Hi there you Game Jolters
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Introduction to the project progress

When the alarm clock rings 07.30 and you are dead tired from night before and all that gaming. The only thing that makes me go up from the warm bed is just the love for games. In minus degrees, I go to the creative place called “gaming school” or more correct way to put it is “school for the game development”.

Oh I’m looking forward to be working in game engine Unity for 8 weeks. Unity pls show me that you can handle this without hassle. Do not want to cause mass errors day 1.

Starting to work on a new project always feels as fresh as the feeling when you are newly showered, until you meet the usual resistance of course.
Once again, one has to find himself/herself and his role in this new group of collaborators and it is not always the easiest task. The group dynamics depend on so many variables, that it is like a lottery every time how it will turn out. Yes, group psychology what is that no one cares, just join in groups with strangers and go go, make some awesome games … if it were that easy.

Then you come as a designer and think everything starts with good planning, right? Yes, probably but what is good planning? No clue, but the one that works for me and as I learned to love lately is just following the scrum method and the “Hack n Plan” tool. It is so good and so adapted to the gaming industry as compared to the boring pivotal tracker.
Hack n plan lets you customize your tasks perfectly, if you forget something you can just add subtasks, it’s perfect. You also can enjoy the dark background which is easier on the eyes. I do like to organize my work so scrum master is perfect role for me.

Hack n Plan

VFX

Now for the little more fun things than planning, game development started and obviously we have to have some start menu for the game, it will be “alive” and I’m not completely satisfied with it yet so I do not have much to show you this week but some effects will pop up promise to show it in the next blog post.

My main focus during this game project would be VFX part and I tried to create some solutions which would show different stages for our main character Luna. By the way Lunas body is shaped like half female half snake, how cool is that, right? Anyway the stages she would have is walk/crawling/sneaking the same thing for her I guess, and some sprint, as well as “in danger mode”.

So I made you some gifs just to show you some basic VFX that would be later in game applied under the character Luna on the floor.

Walking vfx

Sprint vfx

In Danger vfx

I had some spare time to play around in Unity so I wanted get to know the path system for VFX better, so I created a “magic spell” effect. This was only for testing and will probably not be used in our game.

Magic vfx

3D modeling

In addition to VFX, I have begun to model our main character Luna. The body is almost finished. A little bit of polish is needed on the tail and I have started working with the head and I will add hands at the end.

Luna body front side

Luna body side mode

I used Maya 2016 as a 3D modeling tool, because I’m happy to work in Maya. I’ve tried Blender and I prefer Maya every day of the week. I have also used Maya’s customize character page for reference on the head. It’s great for creating and customizing your own characters most commonly for humans, it is missing area for animals or other game objects, but still pretty awesome.

Luna’s head in progress

Good reference is often a good foundation to develop a decent 3D object, the better the reference the easier and better model becomes. My body references for Luna was not the best because I have drawn them by myself and I didn’t do them so proportional, so I had to improvise a bit and model a bit freely.

When I finish the modeling, the plan is that I will rig it and animate it. That will be something new for me and I am looking forward to learning how to do it. I am a bit worried because many people have pointed out that it’s hard but we will see, making games isn’t supposed to be easy.

Until next time …

/Ana Jaksic