That is exactly what we have done - identify a lot of problems. The major problem was that content wasn't getting pushed until it was finished, rather than outputting basic iterations of products often. For example, if it takes a modeler a week to push a model, it might take a rigger a couple of days to come up with a rig that they are happy with. This process can't occur concurrently unless the rigger has the model. The animators can clean up their Mo-Cap sets during this period and the programmers can work on the basics of various functions using primitives but this does not bide well in an animation-heavy game. The Dancer/Fencer project was entirely based around animation - the programmers only received a handful of animations despite there being a lot more available and this happened far too late so we didn't have time to attempt to sync them. This resulted in a very strange looking end product.

Despite the vulgarity of our end output, I feel like I have learned quite a bit - not only about the production process but also about the people around me. It's interesting to see how others work and I'm meeting a lot of good, talented people out here. It's more like a job out here rather than a University which can be quite taxing but I'm glad that I'm working with talented people, otherwise I don't think I'd be holding up so well.

[jordandevs]

Dancer/Fencer

Now fully settled, the Production team have been assigned our first project. The task involves creating a short animation and game based on a script from the Film School involving a confrontation between a Dancer and Fencer sans the conceptual team. This is primarily to test the working pipeline and identify any problems we might have delivering content to each of the competences. We are allowed, if not expected, to mess up here.

In pre-production, the programmers drafted a model of the game in UML. This didn't go as well as planned, with all of us having different, conflicting ideas on how to go approach the task. This is largely down to the ambiguity of the game - we were not supplied with an actual design document so we had all "invented" the game in our heads based on our perception of the script. A lot of this was also down to the programmers from Abertay being from more of a "bare-bones" background and not knowing how to apply this to working with Unity.

Production has been nothing short of laborious. I personally feel that we could have got a lot more done than we have so far, although I think that the biggest challenge has just been trying to get everyone to work together seamlessly. The major problem here is content not being pushed down the pipeline quick enough, resulting in each competence idling whilst they wait for what they need.

I've been trying to use my time wisely during the duration of the Dancer/Fencer task, opting to write the parts of the code that could be saved for future use. The bulk of this project will be scrapped on completion, so I've been trying to create something that we would benefit from keeping. I've mainly been working with creating an interface for the camera, allowing us to switch between different styles of view, a-la the "Cinematic" camera in GTA mixed with a "Prince of Persia" styled zoom feature, which Jordan O'Hare has dubbed "Smoothment". I've also taken on the role of implementing the audio, so I've been trying to create something that the audio people can just drag and drop their clips in to for me to trigger. I've also been syncing left and right footstep noises to animations which has been dreadful as I have had no animations to work with. Don't ask me how this was possible.

No matter what we get out of this project, we have acknowledged where the problems are and what needs to be fixed. It's better that this happens now rather than in the main production. I am confident that our output will be a lot stronger the next time around. We still have half a week to go until this project is presented, so here's hoping we can get in a little bit of turd-polishing before then.

[jordandevs]

Week One

So, Copenhagen is pretty good.

It's taken a while to get settled in, but I think I'm getting there. Myself, Andy and Jordan arrived last weekend around mid-day - we were the first people from Dundee to arrive meaning we had to wait around for the others to give them their keys, which didn't work out so well. It's very, very cold here. The winds seem to pierce through me and my face gets so cold that I can't talk - not a nice feeling.

The living situation isn't amazing; we are essentially staying in portacabins in somewhere straight out of Trailer Park Boys, although Refshaleøen is surprisingly attractive for an industrial estate. A 20 minute walk to the nearest store sees you walking by beautiful boat-houses and expensive apartments, round a frozen lake barren with the remains of cheap paddle boats which somehow just adds to the aesthetics of the place. Copenhagen just doesn't seem to be able to look bad.

The first couple of days at the EUCROMA offices were spent getting to grips with new software, brushing up on some C# and learning my way around Unity. We were asked to split into groups and attempt to create a small game in Unity in a day or two after seeing some examples. This was surprisingly easy, despite basically doing the whole thing myself. Unity seems to have a very small learning curve - the part I seem to struggle with is throwing away a lot of my preconceived notions regarding OO programming for the sake of modularity. It's a different way of going about things and I'm not too sure if I like it yet, although it is satisfying to be able to quickly prototype ideas without having to deal with setting up frameworks, dealing with buffers and such.

On Friday, we managed to go out for drinks at ITU's union, which was a surprisingly similar experience to drinking at Abertay's union, minus Andy trying to glass me. 

Nevertheless, it was a refreshing experience. The prices were more than adequate despite what we had all heard about the price of alcohol in Copenhagen. I don't imagine that I'll have that much time to drink whilst I'm out here but it's good to know that there is somewhere to go that is affordable if the opportunity arises.

I definitely did not end up falling asleep in the toilets.