Joseph Santos Week 8 PPJ

This week I finish textures for the tent and create transparencies for the ufo textures I did the previous week. Also, since we are rapiding approaching our final weeks, I took the time to check all the other fbx models. In the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a bunch of fbx models that weren't uv or modeled properly that I had to fix. Hence I wanted to check which models needed more tweaking. Fortunely, the ones that needed fixing were the ones I fixed already. While I got tent in, the I missed the deadline to get the modified ufo textures in on time due to another meeting that went overtime. However, I was able to complete all my tasks.

Pros:
finished all tasks
not all fbx models needed fixing which I was worried about

cons:
missed deadline to get ufo texture in on time
given that I worried about a problem that really wasn't there( fixing anymore fbx) wish I could done other art assets from back log

Hours:

tent texture:
2 hours

ufo texture:
1 hour

Going through project to see if any fbx models needed fixing:
2 hours

total hours: 5

GDC Vault: among friends uncharted 2 by Richard Lemarchand
being a huge fan of the uncharted series, I watched the post mortem on the the second entry in the franchise. After watching it, I'm still surprise that they run into time crunch and problem despite all the pre-planning they did to try to avoid such problems. Richard has said in the talk about how Naughty Dog cares about their employees and try to not over work them. The pre-planning was to help over work them yet they still ran into those problems.

An interesting thing they brought up was the marco design sheet they created instead of an actual game design doc. the marco design sheet was just a spread sheet with broad details about levels and characters. The reason this document worked so well for them is that with a regualr game document, there are lots of pages with the all the details about everything. Obivously, to change anything would be to go through all those pages and rewrite a page or 2. With this macro design document, they wouldn't be locked down with details that would work best as they added along.

Another interesting they did that I don't see much with the game classes at drexel is they used previz. A lot of times when creating a game, people start greyboxing the game, which at this stage could change. When doing pre-viz in maya, they were able to do a rough animation to show what gameplay could look like. It's something that I think some game teams can use even if we are on a 10 week schedule.

Since this Uncharted was a sequel, I thought the code would be only polished but not completely touch. To hear them they say they made their programmers redo some script completing from scratch to fit the new vision for the series made me realize some things could always use improve, even if you have a solid foundation.