This week was one that I thought would be pretty quick and easy, but of course, I was wrong. We only have a few more assets needed (maybe 6?) so I modeled and textured two of them very simply at the beginning of this week: the bookshelf and teacher desk. They're both low poly and I used a free to use texture that doesn't require attribution, so it was a very quick process. However, one of the other objects needed was a potted tree for the atrium. Julia modeled this and it looks fantastic! BUT it is 20,000 polys... so I'm back to simplifying, baby! I've been taken advantage of the feature that allows me to merge overlapping vertices. However, the trees still have quite a few polys, so I could see this taking me up to two weeks depending on how willing I am to sacrifice the quality of the tree. Once I get that done though, Julia should be done with the downstairs of the building and all of the 3D Modeling should be (for the most part) done. We're getting so close, and I'm really excited to have a finished game. I feel like we're going to succeed (don't worry I knocked on wood...), which is always a good feeling. Goals For Next Week:
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If you look at my art page on instagram, it's clear that I go through periods of doing a lot of traditional art and then a lot of digital art, but they aren't really interspersed anymore. Lately I've been starting to more towards a lot more digital art for a couple of reasons.
This is sort of just a reflection on my recent art, and a throwback to an old blog post I made a while back, with a slight variance. This week has been extremely busy, mostly because of my involvement with theatre, so I only have a very small amount of time for art, which means I either have to make slow progress, or...
I can make fast art! This simply means focusing on hitting deadlines is a higher priority than quality (though, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to throw quality out of the window). Doing this wasn't actually planned on my part, instead, I had deadlines approach much faster than I had anticipated and was forced to work this way if I valued my sanity. However, this also meant that I have produced 6 gif animations and another digital art piece in the past 3 days or so, most of them being very busy days as well. Sure, they aren't perfect, but I hit the deadlines I needed to hit, and I actually learned a lot about how I work/ what I need to improve on. For instance, the unanimated piece of art showed me that I'm better at lineart than I thought, but also am still struggling with making distinct shading. The gifs proved to me that animation, while it can be a lengthy and arduous process, can happen even in short bursts of productivity, and thus, even if I don't have much time, having even a little time means that I can work towards larger artistic goals. For the rest of the school year, I want to try to do more fast art, this time with self-imposed deadlines in order to improve faster. As I talked about in the blog post linked above, I strongly believe that not being so meticulous and just getting in a ton of practice definitely helps me improve more quickly. Below are two of the gifs I made. There are lots of aspects of both that could be HUGELY improved, but they provided me practice in animation, and allowed me to see what I need to work on in the future. This week, I got the chairs simplified and textured, made some weird fish art, and then spent some time making textures for posters that would go around the school. I personally think that the chairs look pretty good, even if they aren't so real to life. I decided low poly count was more important than realism in this particular case, so that's what I did. I still need to send them over to Ryan via flash drive though, but since I'm writing this in class, I may still get that done today. The fish art is a model made to resemble an art project that is done at our school a lot. I also made these goofy posters to go around the school, with messages that fall under the category of "ominous positivity." I may remake the dog and chicken one, because both of those images do require attribution and it may be better to use images that do not. However, at the same time, this game is never leaving this room, so if they aren't attributed in a game that was made strictly for our own education, well, I don't think it's as unethical. I will definitely attribute them here though.
This week, I was sick, so I wasn't the most productive game designer this week. However, I did get a few things done! First, I got the stairs textured, so they can go into the game now. We were having a problem with getting assets to Ryan's computer (the computer our game is on) because for some reason, the computer no longer allows him to access google drive. Luckily, Mr. B fixed that pretty quickly by giving us a flash drive (thanks Mr. B :)). Finally, I was reminded that the chairs I made last year were very high poly and lagged out the game. I loaded up the file again, and it had Seven. Thousand. Polys. The unsimplified chicken had about half that many! So, I started simplifying away. I didn't quite get finished, but I'm sure I will be able to get it done by the beginning of this week. Most of the simplifying so far has just involved replacing spheres with cubes that are spherified and reducing the sides on cylinders. So far I've about halved the poly count, but I'm hoping to get it even smaller if these chairs are going to go in the game. Goals For This Week:
My UVW mapping skills have come in handy in texturing the stairs that Julia made!
That pretty much sums up my work this week, texturing stairs. I did also get the two items I made last week put into a unity package so that they can easily be added to the game, but that's a little less fun. This work week was a little shorter because of a guest speaker, and because I took some of the time to help Ryan with testing new player movement techniques so that we could find one that was less likely to make players sick than what we originally had. Overall, it felt like a pretty productive week though! This week was fun, I got to 3D model two inside jokes from our game design class! It was good practice with UVW unwrapping, and while I am still finishing the second one, it feels like this was one of the most productive weeks of the year just because of how much I got done. The first joke, I already made a post about because I started it last week, was Beats by Broke. It's a joke about the crappy headphones that Mr. B has to lend out to students who forget their own. The second is "why do we yellow banana?" a throwback to an exam question that made no sense to anyone. On a more relevant note, I also managed to model a simple bookshelf, so once I texture that, that can go in some of the classrooms (it has less polys than the banana, which is only about 150 polys, so it should be low lag). We also had some people from Microsoft along with a former NFL player come to visit on Friday to see what we were working on, and to talk to Mr. B about what the classes were like. Goals For Next Week:
I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for almost 5 years now, a few times as a player, but recently only as a Dungeon Master. Since 8th grade when I started playing, it's always been a big part of my life, from being the way I connected with my friends outside of school, to the being the club I go to every other Tuesday, to being a key component in a podcast that means the world to me, to again connecting me with friends. It's helped me develop closer relationships with people, improved my improvising and leadership skills, and has just been really fun. It's also very closely related to game design since it is a game where you get to do a lot of the designing, so I'm going to talk about some things that I've learned from the game. This is the first post, but I hope to make more.
