Wasted Youth - Week 6 Progress Report

It's been another exciting week of progress, with at least as much work on the back-end planning stuff then on all the pretty art that's so fun to post.

First of all, we've got a new artist on the team! Daniel Samuelsson has joined Scrap Metal Games as a support artist, he'll get to start working on high-poly sculpts and texture work on props this week. This helps us fill the last major gap in our pipeline, and just in time, as it frees me up to focus on animation right when we're getting our character rig completed. We're all excited to work with Dan, he's a great 3d artist, go check out his blog.

That's right! Our first iteration of the character rig is nearly ready! We should have a prototype of it tomorrow to start testing, making sure that the system will work in-engine and we can test the last major hurdle of our pipeline, getting character animations in and scripted to be fully functional, right away. As I've been helping some underclassmen with their animation lately as a Projects TA, I've been itching to get a chance to do some more animation, so nobody is more excited about this turn of events then me.

We spent a lot of time this week trying to finalize the most recent drafts of our GDD and TDD, and are getting a very solid roadmap of where we're headed with the project in the process. We got some really valuable feedback from professors on how we can further refine them and where we can put more attention, and we're well on our way to having an exceptionally thoroughly documented project - with a crew ten students working on this game, often in their own time at their own houses, this is a critical component to success, and helps us make sure we're working on the highest priority tasks we can be at all times.

We also wrote up a complete roadmap of our roadmap feature commitments this week, giving us a long, thorough overview of every critical feature of the game we're planning on implementing and when they're expected to be deliverable. It really is great getting to look this far ahead and see how everything is coming together - especially considering we're still right on schedule to meet our current deadlines.

We had a lot of new concept work and art tests done this week - Beau has been pumping out concept art for new props.

He also worked on testing some grass and foliage alphas to put through the "painter" feature in Unity that allows us to lay down broad strokes of plants and other debris on terrain objects. We're planning on using this feature to help scatter random trash and stuff throughout our environment, filling the world way faster then it would be if we had to place each object by hand. He put a bunch of this stuff down in-engine along with some test models just to see how things might look in-game, then dropped in a first-person controller to let us walk around the models and see how things look!

We got some new art assets textured and ready for engine, too.

Zach got Jenny all textured, too. There's a few final touches to make, but she's nearly done! If the eyes and mouth seem a little out of place, that's because they are - they're going to be applied later as an animated sprite texture, allowing us basic facial animation without having to deal with facial rigging, a major time-saving feature.

And last but not least, we may have a new name for the game! Wasted Youth was always a working title for us, as we liked the idea of it but it has some implications we're not particularly pleased with, so without further ado, I present you with our newest name:

Whatta ya think?

Wasted Youth - Week 4 Progress Report

It's been another exciting week of production on the game as things are starting to really come together. The most visible change is that we have a playable early build of the basic game mechanics put together and ready for testing! We actually got it in front of testers yesterday and started gathering up feedback on the control scheme and basic mechanics and got a ton of wonderful data in the process. Really exciting stuff, and a huge boost for morale - it really made everyone feel like we're working on something tangible.

Working with placeholder art elements, of course, but we've got them actually working in game, with working physics and everything.

We've already incorporated a ton of the feedback into the game and should be able to test the new changes in tomorrow's playtesting session.

Jenny's base mesh is basically done and being unwrapped in preparation of texturing and high-poly sculpting.

This low-poly version of the mesh will have additional edges added to it and will be brought into ZBrush for high-poly sculpting so that we can extract normal maps and make it look really great. Zach has been working really hard on this stuff, and we're really excited to get the mesh in-game.

What an adorable backpack.

Beau spent some time working on more concept work, focusing on some great designs for our robots.

He also put together another great look and feel piece, helping to resolve some of the style questions. It was extremely helpful and brought up a lot of new questions we are going to work together this week to try to resolve.

This week we're going to spend a lot of time working on tying down the backstory for the world, putting together the script for the comic book that will serve as the introduction to the world, the opening cinematic and a great promotional piece.

Finally, one of the most exciting pieces of art we got this week was a glimpse at one of our favorite pieces of the game.

How cool is that?