Post Mortem for 2023-2024

Projects -

Heroes of Paligon

Overview:

A VR, tabletop, action RPG where each player controls a pawn on a board during one phase, then goes into first person of the pawn and fights monsters in the next phase. The art style was minimalistic and low poly in a high-fantasy setting.

Roles:

Lead designer, VFX, 3D artist/animator

Timeline: Aug 2023 - Dec 2023

Published?: No

Personal Success: 7/10

During this project, I was able to make major strides in developing my 3d art and vfx skills. Some of my most notable accomplishments were my stylized water material that simulated waves and ripples and my first rigged 3d model for the game's bear enemy. This was my first taste in getting truly familiar and comfortable with blender, so I think individually this project was a success.

Additionally, my design work was pretty thourough, and I learned about scaling power as the game progresses. However, I think my design scope was too much fo rthe team with our size and timeline, and I had difficulty balancing between design and art work.

Project Success: 1/10

Unfortunately, despite my individual development, the team was not progressing well to produce a playable demo. The biggest roadblock I noticed was a lack of experience from the coders to work in VR, and an inexperienced 3d art team led to our 3d assets being slow to develop. Both the artists and coders became highly disengaged in the project, so I decided that having someone else as project manager full time would make future projects more successful and organized.

Warren Tech Golden Arcade

Overview:

Warren Tech Golden Arcade is a game consisting of a bunch of microgames that represent Warren Tech's many different programs.

Roles:

Lead Designer

Timeline: 1 Week in October 2023

Published?: Yes

Personal Success: 4/10

Personally, I had success designing the simple games to represent game dev, graphic design, and audio production. I also used procreate to help the designs become more realized.

Project Success: 1/10

The biggest failure from this project was that nobody in the end was able to incorporate all of the different games into one series, so there were only two games in the final build.

This Side Down

Overview:

This side down is a 2d co-op puzzle platformer where you play as a blob and have to move your arm around to flip boxes into the proper loading zone

Roles:

Project lead, Music, VFX, Co-Lead Designer

Timeline: Nov 13 - Nov 30, 2023

Published?: Yes

Personal Success: 8/10

This game jam allowed me to learn a bit more about working in godot, and I learned how to create parallax backgrounds and lighting effects. I also prioritzed acting as project lead, so I would regularly check in with everyone and help them get on board when things were going poorly. Lastly I created the music track for the game, and helped it develop its playful feel

Project Success: 9/10

This game was one of the most fun ones I've worked on, as the movement, co-op, and puzzles all work pretty well together. I think the art could have used a bit of refining on all sides, and there were certainly assets and levels that didn't make the final cut because of coding restraints, but overall the aspects of the game interacted pretty well with one another.

Idyll

Overview:

Idyll is an idle non-game where you control the environment around your town's citizens to encourage them to do good actions. However, the level of control soon becomes too strong as you begin to rule over your citizens with fear tactics.

Roles:

Project lead, Lead design, 2d Artist

Timeline: Feb 26 - Mar 8, 2024

Published?: No

Personal Success: 5/10

This game jam, my roles were widely varied as I had to design the project, (very carefully) instruct our other designer how to uphold our game's theme and scope, and create 2d art assets to fill in for when both of our 2d artists were absent. While it was stressful, I learned a lot about using procreate and painting from an isometric perspective. I also was able to use sketching asa tool to help clarify design which was important.

Project Success: 1/10

Unfortunately, due to a series of mistiimed absences and major roadblocks to our coding team, this project was unable to meet its full potential. For the future, I would definitely try to host at least one other experienced programmer to help bring the project together, since Kesler's absence on the last day prevented us from moving forward and bug fixing.

Slip Drift City

Overview:

Slip Drift City is an arcade racer that draws stylistic inspiration from comic books and other cel shaded games like Jet Set Radio. It is high intensity couch multiplayer that is fun for the whole family.

Roles:

3D Art Lead, VFX, Music

Timeline: Jan 2024 - May 2024

Published?: Pending

Personal Success: 9/10

During this project, I really was able to go all out learning 3d art and VFX. I learned a lot more about texturing, rigging, and animating 3d models and created my first humanoid character. Pretty much all of the 3d art assets in game are my creations, and they demonstrate how much I've learned in Blender.

I have also furthered my skills in UE5 materials and particles of course, and I created several post process shaders that give the game its cel-shaded cartoon style.

Project Success: 8/10

So far, the project has succeeded in terms of art style and programming. There are still some major bugs that need to be worked out before our final build, and also some design issues that need to be worked out. The biggest area of focus that we have to work on in my opinion is the UI, as right now it is default UE5 UI. Once we resolve these issues, I think the game will be ship quality.

As a team, our biggest obstacle has been a significant amount of pessimism (stemming mostly from one programmer) that has infected our team. This pessimism has led to inaction from our programming and design teams, so progress has been stunted.

Overall Feedback

This year, I have learned a lot in terms of 3d and technical art, and I've expanded on my learning for game design. But I think there are still some major areas that were roadblocks for me and my team. I still believe that more hands-on instruction for the basics would've helped me develop my skills a lot quicker rather than relying on teaching ourselves. I agree that we should be able to teach ourselves many technical skills so we are safe in the future, but our ability to do that still depends heavily on our understanding of the fundamentals, so when we aren't learning those fundamentals, we are pretty much dead in the water.

I would rather the emphasis be on learning for the first semester before we start emphasizing our year-long projects, that way we have room to do game jams and discipline-specific projects before working on something high stakes. That style would also be more in-line with how universities like the U of Utah handle game education.