Abertay University – Freshers and my introduction into University life.

So I arrived in Dundee on the 1st September, feeling a slight sense of excitement and overwhelming; mostly because I have no idea what I’m jumping into, furthermore who the hell I will be spending a year within the accommodation I have chosen.

That being said, I took the time to check the group chat we have on facebook chats (Abertay Freshers / 2018 CG) to figure out all of the faces that I could possibly come across.

So getting into Dundee, I had to get the keys for the flat and this meant going into the University library. Walks in and immediately found I have not done my safety induction (Fire Safety) for the flat…

I did it with much patience…

Then, someone passed me. And with looking through the social media chats earlier I realised who it was straight away. This person was called Brogan. Short blonde hair a sparkle in her eyes and a very bright personality. We introduce and both start talking; funny that she had no idea who I was until I said my name and the face of realisation was amazingly funny.

Later after that delightful meeting: Myself, my grandfather and uncle made our ways to where I would be living for the remainder of that year. Only to realize that Brogan the girl I met earlier that day was my neighbour. This revelation was a relief to have a friendly face on the first day living alone soo far from home.

After my family left, I took the time to get chilled in my flat…

But no… No no no

I had to get a few people around and have a few drinks to celebrate.

Anyway, back to the university. I’ll get to freshers later; I spent time getting to know what my course modules would be and they consist of:

Game Art – Kayleigh

Fundamentals of Programming – Hadi

Exploring game concepts – Euan

Out of all of them I was mostly looking forward to doing the programming segment since I found it a real challenge to adapt to in college. I also had to study math in Sunderland College so this was the best opportunity I had to use knowledge already gained. Now that is no longer the issue, lets say I have free rein over what I study and how much I study.

Moving onto my first ever university freshers week, I wasn’t expecting much and thankfully so. I dare say that it was the most eye opening experience I have had in a long time. Making my way to the freshers fair. A place where you have every opportunity to make friends or find a new hobby, one that you may not consider yourself a part of. I thought that maybe music could be an option since I never properly learned any instrument. Looking back, I ponder how many societies I joined and most of them never got attended because time keeping was not something I particularly excel at.

Moving on to the following nights, mostly a blur filled with drinking, partying and getting to know more people from my course. I’d say it was a good week of ‘Networking’. However, I did grow to enjoy the university lifestyle however there were still a few creases to iron out when it came to exploring new cultures and ways of living.

My time at insomnia 62 – Day Two

It has now been two days since I came back from Insomnia and have finally materialised the events spanning over the weekend.

Still feeling the gaming vibe!

On the first day we got there at around 12PM, drained from travelling but looking forward to seeing the others at the next gen booth. When we turned into the booth, it was hectic; filled to the rim with people of all ages and backgrounds. Kids playing student made games, also coming to be taught about how to make these games and adults come to be taught about the more technical side of games design alongside how the course itself develops you as a person and as a professional.

Before I continue, I will say that besides all of the cool things that took place in the festival. It was by far the best experience of my life sharing it with some of the best lads in my company

Ryan, Max, Robert, Nick + Alex Thursby. Couldn’t ask for any group better, better yet we all learnt from each other considering we all had different skill sets and obviously with our enthusiasm for our work. We would do ourselves and the course justice.

Over the duration of each day, we came to the sudden realisation that it was not just the course and ourselves getting public attention but a game called ‘Coob Jools’?

If I’m pronouncing that name right?

It was a basic 2D platform shoot em up game with a party including 2-4 players. You’re dropped into a small arena with other player in order to survive, the simplicity of the game was enough to kill a few hours for those who needed away from the hustle and bustle of the expo and this sky rocketed into the limelight and the funny thing is. Us in the Next-Gen group also fell into the addiction of the game not just the people we were talking to.

NEW WEBSITE

Now entering my final year of university. I have taken the decision to move all blogging or project updates to a new website. One that has been in the works for a few years. Only now have I taken the time to bridge the gap between my years at college and University.

To those who have followed this blog and suffered my awful grammar. I shall leave a link here where you can find my portfolio and other interesting pages. I hope with better grammar.

Thank you for following me on this adventure! However, this is but a mere milestone. We move onto larger worlds, that being Abertay University.

See you there!

