Weeks 7-8: Level 1 Asset Making
- Mar 7, 2024
- 2 min read
Summary
The seventh and eighth weeks of development were spent revising the game from the first playable, refining other elements of the game. This includes creating a more concrete map for level one, finalizing the number of NPCs required for the game, building more systems to be used in the game, and creating the necessary assets. As such these weeks were spent more refining and building individual parts and slowly combining them into a playable first level.
Individual Contribution
As the visual artist of my group, most of my work in these few weeks was creating assets for the first level. The first assets I created were a set of environmental assets that were required to be completed first so that the level designer could start blocking out the map. These assets included a set of six trees, four different houses, a fence, chests, four rocks and a tiled stone wall texture that can be used on any surface on the map. In addition to the environmental assets, I also modelled and textured the enemies of the first level, as well as rigging and beginning animation on the player. Aside from working in 3D I also worked on a set of icons to be used to represent the various snowman skills that the player will accumulate during the playthrough.
Reflection
The last few weeks of this project have reminded me of how tedious this process of building assets can sometimes be. I underestimated some of the pains and the time required to rig individual characters even with Blender’s rigging addon with adjustable premade rigs. A challenge that I am still trying to find the right answer to is how to deal with character cloth and capes in the transition from Blender to Unity. The current setup is that the capes have a rig that reacts to the movement of the character with wiggle physics on it to simulate the secondary motion. However, there are a multitude of other solutions that might be better suited for the transition including using Unity’s cloth physics. Regardless, some trial and error will be necessary in the upcoming weeks to test this theory.
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