My directing and unity portion of my projects is where I feel I've learnt the most this year. While at the beginning of the year I barely understood scripting and hadn't had much experience with a games engine, I have now directed a game project and been an essential part of the unity team. I feel the directing of the game went well - everyone engaged well with the project and accepted feedback and requests to change things to better suit the finish-ability of the game. I managed to arrange deadlines with people, and if I saw people weren't able to meet those deadlines, I would rearrange these deadlines before they past - so that no one was ever 'behind' a deadline, and those waiting on the model/rig knew what the new date for release was going to be. I believe this helped keep the project on track as everyone always had a deadline that was in front of them, not behind!
Within Unity I have found I have a preference for using javascript for coding, and have used javascript to create a GUI interface, many puzzles, and atmospheric effects. I've also learnt a lot about how level building woks within the games industry, and how the terrian editor works. I feel my environments I created were flawed, but a very strong attempt considering my lack of teaching and experience within the subject. While the levels lacked some of the usability of mainstream games, where I feel I excelled was creating the atompshere in the level. Each had there own personality and feel to them, with juxposation between them reinforcing their atompshere.
Dragon
The dragon was the first model I created in the project - importantly as they model needs to be very quickly rigged so that it could be given out to the animators in time for them to complete their animations. I had a week and a half to create the model and unwrap the model, so that I could hand it over to Joe to rig. I feel I completed the base mesh quickly and efficiently, with the mesh coming under 4500polys. I liked the design, and adored getting to texture the feathers and create that sort of feel to him, but I wish I had taken the design further. In the end there was a giant version of the dragon in the level, and while the design worked perfectly for the tiny dragons, it failed to scale up well. I would like to go back to the model and do a 'big daddy' version of the dragon, with more wrinkles and a much older looking face. I would probably make his skin look a bit faded and streched, and possibly have it mid shred of it's skin. I feel that this design works well in a computer game, and was enjoyed by the animators, which I found very rewarded.
Props
I made props for both environments, with a focus on the ambient scenery instead of the character main pieces of an environment. The props I am most pleased with in this block are my trees and the ruins with the optimized ivy. I feel the trees work really well within the level, and the fact I based them on bonsai trees helped give them a lot of character and style which really added to the game. Optimizing the ivy really taught me a lot about game techniques in this project, and I feel these have really aided me as an artist in creating props which are engine safe and quick to produce.
I feel possibly my downfall in this project was creating too many props for the project - I have a lot which are only to an 'alright' level as I had to split my time within all of them, and only ended up with a few props I feel reflect my skill level. I feel my position as director/level builder was one of the aspects which lead me to over creating props, as whenever I saw there was a gap I instinctively went to create a prop to fix it. However, despite this downfall, I feel that this has at least given me the confidence that I can create game assets very quickly if needed which are serviceable, if not great.
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