The last project of our second year was the Off the Map: Alice's Adventures contest hosted by Game City and the British Library. This was a twelve week long group project, with a very open brief. We had to create an entire working game level based upon Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
What worked well in our project?
While I didn't directly contribute to this aspect of the project, we had a number of simple puzzle rooms that played out nicely. These added purpose and game play to our level, and doing each puzzle unlocked the door to a final room that ended the level.
There were a few areas in our level that visually turned out to be very nice by the end. One example was the main lobby area. The lighting was well done and complemented a number of well executed assets.
What didn't go so well?
Here's the big part, if I'm honest, there's definitely a lot more that didn't go quite as smoothly with this project. A large part of this I think was due the relatively longer amount of time we had on the project, and our failure to manage our time effectively and plan the project in structured stages.
There were a lot of bad decisions made early on in the project that lead to more problems down the line. An example of this was the art direction; I felt that we failed to decide upon a single coherent art style early on. Even later in the project there were a lot of changes and questions as to what we were even trying to achieve in terms of the art style.
Our level was also initially very large in scope and fairly ambitious. By the time we had a reviews two weeks before the end of the project we had to cut quite a lot of content and shorten the level. I think if we had made the scope of the project smaller it would have been easier to manage and would also have allowed us more time to invest into the overall visual quality.
What did I learn on this project?
For me this project turned out to be a gross example of just how much I overestimate the amount of work I can actually get done in a given time. With shorter projects, I feel that I can handle my time much more effectively, and I am solely focused on that project for the short duration. My focus peaked and wavered throughout this project, and I struggled to take things one at a time. This project has certainly given me more incentive to learn to structure any longer projects I do in future. This will be an invaluable lesson when it comes to my fmp.
Balancing quality and quantity was a large part of this project. Throughout the whole project, I wanted to give undivided attention to each individual asset, making it look the best that I could. Often, I felt under a lot of pressure to try and get an asset done as quickly as possible, but I also wanted them to at least look good within the level. However, having an asset look good doesn't necessarily mean it has to take forever. I want to look into different texturing work flows, and find ways to increase my speed when texturing and modeling. As with anything in Art, you can potentially work on something forever.
In all honesty, I think I learned more about my own working habits and management skills than I did about any technical skills. Despite having 12 weeks on the project it certainly didn't feel as though I had 12 weeks worth of work by then end. This feels especially true when I look at work produced in previous projects that took place over 3 or 4 weeks. I think this has a lot to do with work expanding in accordance to the time allocated for it completion. Having much longer on the project just made spend longer on each individual thing that I worked on. However, a large bulk of this time was also spent just learning new things too, and not just consistently churning out work. This project allowed me to learn a number of new things about different baking methods and workflows, and how to import characters + animations and set up third person blueprints from scratch in Unreal.
