#exosense

[cuckoosnestblog]

Girl crush

[freshthoughts2020]

[cuckoosnestblog]

Check this hottie.

She was my favourite

[cuckoosnestblog]

I fell in love. Fucking hypnostising.

[cuckoosnestblog]

Wild saturday night

[markyeoh]

Exosense - Studio III

You Can (Not) Return

Level Design

Mechanics

Mechanics Pt.2

Testing

Theme & Mood

Getting there

Another time perhaps

World Building

BRICK

“EASY”

Time is short

Cont

Maybe I’m cursed to break things

Package

Summary & Reflection

[markyeoh]

Summary & Reflection

Coming in late to the team, my main role was to assist in programming and fill in any other gaps that may exist. The most apparent gap was the lack of merging of ideas from different members. This was most evident in the varying theme and feel of our game from member to member. By sitting down with the team, we were able to finalize on a theme of a serious issue, presented in a light-hearted manner. Another example would be the lack of cooperation between the level, the puzzle, and the players. Although we did not have much time to solve this, I did manage to come up with, and implement partly, a two player puzzle for level 2.

World building was another major contribution of mine. I took it personally to develop the world of our game while following the theme of having a serious issue, presented in a light-hearted manner. I developed a backstory for the two distinct drones, by having two rival mega-corporations, which grudgingly worked together to reached this planet for different reasons. Most apparent of this was the naming of the two drones, which I named B.R.I.C.K (Building, Rigging, Industrial, Construction, Kit) and Spy-DER (Devious Espionage & Reconnaissance). To build this world, I 3D modelled assets like the ship, which brought the drones to the planet, and other supplementary assets like debris. I worked closely with the UI/UX team to achieve the distinct look and feel of the two drones. I programmed the two drones to be distinctively unique to each other. Lastly, I implemented the assets into the actual game which also required level design.

My inspiration for the world building, particularly the light-hearted appearance with a serious core, was primarily from Nom-Nom-Galaxy and Fallout 4. Both games have a very vibrant and comedic outer appearance that masks a very deep and dark world. This was excellent in drawing people in for an experience that would normally scare most away if it was not for the light-hearted appearance. By luring players into an otherwise dark and deep world/setting, players can slowly get accustomed to the world in a natural progression.

My main goal was to perfect our light-hearted appearance, which will be monumental in drawing a larger variety of people. Additionally, I noted that a light-hearted appearance/theme helps in breeding creativity, as the team had fun coming up with ideas and working on them.

Throughout the course of development, I have improved on my programming and modelling skills. This has been an effect of working with those more skilled and learning from them, as well as getting more practice.

This is the largest team I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve learnt a lot from it. A large team allows for more freedom and specialization, where people can focus on their strengths and work together to create a lot more. But it also means that people start drifting apart, and ideas form in solitude. Therein lies the risk of the project no longer being consistent.

[ncyrocks]

Nathan’s Studio V Week 14: The Last Bit that I wasn’t sure would come, but it did

Whew. This semester has, in a lot of ways, seemed like the biggest one I’ve done yet. The fact that’s it’s ending is making me a little emotional, actually. But I’ll keep my full reflection for a little later (either late this week or, like, later today).

Anyway, this is what happened during this semester’s final week.

On Monday, I started by trying to clean up our Bitbucket repository - Mark and Garian each needed to push around 100MB worth of files, and we had about 5MB free. It turns out that we had been wasting around 600MB on starter content this whole time though, so I went and deleted the worst of that, freeing about 550 MB or so. I’d love to say that that was enough to last us our final week, but that’s not true. Anyway, I pushed the changes I’d already made and helped the others with their stuff.

On Tuesday, I stayed home and helped Mark with his programming remotely - not the greatest idea. He started to implement a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t until the day after that we really got anywhere, especially with Mark’s Sourcetree not working correctly. I wrote/finished more posts, and worked on Creative Workflows.

On Wednesday, I basically sorted out programming stuff and source control stuff for the whole day. There’s just so much stuff

On Thursday, I stayed home and mostly worked on Creative Workflows.

On Friday, I helped Mark with his stuff even more (it’s hard for the both of us to program on two separate computers, due to the nature of Unreal’s Blueprints that we’re programming with, which is why I helped him with programming more than I programmed this week) and finished off Creative Workflows.

On Sunday, I came in to finish off the game. We sorted out some finishing touches, like making sure people could see, making sure players don’t spawn three times and making sure the second level worked. (I’m only being partially facetious - we did mostly work on finishing touches.) We packaged the damn thing (well, the others did) and called it done (at least for the purpose of submission - we may have to implement a couple of changes for Open Studio).

I also wrote:

Why everything I wrote/said about releasing ExoSense publicly was either naïve or not something I wanted to commit to more than letting people do what they want

How the game’s core concept manifested in the final product, seeing as I hadn’t actually talked about that before

The potential future of ExoSense, and why I should it should never be