WEBSITE LINK: http://adamwhite1998.myportfolio.com/

What now? The long road to making cool things.

Now I have finished college , I ask myself “what to do?” new projects maybe, trying to expand onto other fields such as programming in C#, Java or even c++ given the recent trend in those other languages popularities.

So after the recent synoptic project, it has come to my attention that now I have some free time on my hands; it also presents the best opportunity to dive deep into the programming world and I have a few recourses I can choose from such as the Unity Q&A Forums, Brackeys (YouTube) and also GamesplusJames (Also YouTube). With all that together, I can create some cool effects and also learn the basics of programming during now till September when I hope to go to University. That been said I do have other things going on in my life … I can’t be stuck behind a keyboard for ever I’ll go mad.

Finishing year blog.

And here we are… Finished. Done. Cheerio.

And now is my time to show what I have learned or even taken from this course over the course (no pun intended) of 2 years.

Lets start with the beginning, coming into next-gen; happy, confident and enthusiastic to get my hands on what scrap of knowledge I could. I have done things from be part of a nationwide competition for 3D modelling, made things that I didn’t think I could do … ever and by this I mean create menus and creating VFX for games; motion graphics and making human faces and the odd body.

 

So yeah.

From the beginning of the year, I have found that my interests have shifted from doing games design to more of a film based environment… yes it’s late but never too late to find something new.

And there are two reason for this. One being that the placement from January to May really opened my eyes in what I can do in regards to moving from one field of creativity to another. Another reason is the intro animation of my portfolio (Link will be somewhere in here) the time it took to complete the whole sequence I pretty much learned both the shortcut keys and the many different effects to thus make my workflow faster. Now I barely even look at the keyboard for shortcuts.

 

 

So over after all that good stuff with the placement, I came back to finish with the synoptic project and that was also an eye opener but seeing that we had our imagined worlds prior to that in 2017, there were some familiarity to what we had to do such as the pre-production, theory, planning, documentation… all that fine exciting stuff.

Then we came to actually make the game and as per usual there were some both major and minor bumps along the way such as team members changing roles from time to time. Changing ideas, throwing away, making new methods etc.

but we grind ed throughout the majority of our problems and came out with a solid start, middle and ending to our game alongside some special stuff which I kinda wanted to include myself. That basically is stating I made the entirety of the finishing screen and personally I love it but there could be some things to improve upon in terms of animation… and that’s another thing I have to cover. Animation.

 

 

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I love Maya and 3D modeling as much as my peers on the course but I can only do animation on a node based system A.k.a “I can only animate on unity”.

I’ts because I understand the majority of the workflow used for Maya animations, I just can’t seem to get around both paint weights and IK handles (Still don’t know what they are) that being said I want to dedicate some time into both animation and programming before I hopefully set sail to university come September.

I would finally like to write this paragraph as an overall statement to thank the staff of next gen, Three Motion UK ‘Including the dogs’ and my friends who I have spent 3 years with doing this course as without them I wouldn’t be here now doing what I do now. It’s just a question of where I will be in the next 5 years and we will have to find out.

Synoptic Progress: Finishing touches

Final week & the final push for the product this coming week. Our deadline comes Friday the 25th. So therefore everything has to be finished, assembled & tested before the final build.

So for now we have a stable version with a beginning and an end but there is one vital component that is missing but we can not go any further with it until the animation is fixed for the Venus fly trap plant within Maya. This could simply be an import issue or something else; regardless, it has to be sorted out by the day after publishing this post.

Fixed Animation

 

Furthermore, whilst waiting for the animation to be fixed from our guy Alex, myself, Amy and Nick worked on the presentation for the coming exhibition. That meant putting together a PowerPoint presentation showing off all of our work, this was placed for Amy to do. Nick is working on other ways to present the game, and I was working on the poster design and possibly print of a poster to show off where we where and what we worked on. And surprisingly, I learned the majority of Adobe illustrator throughout designing the poster itself. Anyway, back to the game…

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Like I have said, we have the majority done with some polishing to do on other small assets. I have managed to sort out the combination code with some help from a tutor and he explained to me how he had done it although it was proving a challenge for both of us so I could completely understand why I couldn’t get to grips with it at first. Then there was the ending room with something to trigger the finishing screen.

