Our Third Week – It’s Slowly Sinking In

               Our game development group, WASD, has been going through some minor rough patches  lately. Altogether, we have not had as much progress on our game as we would’ve hoped for the week, or even the past two weeks. Truthfully, we’ve been trying to focus so hard on individual homework that we haven’t had much time to take out of our schedules to work for very long on the game. Hopefully, next week this will change.

               However, we have solved a few problems and made some progress at least. We have fixed our issues with Microsoft Visual Studio 10, and we have fiddled around with our game code somewhat to get a feel for things with this program. Personally, I worked with our .obj loader class in attempt to make it run faster, but found that it wound up being the same speed either way, so that was a disappointment. We have a couple more raptor animations and a slightly clearer idea of how we are to accomplish some goals since completing the first milestone, which really made us think about some of these questions. For instance, we’ve rethought our uses of lighting in the game, and now hopefully have a better picture of how that will turn out. We’ve also inquired about the possibility of using a shader effect with a similar outcome to cell-shading, and found out that this is likely possible for us to do, so we were cheered up by that thought.

Our first attempt at a style similar to cell-shading didn't work out too well. For some reason, the colours of our raptors started to fade away, leaving less distinction between them. The final result also didn't end up looking the way we'd hoped. We're planning on retrying this effect, but with using proper shader effects.

               We have also explored using Mudbox as a tool for enhancing our 3D models and their textures, and our group artist has begun to fiddle with it to get a better feel for the program. Once she has adequate understanding of the program, she will likely start working on enhancing our models and textures.

               Another goal of mine is to explore some outside sources from which we can find music for our game. Since it turns out we are actually supposed to take some of our sound from other sources as a requirement, we do not feel bad doing so, especially since we may have some resources from which we can have our music custom-made to (hopefully) fit our game. I’m looking forward to this, and hoping that our music will turn out the way that we hope.

               Altogether, we have not been as productive as we’d hoped this week, but we at least are getting some of the groundwork for improving our game down before moving on to bigger things. Luckily, the idea of competition between groups keeps us going, since we don’t want to fall behind, and so hopefully we can pick up the pace soon and start to make our game more and more presentable.