There isn’t too much to say overall for this week. The art team is now on play-testing and QA, the programmers are bug fixing and doing their magic, and a few of us are specially assigned to RTM marketing materials.

My specific assignment is to work on our two required videos. In addition to the videos below I am also working on our game’s cover which is still under construction. All in all, the work that I have done for this project will make nice additions to my portfolio. I can’t wait to see the finale’ of all our hard work!

     ​This week was quite an intense blur of work. I feel like the group did an amazing job pulling together to get all the art and other assets into the source control on time. What we didn’t anticipate was just how tedious it would be to sew all the pieces together into a start to finish experience. There was some miscommunication between design and programming regarding the tutorial level. Somehow programming didn’t even know of its existence? It was quite an ordeal considering there had been continued, open discussions throughout SLACK including pictured updates of it being modeled and textured as well as discussions about voice actor dialogue for it. Either way, all the content that was the tutorial was ready and fully completed; it just needed to be programmed in. Once Austin got started, it was implemented in no time.  

​     On an odd side note, our source control ended up being something we really had to fight with when it came time to make the final build for the Alpha deadline. Unreal was trying to package everything that was even remotely tied to member’s test levels. So essentially it was trying to build our entire source control into the package. What we ended up having to do, was duplicate a version of our work-space that only had the essential things we needed. It’s easier said than done when you have to weed through 15 gigs of stuff. It all worked out in the end and we have learned another Unreal idiosyncrasy.

Not much to elaborate on this week. We have all been on autopilot. One more week till our Alpha is due. All Systems Go!

​The final procedural music track for the game is up too. This means I only have the title screen music left to complete!

​This post comes in a little late do to the holiday but quite a lot of progress was made on the opening cinematic. Along with the cinematic I was also able to complete another procedural track for the Tutorial area of the map. 

​The cinematic I’ve been working on has several steps in its process. The style is 2D are with a comic book flare. It is largely done in grey-scale with pops of a single color. I wanted any of the environment showed in a scene to have solid perspective and realistic shadows casting. I figured out a great way to pull this off as well as cut down on drawing everything in a scene. Below is the listed process.