So what I did was create a narrow corridor with the goal in sight, so the player can simply walk up to the goal and finish the game. I also took the idea to tear away the ceiling for the parkour room and make it look like the roof had caved through.

 

My only concern now is adding music to the game because it has always bugged me (no pun intended) that there is no sensory input for the player to take away from the game. When I say this I mean the human senses, for gaming it’s mostly the obvious ‘Sight & Sound’. So at least having those included into the game would be a big booster.

Synoptic Progress.

We are coming to the end game of our projects and its safe to say that there is a more visual ending in sight.

By this I simply mean that its safe to say that there will be something by the end of the project and MVP can be shown by deadline. I have struggled a lot since the beginning trying to prioritize my coursework, placement & other personal projects all ready for the end of year.

Now I’m going to try and push myself to learn programming to thus understand not just how it works but also how to structure code in the future.

Visual the game is coming together a more assets are pushed through, I have also contributed into making other graphics and fixing some, there have been instances where some of the maps were not working, thus I went onto Photoshop and added the characteristics needed such as extra lighting on brighter colors or the need to add more white to an alpha map.

Speaking of which, this also was shown to be really handy when it came to creating emission maps although this time I used after effects to give the glow a more revealing effect then adding a drawn over effect so therefore the player can realize that the effect is active and working as it should be.

This was then taken into account, so I then moved onto using the emission maps in programming, So firstly with the help of one of my tutors. There was two scripts created; one for the door and one for each button so therefore the player can open the door via a key-code.

Speaking of which, the key-code would be shown on a tablet placed on the far back corner of the room which would have to be traversed by the player, read, and then the player would follow the code shown in chronological order.

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Feedback on progress.

We’re in the midst of the 6th week at the moment and personally, I’m really struggling to keep up with the change of ideas for different assets and the spawn of new ideas.

I have found that communications have slightly gone adrift as I find myself coming to the conclusion that the entire team including myself find it hard to come from realistic textures, art etc.

So to change this, I have taken the time to do some R&D on stylized textures; taking inspiration from games such as Overwatch, paladins, Disney Infinity,  Pixar and so on. What software to use and most importantly, how to make a pipeline for this within a couple of days.

Feedback specifically states:

You are behind – some task have taken longer, people are putting extra work in to catch up and sacrifices may be made.

From this I was thinking, the MVP may not be even a solid outcome if we don’t pull out and crack on with creating assets asap. Yet again, this makes me extremely worried since were nearly halfway through the project and still going through block outs and touching on code.

Above is the burn down chart currently being recorded from week 5 which I will update on Friday 16th, I update at the end of every week so I have a summary of what people have done alongside following the asset sheet with completed days.

For me to contribute more to the project, I’m going to need to research extra code. Block out the puzzles to thus make them activate the other doors. Recycle code in order to expand the challenge alongside easing the player into the game.

Granted the game looks good in blocking but only if we all can solidify the art style of the game entirely alongside myself putting more time into programming, then personally I can see a good product being made in these next few weeks.

 

Synoptic Project: Something visually new for gameplay.

I have tried to make gameplay easier for a player to follow; To do this I could do many things environmentally.

Light leading, sound, linear design, breadcrumb method (I’ll get to that later) etc.

But instead I wanted to try something new and introduce myself to the world of video effects in unity. So I went about researching how to play videos in unity as maybe a transparent floating icon to help the player understand the mechanics visually.

So I went about creating the icons first and foremost, it came in many different forms but I settled mostly around this design with a few tweaks.

Synoptic: Filling out the tutorial room.

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It’s coming to the end of week 5 and we’re now in full control of our slippery slide from last week. With the burn down chart completed and updated, development can now go into full swing; lets start with Unity and all of its bits and bob’s.

Firstly, we now have a working mechanic that opens the door when the button comes on collision with another object such as a ball (that was actually set specifically). This was used by the animator window which I’m yet to understand as I needed some assistance coming into this entirely new tool.

It works by having an animation made to a specific object then, placing it within the animator depending on when you want said animation to occur or what you want it to be played in connection with or have connections for that matter.

Animator showing open and closed states

I then proceeded to start the code with the help of the tutor as I had no idea how to link the animator and a C# script together. And this was the final outcome…

Pressure activated door.