Weekly Assessment #3

Here goes this weeks assessment of progress, planning and such. I haven't actually managed to do all that much for the project due to a load of work in other courses, but things are moving forwards. For one, I've discovered an easy way to do techy textures for our vehicles and ruins, which looks better than my previous approach and is much faster to do. I've retextured the main player vehicle with this method and it should be ready to go into the game.

I've also done a few concepts for the mobile garage and some of the minor characters, and I've started experimenting with character models in Maya. There's really no quick way to do those, but I think they're still perfectly feasible, since I don't have to do binding (except with the heads, I guess) and I can get away with projected textures, saving me the pain of UV wrapping. But of course, if we're going to use these in cutscenes, we'll need some environmental stuff too. But much of this can be very simple or done in photoshop. Plus, I don't think we'll end up having all that many cutscene frames. Then again, I may be dangerously underestimating the size of the workload.

I haven't seen that much of what everybody else is working on, but things seem headed in a promising direction. Lawson has found a flying starter kit, so he won't have to build the flying mechanics from scratch - a definite plus. I haven't heard any of Dan's sound work so far, but he looks like he knows what he's doing. Matt is working on level design and upgrade mechanics, though I'm not quite sure what exactly that involves at this point. And then of course, Cody is busy with our story development and whatever team coordinating has to be done.

I'm sure more pieces will start clicking together in tomorrow's meeting (again four hours long!) but somewhere I've gotta find some time to work on 355!

Sigh...