T-20 days!!!

So big meeting this week! Our presentation could have gone better but there was still a lot of modeling and texturing being done right up to the last few hours.  We were told however (pretty starkly) how important it is to focus on having working features placeholder sound effects and complete animations rather than polished textures.  But we know now and I always found the best way to learn is to make mistakes and then be called on them... at least that's what I tell myself to get to sleep at night :p

So today we introduced a Kanban strategy with the help of Sion, on of our tutors :). It was a little scary to see all the features we were hoping to implement in only 20 days but seeing who is doing what is realy useful!! Also it's a great way to predict how much time we have and how much time our tasks are going to take. So below is a picture of the features we are hoping to implement before we broke out the post-its! And the very small line of numbers at the bottom is the tiny amount of time we have to do them all in eek! I'm actually quite confident at the moment that we can get it all done but I'm sure future rob will laugh at my naïveté :) especially since I am moving house at the same time and also planing to work on the up comming UK Game Jam next week yay! Looking forward to completing a project in such a short time! Also gonna work with one of the second years Anna Patricia a rather eccentric Brazillian who comes up with some v cool ideas! So stay tuned!

So my latest task is to tidy up our character model, rig her for our canned animations and to create a custom jump animation.  We had an initial model to work from but despite it being very well built for animation there were quite a few tweaks and rebuilds I had to implement to prepare it for a game environment.  I am pretty happy with the result but have not tackled the hair yet..... I'm sure there will be a couple of posts in the near future documenting my journey to insanity while I try to make the character look good enough :p pictures to follow when I've done some screen grabs :)

Have a random picture of some crazy NFTS students filming dogs playing on the grass! Glad to see we have a bunch of people doing edgy artistic stuff :p

One other highlight of the last few days was introducing Jen to Niddhog! A brilliant 2d fencing combat game... Wish I could say I was the yellow character though :p

So sorry for the lack of interesting photos in this post but don't worry next time I will have some cool textured walls to show off and some cute little mushrooms... that look a little bit more like shells than mushrooms but it's really nice to see a level coming together.

It is a great experience to be working on a computer that can actually handle a completed and textured level :) previously when I was self teaching with Digital Tutors (totally recommend btw) I would always have to give up when the project got up to particle effects or complex texturing as I saw my old desktop grind to a haut when I asked if it could generate 100 smoke particles rather than 10. But seeing my completed level in unity lit well with all it's normal maps etc is a real treat! Really looking forward to having more completed projects under my belt!! And having a level completed with sound and a good looking character!

Yesterday a few of us caught the new Aronofsky movie 'Noah'

..... I can sum it up in one observation, the audience laughed!! when Russell Crowe dramatically walks towards Emma Watson wielding a knife with the intention to murder her new born daughters.  It was by no means a bad movie I just felt since it was directed by Aronofsky I was expecting something more subtle and dark.  There was so much focus on spectacle I think some of the subtleties were very easy to miss. The dream sequences were very powerful and almost felt like they approached some of the visual beauty of "The Fountain."  In my oppinion there was one beautiful scene between Noah's middle son Ham and the main antagonist Tubal. There is a lot of backstory, leading to Ham considering to kill his father, but these two have a great dialogue exploring the side of life where humans are dominant to animals that completely contradicts Noas teachings to his sons.  I felt that dynamic between these two could have carried a whole movie on its own with all the important events from the actual Bible story being background elements framing Ham's internal conflict.  Unfortunatley in the end it recieved very little screen time. Clint Mansells music was great thoigh as always.