Kelvin - Dev Blog

Week One

This week we began with looking for inspiration for a game to create in 2 weeks, we wanted it to be a cute-sy game with a small spider as the main character, then we researched a bit more on the type of game we have envisioned.

After a couple of days of research we all came back together and delivered our ideas, we combined most of our ideas and came up with Scrambling Spider, We began by deciding what we wanted to be in terms of creating the game, I was the character creator, rigger and animator.

For week one I spent that week researching spiders and the types of spiders that have the “powers“ we were looking for, We wanted to have the body of a jumping spider and I thought it would be cool to mix in the legs of a daddy long legs.

So For the rest of the week a spent that modeling the spider once we had a design we all liked, I ran into a few modeling issues with the legs and how they bent but that was quickly fixed with the help of Brad and Lorne, Everything else to do with modeling went fairly smooth surprisingly, I finished model and the UVing of the character on the Friday and started on the rig for the character over the weekend and some after school work in week 2.

Week Two

I started this week off with continuing the rig for the spider and with my little knowledge in rigging I struggled a lot and needed help from multiple classmates and tutors, I got as far as setting up the rig and had all the naming conventions right and I began to connect the joints together with the right connections, I needed help from Colin because I had messed up the leg connections and needed him to help direct me through the way to reconnect them again, There were two ways to connect the legs and I did it the hard way but I didn’t quite understand the other way Colin was teaching me how to connect it so we settled and completing it the hard way.

So Colin helped me with the rest of the rig so I could get to animating and by Tuesday I finished the final rig and after class I started on animating at home because I had the right software, so in terms of animating I thought it went pretty good, developing the animations went good but the end result animations weren’t the best unfortunately because it was a bit of a rush job due to the game needing to be finished in a few days, so I think if I either had a few more days, managed my time or didn’t give myself all these different jobs to do I could have produced better quality animations.

I finished all the animations for the character on the Thursday night with a couple all nighters and after course work at home, As I finished the animations I forgot I needed to texture the character as well so I made that my task to finish within 2 days and I managed to finish it half a day early so I could import everything that I have worked on into the unity scene for Lorne to set up.

We needed music for the game so Brad and I thought it would be a cool idea to record some of our own music for the game, we booked out the recording studio for a couple hours on Friday and Brad brought his harmonica and I brought my guitar, We started to record some stuff and we we’re going good till people started filming in the green screen room and made a lot of noise with the mic picking it up and we had other people knocking on the door asking when were gonna be done so that messed us up a lot, so then we decided to leave the recording studio and use what we had recorded.

I spent the rest of that day mixing the music together and it turned out bad just due to the time we had and because we had people interrupting us during recording, so I think next time we will just use royalty free music and just mix that together to make something for our game.

That's where I finished my tasks and I just chilled out over the weekend watching Lorne composite everything we created and if he needed my help I would help out.