Tuesday 18/10 - Time slipping away unnoticed

Another day 'at the office' and so far it's a good start to the week, it's two days where I've arrived for 9am instead of 9.30am, am sure I'll be making that earlier as I get closer to crunch time (not sure why I use this phrase as it stinks of Americanism, but for once I don't actually mind).
Today was basically yesterday but today, and working on different assets. It really is quite incredible how much time I will spend working on one small thing trying to make it look exactly as I want it to, and often that look is not even good enough and I have to keep tweaking and tweaking until I finally do get it to look right. It is so easy to spend half hour, an hour even, merely just playing with different colours on a background or some asset (such as the colour of the player ship or the glow around some text) before thinking "yeah that's not too bad at all, I like that. Ah but wait, what if....NO I've already spent thirty minutes tweaking the colour between the green and the blue spectrum's trying to find the right shade of greeney-blue glow. Must move on!"; and before you know it you're looking at the clock and realise it's already lunch time, you're half way through your working day and you've spent all your time doing something you thought would take you an hour at the most. That's the thing with us artists we're all perfectionists and we always want to tweak tweak tweak followed by polishing, and I say this because I know I'm not the only one as I was talking about this Simon who has basically been doing the same thing.

All in all, though, it has to be said I find that my work seems a lot more polished and presentable (well what there is of it, of course) which turns out is a good thing because we had some surprise visitors in today, two women from Sony came in to look at what we were working on, and they weren't afraid to give their opinion either. I heard them give ideas to others, whether the extent of the advice they gave me was "I hope you're going to keep that green grid in there" to which I replied "oh of course, it's part of the look I'm going for" which she then said "oh good, I was afraid you were going to rub it out". I showed them some more of my work, of course, but there was not too many ideas being thrown my way, which could mean either; "that's very good and you clearly know what you are doing, and so don't need any advice on which direction to take", or "yeah that's not bad but not so interesting so have nothing much to offer you", to which of course I prefer to think it was the former rather than the latter.

As today I just worked on creating new assets and improving old ones I will just list and briefly explain what I did today:

1) HUD (Heads Up Display) - I had actually started modelling this in 3DS Max yesterday while at uni and also spent some time at home working on it also. But today I spent some more time getting the right textures to make it look more realistic and adding other features. It has gone from a pretty boring looking 'radar-type' screen to a quite interesting an nice to look at feature.

How the HUD looks after today

How the HUD looked this time yesterday

The bored bit (the part that is known as the HUD) was actually modelled in 3D and is bigger than what you see, which will be seen when in the main menu (there is a twisty knob thing and a switch that are animated).

2) Game Over - I created a game over screen which is animated. It looks pretty awesome actually as I used the old player ship I designed before (the funky looking 3D one) and just obliterated it onscreen. It looks pretty awesome. Maybe on another day when I have the time I will turn it into a GIF and show you it on here.

3) Enemy ship #3 - I have started working on the third enemy ship, it is a pretty mean little guy. It has been modelled and rendered, so it just needs to be re sized and have the right effects added on. It will be a different colour, as you can see from the screenshots above so far I have green neon for the player ship, and blue and red neon's for enemies. This one will be a kind of pink/purple neon, but like I mentioned earlier, it can take ages to tweak and get the right colour so I have decided to leave that for tomorrow.

The rest of the time was spend tweaking other various assets that weren't quite looking right in the game. Tomorrow I plan to add a double shield to the player's ship, as the player loses a life when he/she is hit by the enemy they will subsequently lose a shield, with the last life representing the ship itself and thus activating the whole ship getting blown to smithereens in the 'Game Over' screen.

Bonne nuit les petits!