Our first assignment for this semester back was to team up with the Games Design students and create a fully playable game with a goal, objectives and at least somewhat of a storyline. Each department had to take care of their respective side of things, but were allowed and encouraged to help wherever they could, as it gave experience and broadened horizons.
Work was judged individually depending on how much effort each student has seemed to put into the project. This was portrayed through blogs, weekly presentations on progress, one to one or group meetings with the tutors and of course the resulting work that they have to display. Animation students were dealing with the art side of things such as backgrounds, art, hard surface modelling, animation, etc while Game students were focusing on the game coding, scripts, AI, all that sort of stuff.
Before this project had began, we were all sent out a short form to fill in on what roles we were happy with taking on for the project and which we’d rather not. I was happy with pretty much anything except for lighting and backgrounds as I don’t really understand how to effectively do either, which tells me I should definitely set some time aside and work on that in the future. My main two topics I chose that interested me were modelling and animating, rigging was also in the same category as animating but I was a little worried about that since I’d only rigged a bird feet model I’d previously created for a short in first year.
Fast forward to meeting our groups, I haven’t been able to get in due to no travel availability but I make sure to keep my phone by me on loud at all times so I can quickly get updates and respond to the group as we communicate via Discord and try to hold meetings as frequently as possible. To get a feel for the kind of work our teammates were used to doing and what they could provide to the project, we all sent in our portfolios and show reels for the others to have a look. Seeing as though I wasn’t in, they contacted me on Discord where I sent a link to my blog portfolio, my showreel and my Sketchfab profile, making sure I was giving them all the evidence they needed to see what I was capable of and where I’d be best suited. Two of the games students, Karl and Joe, sent their portfolios for me to look at too and their work was really impressive! Seeing what they’d already done made me really excited to start working on the project and combine all our skills to come out with a really good game.
Later on in the day I was informed that the class had been talking about the general brief of the project and that we had been set a homework to talk about the genre and feel of the game we were working towards and to create a “room” which would have a piece of work done by each group member to showcase what genre/feel we had chosen. We had decided that a group VC meeting would be best in order to fill everyone in on what had been talked about in class and to further discuss our game ideas, though everyone at this point had agreed on a horror genre which later developed into a psychological horror in which the player is haunted by hallucinations that they can’t pick up on the camera and a vague idea that there would be a girl chasing the player.
