I think the biggest challenge for me so far on this project has definitely been
getting my head around the scale of the project and how that affects my approach
to asset creation and just generally running the show. Past experience has
always been something of an orchestrated dash to the finish but with the time frame
I have now it’s forcing me to re think my pipeline. My lack of experience with
a solo project of this length has been under cutting my confidence with the
FMP, the central theme of last week's post, it's like every morning
getting in and looking at what needs to be done and it’s pretty much everything
and I’ve initially struggled to break that down into more manageable chunks.
That's resulted in a lot of iteration as from what I initially thought my
timescale and pipeline would be and I’m sure that will continue. I
think the big issue has been how I've looked at the workload, by focusing
too much on the project as a whole rather than breaking the project into,
essentially, smaller internal projects. During the week I've
reproduced my layout building it from modular kits and tile sets that, ideally,
will be refined from their current rough boxes to final geometry.
While this helps to inform me of the assets I need and how best to build the
level they’ve helped to divide the environment into, in my mind, four
major pockets. Those are namely, the Earth Pod, the Command Module,
the Mining Facility and adjoining Corridors and as these calcifications
have solidified in the back of my mind over the week it's become clear to me
that by splitting those into almost mini projects I feel it’ll make
creating the whole environment more manageable I also believe that by
creating more structure and clearer deadlines to meet for each of the four
sections I'll create a faster, work pace over the course of the next
months. It's something I've felt lacking these past couple weeks and while
I much prefer working on a larger project, at least the idea of it, I do miss
the speed of production last term and that's something I want to tap into.
Smaller, more frequent deadlines also fits a lot more snuggly with the
supervisor review system and again I feel creates a very clear sense of what
needs to be done and when that before I didn’t really have.
This week has also seen me begin turning my attention towards concepting
the various assets within the environment itself although a lot of my
pre-conceived notions about how my approach to concept work during
the project have been challenged. I'll put it bluntly, the early concept
phase worried me most for the simple fact that I'm predominately a 3D guy and
while I'm happy enough to concept to solve individual design problems I've
next to no real experience concepting on the scale I have to now. Something
that I was beginning to feel into the end of the first week
and the beginning of the second was I painting for the sake of it rather than to
solve design problems and in reality trying to create paintings in line
with what you see in various art books. That's next to useless at
this point. I timed out and mulled over when I felt my concept work was
strongest and a lot of that focus turned to the recent Gateway project.
Looking back to my approach with concepting then helped to highlight what
works for me and what doesn't and it goes back to what I said before, that I'm
strongest when I'm concepting a specific problem or asset and not so much the
overall picture or atmosphere, at least not without a lot of leg work in 3D. Personally
I feel a lot faster and more comfortable exploring designs in 3D, while it
gets stuff in Engine faster and I also believe it helps me to keep my
focus away from the details and stick to working on the overall forms and first
read of the design. Having said that I have been doing a lot of rough
sketching both in Photoshop and my book to help get my ideas on paper and
outside of my head to support that process in 3D.
Finally as aforementioned I've been rebuilding and tweaking the level
layout and alongside that I've been further exploring the player experience. I’ve
gotten round to some basic storyboards and the major story beats have become
more locked in. I've been playing around with blueprints as well so
currently almost all of those beats are in level, animated,
modelled etc. to some degree. Of course it's not the whole experience but
enough of it exists in engine that I can visually demonstrate and walk people
through it and that’s crucial to getting the first wave of feedback. Talking
to Mike on Friday he brought up the lack of a big final climax to
the level, as it stands my idea is to have the player end in the Earth Pod
surrounded by the more human aspect of the station in contrast with the
very heavy industrial aesthetic of the space. In that way I was aiming for a
smaller, more personal ending rather then, as Mike was suggesting,
something larger and more attention grabbing. Its food for thought, I mean
I do agree with what he's saying in the way that there's a starting
spectacle, building up through the vista reveal and then it sort
of fizzles out into the Earth Pod. Definitely from a cinematic standpoint
that holds true but part of me feels that what I was originally wanting, if
executed well enough, read perfectly, with enough contrast to the rest of
the level could be enough to create a memorable ending for the player. But
yeah, like I said I'm mulling the ending over. At any rate you can
see some of the in-game renders I've taken the other day so you can get a sense
of how it's starting to shape up.
I feel as this week has reached its end a lot of stuff has clicked in my
mind about the upcoming months for the project and how I intend to tackle
them. In that way the elusive confidence I was looking for last week has
finally began to make an appearance. At any rate with my new approach to
dealing with the four sections of the environment as smaller
interior projects within the larger FMP has made the project more
manageable in my eyes. Moving into next week I'll be shifting into a more
production-like gear as I begin work on the creation of the corridor asset kit,
while they’ll be a lot more bread and
butter modelling I’ll also bee tackling concepting more head on as the week progresses
so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. Right now I'm toying between
a three or two week timeframe for them with the hope of fostering the
faster pace of work I’ve discussed here. For this first of the four
sections I think it'll be a lot about finding my pipeline that will then go on
to inform how I go about the next three. Ideally faster and more efficiently.
Keep in mind as well that there will be a number of materials and geometry
I'll be able to carry over or repurpose to help make each section progress
faster still. In that sense I feel I’m beginning to find myself in a better position
but there’s still a lot of doubt in my mind and honest I am finding the project
a little intimidating still, especially the solo aspect of it. I don’t know, I
think I’m still waiting for something to click, I feel at the end of the day
that’s what I’m really needing.
No comments:
Post a Comment