This first lesson is "Who's Playing?" or in other words: Audience is EVERYTHING. Ok so this one might be because I'm a weak little man without a backbone (aka a doormat, a pushover, what have you) but truly, the players that you have can really change the game. A stricter DM may not experience this at all if they try not to be flexible to fit their players needs, but I certainly try (maybe too hard) to be accommodating to the players and the story that they want, so my games do change depending on who is playing them. I especially have been able to see this through running the same (or a similar) campaign twice with two different groups: one composed of my close friends, and the other at tabletop club. My group of close friends are much less combat-oriented than the tabletop group (possibly because they know that I hate running combat) and are more likely to explore and investigate, and MUCH more likely to talk at length with NPCs to ask about what's going on. At tabletop club, intimidation is the name of the game with NPCs, who are often ignored, and no questions are asked as they rush into potentially dangerous areas. This past Tuesday at tabletop was the smoothest combat that I've ever run, and that's because these players are really into it. All (except maybe one) were constantly paying attention to what was going on, and so it moved very quickly. Usually, combat drags on forever and doesn't feel so consequential, but here, they were using high level spells to stay alive, and while some of this can be attributed to me improving as a DM, I also really believe that it's because of who my players were. It's a little bit like how if you throw someone who is bad a videogames into a racing game, they're not going to be able to go very fast - similarly, my friends, who are catching up after being months apart, aren't very good at focusing in on combat. In contrast, the tabletop kids are like pro racers, they have more knowledge of the Official D&D rules than I do, so once their turn rolls around, I don't even have to tell them that it's their turn: they already have their entire move planned and ready to go without any prompting from me. This leads to very different combat scenarios, the first feeling tedious, and the second being a core component of gameplay. I'm not trying to say that the tabletop group's way of playing is better though, I actually typically prefer the way my friends play, as is outlined by the tavern scene. I had set up a tavern with 6 different NPCs who would supply different plot threads so that the players could have a bit of choice in what kind of game they wanted to play (I would develop the overarching storyline based on who they chose to do a quest for). With the tabletop group, after talking to the first guy, they rushed to get a horse and carriage and got outta there! (they went to complete his quest). My group of friends however talked to 4 of the NPCs (we ran out of time in the session to talk to more) and they had a nice scene where they deliberated which quest to follow. It allowed for some good character development, and set them on a path to a quest that they were all interested in. There's nothing wrong with impulsively rushing in, but I personally appreciate careful deliberation as well. Overall, I'm trying to say players choose which direction the story is heading, but also affect the energy of each encounter as well. There's no style of play that is inherently bad, but there may be a style of play that's a better fit for the game you are creating, so you need to take into account who is going to be playing, how they play, and if you can work with that. It's exactly the same with all game designing. If you want to make an FPS, your players are probably not going to appreciate long, unskippable cutscenes, unless you are specifically advertising to an audience that likes both FPS and narrative heavy games. Knowing what kind of game you run, and who your target audience is can really help solidify what challenges and features you create for the game you are making. I don't know when this happened (or it may have just always been there but I never noticed) but Weebly now has an Alt Text feature that allows you to easily write image descriptions on any images on your website! This is very cool, for a couple of reasons.
The first, less important reason, is that if your alt text contains keywords, your image may be found by these keywords, but the normal description doesn't have to include them. It could help images or entire websites get a little bit more exposure. However, what's even better is the second reason: accessibility. Alt text will be read by screen readers, so people who are blind or have any sight problems who use screen readers (programs that will read online text to them) can also understand what is going on in the image. This is something that a lot of people never even think about when creating content, so I am very glad that weebly has brought this technology to an easy to edit place on images (the same place you would click in order to write a regular caption). I learned a lot about this as I've been doing fan art for a podcast, because as a completely auditory medium, there's more hard of seeing people in the audience since it is a media form that is more accessible to them, and so many people in the community have been encouraging more image descriptions. There are people who aren't completely blind who can definitely enjoy visual art, but may just need a little bit of extra description in order to figure out what they're looking at. For instance, telling someone who sees a blob in the middle of the screen, "hey, that's a face!" might clarify it enough for them to be able to see the face you drew, much like how when we look at clouds, if someone suggests what the cloud looks like, it becomes much easier to see. If you include an important image or diagram that is crucial to understanding a blog post, an image description means that there is a better chance that people who have trouble seeing can still follow. It's also helpful if you took a screenshot of some text to transcribe it to alt text, because a screen reader wouldn't be able to read that. Personally, I think, from both a business and humanitarian standpoint, the more people who can enjoy your content, the better, so even if this feature would only help a few people, it's still very worth it to use. Of course, it is a bit more work, but image descriptions should be less than 125 words (this is so that people with screen readers don't have to sit there for a long time as each image is being described) so it shouldn't actually take that long, and it's a really great thing to do. This week was more UVW editing! I didn't get too much done, but I started modeling some "Beats by Broke" headphones as a little inside joke for the game. I started off by doing traditional UVW mapping since it's not terrible, but I ended up having a lot of problems lining up the letters. I downloaded the Lazy UVW mapper that Mr. B suggested, but when I gave it a first try, I just gave me the same issue that photoshop does when you don't unwrap at all. I don't know if this error was because of the complexity of the object or what, but I'm going to figure it out on Monday, and if I can't I'll go back to the old method of UVW mapping. Goals for Next Week:
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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