This has been a long discussion amongst us, the engineers and Mikeh: what happen to our art team? It's been third of the semester, however we are still far away from alpha. We decided to have a 2 weeks build goal last two week but we couldn't make it. The engineers were close with the exception some feature was implemented in minimum requirement. The arts....(break) well.... we only have the first pass of the in game UI. The character rigging didn't work - we got it just a day before the build date target. The obstacle we got was far away from what we had been discussing all this semester even through last semester. We decided to go with low poly - simple geometric shape. With our very limited-skilled artist (one decided to focus on UI and the other one (or 'half' in our word) is a technical artist who had just started learning Maya in the end of this summer. However...
Well, that's the big question in the engineers head. We had been told all time that we are going to have low poly - basic geometry 3D object but what we got is a spiky bomb - not a low poly and simple geometric one! Are we not clear enough in our request? Are we asking too much? Are there confusion in our request? Whatever it is, I think the art team should ask the engineers or others when you had confusion.
I agree that we are not perfect. We thought we were clear enough. We gave the art team the list off items we want to have in the game. But, we couldn't give you the main art term specification. We are not the artist. We can only ask you in the best language we know. We were lacking of those art terms. That's why we have you here. We didn't give the really really specific request using the image we Googled because we have artist. We want the artist to lead our art direction. We want the artist to use Still... after finally the artist gave us the style guide, we still had no clue what is this game would look like. ..... I am speechless about our art team. It's indeed getting better since Zeph took over. We got something although that's not exactly what we thought.
Today Mikeh, Cody and I had another short art discussion - mainly about our UI. We did got in game UI. It's fine that it's not well themed. Each UI element stands by itself. This is still the first pass. However, it took 5-6 weeks to made 4 in game UI! We were worried about our menu. We could make a simple geometric in Unity - which we already did since beginning. We could find a free character rigging for our character like what Cody found. But, we had no clue about the menu.
Around 3 weeks ago - before Zeph took over the art, I learnt that Alice creating menu screen using Adobe After Effect WITHOUT consulting the engineers. She said she did research for the possibility but it's still best to ask the engineers especially when the engineers had already their own backlog tasks. The engineers are pretty much done with feature implementation but we still need to fix the bugs and improve those features. Frankly, we don't think Adobe After Effects is better for Alice. We think Scaleform will goes better with her resume as it's more industry standard.
So, today we decided to have another art meeting with Zeph. During the meeting we will try to have 5 or 6 menu layout and picked two we prefer most. We, then, will bring this to next meeting with Craig, our art advisor. In the same meeting we will also decided whether it is necessary to put another engineer - so far I am in the most favor as I am the most artistic engineers in the team - to work together with the artist in the UI. The engineer, basically, will keep moving forward no matter there is art or not. And for our obstacles, the producers can make something simple. I am also planning to install Maya in PC at home so I can create some simple themed geometric.
Well, let's see what we had for next week build goal from the art team.
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