In conclusion and to end the work we did in this project, I was able to work in a group to produce a functional game. As the game is 3D based, I wasn’t able to help as much as I could have, due to the nature of where my specialty lies (2D), but regardless, I contributed to the best of my ability and have work to show.
On the topic of specialties, as someone who isn’t good at any 3D based creation, I fell behind with asset creation and getting to grips with the ideas. It was incredibly hard to keep up with the rest of my group, and my cluelessness to the topic made me sceptical about any work I did do, not having a clue what it was tying into. Because of this, we ended up clashing more than I would like to admit. Regardless, we all got work done and finished all of our respective tasks for this unit.
Now that everything has been created and prepared for our game, this week is dedicated to the PowerPoint for our presentation and implementing all of our assets. I will be helping with the PowerPoint, as I cannot handle the Unity project.
As the project is coming to a close, we have no more physical practical work to do left, apart from implementing the assets. As a result of this, we worked on our PowerPoint for the presentation.
In the PowerPoint, we were able to add enough to make it informative about all the work we had done, whilst being brief enough to talk about it in detail for the presentation.
In terms of work, I am very pleased with what I have done this week. I am proud of myself for creating functional and decent models after not knowing a thing about it a few days prior, and they have turned out looking as close to identical as I have been able to accomplish to their concepts. Through this week, my knowledge on modelling has improved a lot, and I think that I’ll be able to create more (basic) models in the future.
This week, I managed to get my towers ready to be implemented into the game. Following the guides I had prepared and on-screen references to my concepts, I designed three separate tower designs for the Fantasy level.
This is the first tower I created. I decided to go for this one first due to the simplicity of shapes. As someone who had never touched Blender before with the intent of using anything I created, I couldn’t properly follow the concept, due to the different shapes and additional effects I had envisioned, but I made it as similar as I could to the concept.
For the second tower, I made a last minute choice to make it smaller and less tall than the others. The decision was based off the idea that once I had created it, I had come to terms with it slightly resembling a gnome. This worked out well for me, as one of my group members who worked on Fantasy with me had created a gnome enemy prior. In order to match that theme, I left it small. I changed the base shape from cylindrical to a cuboid due to the complexity, along with the roof and sides of the tower, which I changed into a cone .
My final tower was the hardest to complete. With a tree-based design, I had a very hard time with modelling it to look decent. I used a separate guide that I found (linked in research) to help me create the low poly tree to put on top of the tower.
However, when it came to importing the final tower, it appeared to have lost colouring.
In conclusion, I believe the towers came out incredibly well for what little experience I had with the modelling program. Although not in any way a piece of art, they ended up looking similar enough to link to the concepts, which was the idea.
Following this week’s theme on ‘How To Grasp The Complexities Of Blender’, I decided to watch tutorial videos on YouTube which covered simple asset creation.
BlenderClicky (2021). Blender Modeling Tutorial | Low Poly Tower. [online] http://www.youtube.com. Available at: https://youtu.be/RMPKInNlLCs [Accessed 4 Oct. 2021].
The first video (Harvard Reference linked above) was incredibly helpful, explaining how to scale and pull up objects, along with decorating the outside with windows, in order to create my tower.
Abbitt, G. (2017). low poly tree | Blender | quick. [online] http://www.youtube.com. Available at: https://youtu.be/wB0VgyN8tOw [Accessed 4 Oct. 2021].
The second video, referenced above, was a quick guide that explained how to create a low-poly tree. For me, this tutorial was very useful, as in order to match my concept, I have to create a tree to put on top of my Fairytale-themed tower.
Using the two very helpful guides above, I will be able to model my towers despite the lack of experience I, myself, have in the area of 3D modelling.
Using the three previously conceptualised towers I had drawn and Blender, I will be modelling what I had initially designed as a concept into an asset for our game. Although I was assigned this task, I have no idea on how to use Blender in the slightest, so I downloaded the program on my PC and spent a while familiarising myself with its functions. I will be looking at step-by-step guides on YouTube in order to have a clear path to follow for the sculpting of my towers.
For this week, I have assigned myself with the single task of modelling all three of the towers that I had created concepts for a few weeks back. I have one experience with Blender which turned out horrifically, so in order to fulfil the task, I will have to spend this week figuring it out and attempting to create something good enough to go in the game. In order to do this, I will use step by step videos on how to model on YouTube.
Games Design Y2 