The Start of a New Game

Three friends and I have started the process of making a game on our free time. We try to meet Monday through Thursdays after school for an hour of two. For the first week we did a lot of brain storming. We wrote many ideas on the white board, seeing what we liked the best. After spending about an hour on taking turns with our game ideas, we decided on an idea we all liked. When we decided on the idea on making a rouge-like game for android devices, it was time to go more in-depth on what the game was going to be. While doing that we also decided what the core mechanics of the game are. 

We did this drawing a bull’s-eye to mark in the center what is important to get done first before we get distracted on working on the non-essential parts of the game.

 I know I have not written in my blog for a long time, but I will plan on writing at least one entry a week.

So for the past 5 weeks, I have been working on a game. I’ve been working with my classmates, so we are a total of 11 people working on this game for our game engine implementation class. This game is called Lycan(https://www.dropbox.com/s/wn2tbejoudwbx1u/Lycan.exe). Lycan is currently being built on the Unity game engine. This is the first time I have been part of a team larger than 4 people and that has made working on this game an interesting experience. So the way the team got split up was 2 people on coding game play, 1 on AI, 1 on networking, 1 on UI, 1 on audio, 2 as level designers, 2 animators and modelers, and me on art. Everyone in the class is a programmer first, so it was different for some of us to not work mainly in the code base.

                As an artist I mainly worked on textures. I actually worked on all the textures in the game. I have some experience with using Photoshop, so I think I was the best candidate to the job. The textures I worked on ranged from tileable textures like wood and the dirt on the ground to the skybox the players see to the texture on the Werewolf and the human player.

                The textures on the players were the most challenging textures to make. Mainly because I need to UV the models. That was very time consuming because I wanted to get the UV just right, in order to make my job of making the texture easier. I also I forgot how to UV a model, so plenty of time of spent on learning from mistakes, but I think I learned how to me a good UVer and I am comfortable doing that job.

                In the end I think I learned a lot on what it means to be in an artist when working on a game. Being an artist is probably a different experience in industry from what I experienced, but I think the principles are similar. Anyway, when I communicate with an artist on my team in the future I’ll have an idea on how to talk to him and know the artist’s point of view.