Week 6 Project Dissonance Progress

With the help of Nicole, we have finally corrected our backlog to be in a less confusing and of course readable state!  Everyone is on the right path now with the google drive directories all shared correctly, and everyone being able to access each of the folders.  This week has consisted of a lot of team meetings to establish level design, going over the art style and fleshing out the approach for each of the assets.  Programming wise, we have our moving mechanics and tether working for the main character established into unity.

The way our programmer, Alex, approached implementing mechanics onto unity was by establishing them on processing first, and then integrating them onto unity once it was working on processing.  This does slow us down a bit, but it beats actually slamming our heads into Unity and trying to do something we just don't even know how to start off.  This is what we get for not having an actual programmer on the team.  Originally, Alex was our level designer, but because of the amount of work load with programming that he has received, we had to give our level design role to Jeff so he could have more work to do other than finding sound design clips.

Alex went ahead and created some puzzle modules that we could add onto the level, which really helped with giving the environment artist visuals for what the puzzles would look like.  Jeff went and tried to actually create a level using the modules.  The team looked over it and critiqued that it needed a better movement flow rather than just puzzle after puzzle, which could bog down the player.

Our character and enemy concepts are almost done so they can be modeled and textured for us to turn in for the end of the quarter.

Environment concept wise, I (Tian) created a reference board of many origami and different papercraft references so the team could look back at this to remember that they aren't just drawing regular drawings, but have to establish a new look to their drawings so that the 3D artists could model off their references correctly.

A lot of our inspirations come from paper fox, but we wanted to take it a little farther and actually create more paper creases for the blocky models in the background that couldn't be made into being a full on origami.

Our 3D artists were given the job to start doing modular tests to figure out how well the units and scale worked through the modeling process.  Olsen helped out with a lot of the tech spec sheet specifications, and did research on the polycounts for the level so we wouldn't go overboard with some of our assets.  I wanted to see the weaknesses and strengths of the 3D Artist to see who was going to be assigned certain roles in the asset creation spreadsheet.  This way I wouldn't assign assets to someone who had a harder time understanding how to model complex models.  This also allowed us to see how we could approach modular design on our decorations and also our platforms, which is going to help a lot during the concept art approach.

We have a pipeline for modeling an asset ready on google drive, but as the process was being established out, we realized that we are going to need 3 different pipelines for modeling an asset, and also texturing.  This is because of our platform camera view, we have 3 different spaces, foreground, mid-ground, and background.  Because of this, details for each space of props are going to be modeled differently and will have their special identities that will make it cohesive.  We have the small prop done, now we need 2 more, mid-ground, and background.