BA2B - New Project - Week 1

The new course project came around, we have 8 weeks to develop a fully working game with a minimum of 1 working level, fully textured and at least 3 working main mechanics of the game. A team of 6 is required so specialisms can be adjusted for. This was great news to me as it can allow for me to be able to further my specialism in both 3D and high res texturing, the reason I say high resolution texturing is because it is something that I've wanted to do since using designer at the beginning of the year. This project required quite a lot of respective traits, one team leader, a Trello board (Of all progress) and to form a team. I chose to go less friendly on this project as previously on game-jams I maintained staying with friends. As for this project I wished to take it with a pinch of salt and grab the best designers/developers I knew from the course. Putting myself firmly as team leader I grabbed 1 concept artist/3D character artist, 2 UE4 developers, 1 3D asset creationist and then 1 overall artist for both level design and environment design (who has both a understanding of UE4 and 3D well). I then assigned myself to prop creation and texture artist for the prime amount of the project, this being said the roles aren't restricted and we flow well as a team to create what is needed with the help of each other (knowing this is how the team works through experience working with them previously).

Once we had the team assembled within seconds knowing we'd all like to work together we then started the concepts of what our games will be through team meetings (unrecorded first meeting but the rest are recorded). The first 3 days we set out just getting the ideas we wanted down and then from there collaborating and thinking of mechanics that will help our ideas. We noted all this down in our Google drive documents. As the team leader I setup exactly what was needed from everyone and gave them a expected date on which I wanted it all completed by. Using time management is something I need to work on so I thought this project will be exactly what I could do to correct this. The image shown below is most of our concepts from art styles to mechanics to the base story we generated. Once we had this understanding of what we needed to do we setup a Trello and got to work on everything basic that we know we was going to need. The speed this team works at is something that was new to me as everyone knew what to do and how to do it so we were ready to start development almost immediately. I'll let the game speak for itself rather than writing most of what we want here, the main mechanics is stealth based, the art style is part realism and the concept behind the game is someone sneaking around a cathedral avoiding people using light levels.



That is a basic understanding, now for the part I've been waiting for. Texture designing realism is something I've been wanting to do for a while. Keeping it efficient is something I'll have to learn for this project because of the resolutions of things being quiet costly in terms of video memory. Instead of using the texture height maps to create a level of detail we will be using geometry to keep the usage down. Saying this I will still create some textures with a height map in mind in case we can't figure out the geometry. I started immediately on certain textures knowing it was what we needed such as bricks, moss and more. Shown below are some examples.



The team leader role has come into play already, setting up team meetings, Trello, presentations and making sure everyone is on track.

Completed this week from me:

• Team leader role
• Trello update
• Presentation ready for weekly update
• Discord setup
• Basic textures made
• Concepts and ideas put down
• Team concepts in google drive
• Documented art styles
• Team reassurance (Making sure everyone was happy)
• Team trello updates
• Team presentation updates
• Team meeting 1
• Readying everyone for week 2