OK so I realise that I am posting this 3 days late, which kind of defies the point of writing this blog as it's supposed to contain the things I learnt and would most likely forget after a couple of days, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.
So on Thursday morning was dedicated to each group having a meeting with the powers that be (our 'tutors' to put it in another way). These meetings were there so that we could explain and outline our scope to them, and which in turn they would give us their feedback, tell us whether it is a realistic scope that could be achieved within the time constraints and give us their advice about the best way we should approach it.
To put Brown Team's (the team which I represent, working alongside Varun and Steven) meeting in a nutshell, the ideas which we came up were very good; but (and there is always a but, BUT ours was quite a big one) even though we had spent the previous day bring down our ideas to a more realistic and achievable project it was still too ambitious. They also seemed to think that this was largely down to me, probably partly because I'm an artist and we don't always realise how much we're asking of the programmers and maybe also partly because I've already come across as ambitious, opinionated and full of ideas. Either way we listened and took their advice and implemented it and have now come up with something a lot more achievable (even if we had to drop some of our favourite ideas, but this is something we are taught to do from the beginning).
The rest of the day was dedicated to coming up with a precise work flow of what we want to have done and by which date. At first we were taught about perforce (a centralised control system which is used to share all our data with the others in our groups. You have to check out a file (like you would in a library) then you can make changes to it, and then you submit it back in so that the others have access to the updated version; it really is quite ingenious. We were then given an excel spreadsheet where we fill in the objectives we need to complete by a certain deadline (in this instance it is by the time we realise the prototype) and by which day each individual thing must be done by. As the artists are kind of working in a team we had to get together to decide on the deadlines for the process of creating concept ideas, which is something that should have maybe taken 10minutes but took closer to an hour because we kept confusing each other and making it more difficult than it should have been (that and we misinterpreted what Iain had said we will do.
Oh well, we got there in the end after a lot of faffing about and post-it note sticking/re-arranging.
So Monday (tomorrow in this case) is the official start of production. Even though we decided to make some mood boards over the weekend to get them out of the way. Monday we will spend the whole day concepting ideas; first some time creating thumbnails for each type of asset (player ship, enemy ships, props & environments, and VFX such as missiles and shields), then we will spend a few hours picking the thumbnails we like the look of the most and bringing them to life by turning them into an actual design which, as of Tuesday, we will be able to turn into actual assets to be used in the games.
Just a quick note, even though it will be a 2D scrolling game I have decided that I will create my assets in 3D using 3DS Max; so exciting times ahead...
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