Modeling, fixes, weird art and research via playing video games...WHALE YEAH!

This week felt uber productive for both me and the team. My facebook feed exploded with the sheer number of orthos and concept art iterations. Our team also got to play the latest build with actual models in it (and a lot of fangirl screaming about it from Henderson), and I realized that I should go MLG Pro since I found a game breaking strategy that no one can beat.

What I Did

At the start of this week I finished the modeling of the tank unit by adding the remaining parts of its armor. This actually took quite some time since lining up with the orthographs as best I could while actually having the pieces in the proper areas on the model proved to be a challenge. (2 hours)

After Kai-Lin reviewed my first phase he gave me a few areas to fix for the rigging process to work, and using his many useful screenshots I got the approval of the phase 2 model. (1 hour)

At the start of this week a new MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena which is the genre of League of Legends and Dota) came out for the iPhone called Vainglory. After playing a practice match (an incredibly boring mode which is designed for you to test out characters) with the Character SAW, I found that the way his passive works for his basic gatling gun attack would be a good way to implement it in our game. After bringing this to Jon's attention he said that that was actually how he visualized the unit working in our game ending the message with "good reference." Seeing as that was good reference I decided to be a masochist and try out every character in practice mode to get a feel for them, and have a few ideas for how units such as support and rush should work, and plan to share this with Jon the next time I speak with him. (10 characters practicing for 15 mins each = 2.5 hours)

Speaking of support units our team decided to play the game this past Friday, and I had the pleasure of going against both Jon and Alex. I accidentally found a game breaking strategy of just building support units, which thanks to their stacking buffs eventually had them dealing infinite damage. Our game, which usually takes about 15-20 mins per match was a 3 minute domination with the opponent left in awe by my mad skills (or something like that), but thanks to this we learned an aspect that needs to be rebalanced for our game to be enjoyable by people that aren't me. (9 minutes ;D)

Thanks to my partner Ryan, I was assigned the task of trying to come up for an idea for the crippler where he wanted me to combine scorpion elements with other animals. Though I cannot exactly say it was a success in terms of both artistic talent and coming up with an idea that the team liked, I had a lot of fun doing it. (3 hours)

Lastly, Desiree has posted the orthographs for the tank super unit and the tank tower, and I have been modeling them now, and plan to have them up on dropbox by tomorrow afternoon. (3 hours)

Total amount of time: 11.5 hours

What I'm Going to Do 

As stated above I'm going to finish the tank super unit and tower by tomorrow, depending on where the phases are start to UV the models that are already done and begin to texture the models that I am tasked with texturing. I also plan to speak with Jon and write up documentation on my findings on the game Vainglory. 

Debrief Not Deboxer

Shout out to my main Man Ryan for giving me things to do, and for being just an awesome guy, I'm going to miss having you as a partner. Also shout out to Henderson for starting normals on Augher in zBrush. I'm excited to see how effective that level of detail will transfer so I know for my own texturing purposes.