Role and Game Development

There were a list of roles to choose from and three from our team chose to be the concept artist which was problematic. However we easily sorted that out through discussions. Everything had to be done like a conveyor belt - if you get what I mean - e.g. the coder cannot work on anything unless the level designer and concept artist has done their part etc etc.

There was a lot more to each role than expected, everyone had so much on their hands. Our coder by far had the most difficult task, the level designer had the most time consuming task as every tree had to be placed on by one, there were no large packs available. And as a concept artist, I expected to just come up with concepts and model the characters, however due to the work load on others, I had to take up rigging and animating as well. Though it was a real challenge, it was a good skill to learn.

As for the game, we were pretty stuck until late July- early August. Our ideas somehow worked on paper but not in the game. We had to make it stand out somehow and the idea of making the lead a female with an umbrella/parasol as a weapon came to our mind. Our original idea with the choice of the player choosing between the boy or girl as the player's character proved too complex and time consuming therefore, even though it was a good idea, it was scraped.

If you compare our final product with our original ideas listed in the google docs linked in one of the first posts, you can see a major difference or improvement.

One of the most challenging aspects was thinking we had enough time. Spending too much time on minor details held up other team members - my modelling took a little too long due to me tweaking the models and animation too much. However as I made more characters in Maya, I got used to the process and sped up a little to catch up with the rest of the team.

Everyone did their share of the job and everyone did well despite the large workload, steep learning curve and stress, I don't have any complaints, I'm proud of what my team and I had accomplished.