With the Kit of Parts project, I had the awesome opportunity to collaborate with two brilliant minds that are Sean McNamara and John Hayden (the latter I would go on to work with in Bluejay Games on Little Folk). We stayed after school most nights figuring out the design of the game and what exactly we were going to shoot for. We knew that we wanted to create a game that drew inspiration from tabletop pencil-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but we wanted to simplify it to make it accessible to somebody who had never played a tabletop RPG.
After we finished with the game's general concept, Sean and John started creating the games battle mechanics while I started writing the game's story and designing the board and cover. As the project deadline approached, we realized that we had to go into crunch mode to create all the assets we were going to need to create a polished finished product. We kicked it into high gear and I wrapped up the writing and design, and John and Sean were finalizing the mechanics by simulating combat to see if it worked. The night before the game was due, Sean and I organized all of our files and took it into Kinko's to print. Over the course of the night, Murphy's law came into full effect as everything that could have gone wrong started going wrong. The templates weren't lined up correctly, Kinko's said they don't print after 5pm, we couldn't print from our Illustrator files, we had to pay by the minute to use their computers, etc. We even had to resort to bribing the Kinko's guy to print our project! Sean and I stayed up at his house until 4am cutting and pasting onto card templates.
The whole experience was an invaluable lesson in problem solving. For all our trials and hardships, however, we came out with an excellent product that I feel was unsurpassed. I'm extremely proud of all the hard work the we put into it. Our classmates were able to play the game and immediately found ways to break the game. We iterated our design as a result the game was better for it.
Yesterday, I wrapped up my final 3D project for Intro to Game Developer tools. Our task was to find an object and take orthographic photos to use as a template to create the object in 3D. At first I planned to model my Xbox 360, but I wanted to do something a little bit more interesting. I finally decided on modeling a little R2-D2 timer that came with a Star Wars Trivial Pursuit game I have. It took me about 3 weeks or so, but I learned more about 3D modeling from this project than I did in over a year of using 3DS Max.
I ran into a crazy glitch when I tried to unwrap my textures. After hours and hours of frustration, I ended up going to my instructor to see why it wasn't working. He found that me version of 3DS Max had some sort of weird bug. After he fixed it, I was able to apply all my textures to R2. Instead of grabbing the textures directly from the object, I decided to paint my own. I also used textures I found online to simulate wear-and-tear on R2's body.
I'm really happy with the end result, and I hope to keep working on the model to make it even better.
It's been a good semester, and I can't wait to expand and further my skill set in the new year.
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