Group Work
By this point the group idea was more or less in place, the only suggestion I made this week was in regard to timing the player. I thought it would make sense if the player started with a timer that ran down, then for each item of litter the player put in the bin (whatever form the bin takes) they gain back a bit of time. This would require a lot of playtesting to balance the difficulty for players however if the right balance is struck, I thought would work well.
Individual work
Production this week was a little slow, I made one book model and then textured it five different ways. These book models would be used or litter and as such require more modelling work than the book asset ill use to fill the bookcase shelves. For those I will make one object that looks like lots of books to help with the layout of the game and not reduce performance. I didn’t need references as the classic hard back book style was pretty easy to achieve and didn’t require additional help.
I did have a play around with the different alphas available in substance for these book covers as well as including a cheeky reference to firefly with one of the books. Other than that this was a straight forward model that really helped add to the environment when laid out correctly.
Next, I turned my attention to the walls and floor of my environment. The base object were provided to me by a team member so as to get the correct height and depth, but I wanted to add to them. I knew I wanted the walls to be wood panel, however the method I used to achieve this required extruding the walls outward, thus increasing their depth. This was easy enough to fix however, I just halved the thickness of the walls and then extruded outward as needed to fit in the same silhouette, thus not messing up anything with coding etc.
I know I could have baked this detail onto a flat low poly wall, however when I tried that method last term the illusion only worked when facing the object directly, and as the player would be looking closely at the walls of this environment and moving around that wouldn’t work here. So, I had to bake down the physical model. This meant the room had slightly more polys than the other method would have done, but not enough to hinder performance by any means. With the walls and floor done I think the environment really started to come together.