Ricardo Yanofsky, Week 9 Journal PPJ, Blog post 9, GMAP 378

Content with Hours:

Playtest session
I was at the joint play test session for 3 hours, making sure Alien Arcade was also being played. I also messaged some people to come play (some did) and played both in and out of the ride for people who did not have a partner. It was a little frustrating since there was a small group of people who kept replaying Infinite Skies and did not want to play Alien Arcade.
(3 hrs)

Animating the Alien
I spent some time animating and polishing animations for the alien, which I do not think I will make more of. I'll export them first thing this week so they can be put in the game. It should go smoothly, I think I've found all the problems.
I made:
-floating in space idle
-2 standing idles (taunt and wave)
-run cycle
-whack the alien animation
(3 hrs)

Content Positive:
-Got some playtest data from the ride
-Enough animations now

Content Negative:
- Joint playtest would have worked better separately.

Total Hours for the week: 6

Personal Postmortem:

Negative:

1. Rough start: Starting off the term with an injury was a big setback, especially with it being in the first few weeks and getting settled into a new team. It took some time, but eventually I was able to work in 3D comfortably as before.
2. Alien Arcade was not the best game for a 3D artist, since there are so many small scenes, it would be too much to work on each individually. With Angela's 2D general assets, the game was able to look good without as much art, but that also meant I had less to do. This was especially noticeable when I would go on trello and find very few things I could do.
3. Lack of coding abilities: due to my abilities being almost limited to art, I do not feel like I had as much of a creative input as I have had in other games. I helped brainstorm ideas, but did not actually make them happen. If I had been able to contribute more to the game creativity than I probably would have been more motivated.
4. More of a team wide thing, but one aspect of the motion base we did not consider before is the complexity of the controls and game. If a game plays in a unique matter, it usually needs to spend a few minutes teaching the player how. The problem with the ride is that we only have a few minutes to play the entire thing. Default mechanics and controls (such as Infinite Skies' driver/gunner) work well because they don't have to be explained. With Alien Arcade, although the controls were somewhat uniform, it was still too difficult to tell the player what to do.

Positive:

1. The alien rig; Once I had recovered from surgery I found something I was motivated to work on: the 3D rig of the alien. I was able to make a fully rigged character in 2 weeks, and then make several animations for it. I like animating for games and I am glad I got to do it for this project.
2. Work in Unity: While I do not know how to code well enough, I have learned some things about Unity. Nothing major, but I did get to import and tweak assets and mess around with mechanim,

Lessons Learned:

• 3D artists are not always a valuable team member.
• Games are better if you can play as long as you want.
• A few more things about getting fbx animations into Unity
• It helps to like what you are working on.