My group has started the production phase of Unreality, which is the title of our team game project. As the main 3D artist, I've been busy this week working with my teammates to design an environment. This week, I've focused on getting prefabs ready for placement in a scene and adding detail to parts of the game. I used free premade assets from the Unity Asset Store that I found on the Asset Research project during the pre-production phase in addition to newly found ones as well as making and customizing a few of my own. The main programmer, the main writer, and I divided some things that needed doing into roles for each other. The programmer began work on the terrain, the writer created a basic map for Unreality, and I was responsible for making the individual parts of the game. This incredibly vague category includes making cabin assets, vans, and abandoned structures to fulfill the apocalyptic mood of Unreality. I made my own prefabs through modular design, bringing together premade assets to sculpt original creations. Working with 2D artists, I made sure the textures of every object were optimal for our game. Now that I've outlined what I have done, I'll go through this week's plans. As the team leader of Butter Cow Games, I've made a meeting plan for this week's team meeting. I will give recommendations for what to work on for every team member, listening and taking into account their plans as well. I will focus on using 3DS Max to make items for Unreality. Hopefully, I'll get re-accustomed to the program fairly quickly and I won't have too many problems. I didn't run into many setbacks on the previous week's work, but I did experience a couple. Some file types of textures were hard to work with. I received error messages when importing from the Unity Asset Store. I fixed the file type issue through online resources to convert to a different type of file. I resolved the Unity errors through modifying the imported assets. But what about the team as a whole? What have we accomplished? Our greatest accomplishment this week as a team is a basic outline. We know what the game map is going to look like. We know the overall aesthetic of the game. We know that, although we're far from finished, that we have an idea of what Unreality will be - and that it's not an unrealistic vision. Using modular design to create a prefab from a Unity Asset Store free asset
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The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea that thrived for hundreds of years. That is, until it went extinct last century (probably, there's a decent chance small populations still exist, but for the sake of this metaphor, let's ignore that). 3DS Max might be the next thylacine: a unique, interesting thing wiped out by humans. However, 3DS Max won't be incidentally hunted to extinction. It will be destroyed intentionally.
Why would Autodesk want to discontinue 3DS Max? There are actually some good reasons. Autodesk is the parent company of Maya, another 3D modeling program that I've used. Unlike its sister software, though, Maya can run on operating systems other than Windows. This makes it possible for Mac and Linux users to run it without building a virtual machine or switching operating systems. 3DS Max simply can't gain a wider demographic due to its limited availability for different types of computers. Additionally, the age of the program makes it harder to update than Maya, which has a staff that knows the software better. Lastly, it doesn't make a lot of sense for one company to have two 3D modeling programs - especially when one is more available than the other. Is there any merit to the rumors of discontinuance, though? It seems so. Autodesk has already announced that they are discontinuing the 3DS Max Asset Library. Autodesk got rid of Softimage in 2014. However, 3DS Max still has an active and large community which is full of workers who won't be willing to give up on the software they have trained and made a living on. That being said, as Maya becomes the industry standard, I wouldn't be surprised to see 3DS Max going extinct in the near future. Summary
With the making this year's PBM finally behind me, I'd like to reflect on some of the experiences which my classmates and I went through. I've heard lots of insults thrown at the Unity Game Engine, which we used to create educational parkour games for our 2021-22 AGAD Proof of Learning.
"Unity is literally the worst application ever made." A classmate of mine confessed this strongly opinionated statement very recently. I took a moment to think about it and I eventually realized his perspective. Bugs in games, tiny errors in scripts that are hard to fix, weird issues that seem unsolvable, and an aura of frustration are some of the things that the Unity Game Engine has given my class the past couple months. I've experienced my fair share of difficulties. I had terrible issues with my respawn script, I had lighting bugs in my published game, I had problems switching scenes from my main menu, and more. However, I appreciated that Unity Game Engine allowed me the freedom to solve these problems through consulting Unity Forums, examining the Project Settings, or by engineering my own solution through Unity's basic yet useful 3D modeling interface. Every major issue I had I could either circumvent by doing something differently or solve. Was it frustrating? Yes. Is frustration present in all game engines sometimes? How could it not be? Perhaps the best thing Unity offers is the Unity Asset Store, which I've used to find wonderful free assets to upgrade my games and add to the environment. For my upcoming team game, I already have many prefabs from the Asset Store lined up. Although Unity isn't a perfect piece of software, I can look beyond my frustration with certain issues and see it for what it really is: a powerful tool to create games. A flawed tool, but still one with limitless potential that I'm excited to explore more of. Summary
I've gotten to a working edition of the Parkour Games - the big project I've been ranting about on this page - but I'm far from finished. There are still missing features that I can't wait to add.
First, let's examine the respawn system. It has given me trouble for a while. Initially, it was especially troublesome with triggers and colliders and teleporting the trigger to a checkpoint instead of the player. I worked around the respawn issue by creating a level underneath the caves with arrows serving as signifiers to direct the player back to a starting point. However, I still want to do work on the respawn system, whether that means improving what I currently have or revamping my original idea to work more consistently. Although it would be nice to change the respawning mechanics, the most important thing to change is definitely the controls. I began development of the Parkour Games with a third person perspective in mind. However, during my process of simplifying the educational aspect, I switched to a first person view. I didn't change scripts or assets, though, I just swapped my player object with a camera object. I'd like to implement the built-in FPS controller into my game to have a more manageable movement and view panning system. Now, it's time to go over my level ideas. Right now, there are only the desert and tundra levels, but I'd like to add more. The forest and grasslands levels would be perfect additions, along with a final boss of sorts (i.e. a quiz on what biomes look like to polish off the educational aspect of Parkour Games). Hopefully, these additions coming soon will really help my game feel complete. Summary
A parkour game. Possible. An educational parkour game. Also possible. An educational parkour game geared towards kindergarten through 2nd grade? Maybe possible? Let's take a look at what I've managed to do this week about educating young children through parkour.
The educational aspect of my parkour game has evolved greatly since my prototype was published earlier this week. I changed many things, which I'll outline here. The most obvious change is certainly the shift away from countries. Initially, Parkour Games revolved around different countries competing to be the best at parkour. The player could select a country at the beginning of the game and have a third person look at a representation of the country to play as. That's been scrapped. I've changed the focus of the educational aspect from a scrambled, disjointed, fifth or sixth grade geography lesson to a basic biome activity. I also removed the continent screen from the instruction screens, as it was no longer necessary for my new focus. I changed the biome map from the falling instructions from a complicated, fourteen-biome mashup to a simple four biome image that's much easier for young kids to digest. It's a shame to see the country and continent stuff gone from my game - especially because I spent a lot of time creating textures, programming, and debugging features revolving around them - but it's definitely worth it. Taking into account my target audience and rethinking certain design decisions has led to a great outcome. Now, thanks to my adjustments, Parkour Games is a much simpler parkour game which I'm proud of. Summary
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AuthorHI! I'm a 12th grader and on this page, I will blog about me and what I'm going through, both in Game Design class and in life. There are a mix of required blog posts and personal reflections, which you can sort, among other things, below the disclaimer and archives. DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
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