Weeks 11 - 12: Sprint to the Finish
- Apr 4, 2024
- 2 min read
Summary
For the eleventh and twelfth weeks of development, the team’s focus was on finalizing the second level and building the third, continuing to balance the game, and working on the integration of the cutscenes into the game. These past two weeks have been spent polishing the first two levels and adding more effects and animations to make it a more fully realized game with the final stretch being dedicated to applying all those built before into the final level of the game.
My Contribution
Continuing my duty as the visual artist, most of my contribution during the past two weeks was dedicated to completing the character animations for all the NPCs for gameplay. This involved animating the long-ranged basic enemies of the second level, narrative NPCs, the second-level boss, and the dragon that serves as the final boss of the game. I also remodelled the snowmen NPCs that another teammate had previously created for the very early stages of the game and retextured the first-level boss so that the model could be used as a base-level boss for the second level.
Reflection
Had I written this yesterday I would’ve written that these two weeks had been incredibly satisfying as I finished almost all of what I had to do for the project. Alas due to a flurry of last-minute asset requests I cannot express the same sentiment, though it has been quite eye-opening to see the unexpected waterfalls that can occur during production at unexpected times. One interesting challenge faced in the past two weeks was the discovery of how different export and import settings for 3D models with different rigs need to be. The most obvious example can be seen with the exporting of the dragon which required a lot of trial and error to export due to complications with the added jaw bones to the premade quadruped rig. For a lot of the import attempts, the jaw remained stationary while the head and rest of the body moved creating an incredibly unsettling effect. This was overcome by exporting FBX exporting plugin for Blender that was designed for Unity and changing the rig type in Unity to Legacy rather than generic to remove the unwanted squash and stretch. In the final stretch, I will be dedicating my time to completing the last few character animations for the cutscenes and making the final assets for the third level.
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