Summertime has been a testament of trying to balance Capstone and my specialization. Clearly, Capstone's important because it's ... well, Capstone. It's the biggest project that anyone will be working on during the FIEA program and accounts for the majority of your experience developing a full-scale game. As an artist, your specialty is also important because it accounts for the majority of your portfolio pieces. There comes the difficulty of having to devote equal amounts of time to both of these things, and trying to squeeze in work for Common Core Art because that requires an almost equal amount of love.
Some weeks, Capstone had to be the focus and my Animation tests suffered - and vice versa. About halfway into the semester, I found this balance in spending my Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday exclusively for Capstone work, and the other four days divided up between Specialization and Common Core (usually Specialization gets almost all the attention, though ...). In any case! There's a lot of things to update on! This post is going to be about the majority of my Capstone work, and another post will be about my Specialization & Common Core. Hehe.
All of my animation for the Ley Ls game (save for one or two last - minute assets) have been completed for Capstone! Vala, the Minion (we call her "Morty"), and the Boss (we named her "Brittney", lol) are done for the game! Implementation is still going on for Brittney ... along with some tweaking with her programatically - animated body (it's really cool!). Overall, though, things are done for these characters right now.
Along with being the 3D animator for the Ley Lines game, I've also become one of the 2D artists for the game. In an effort to add in more context / story into our game, I drew the bookend cinematics for Ley Lines. They were written & voiced by our Project Lead, Matt. The overall wording for this is subject to be tweaked within the next week or two, but the images aren't going to change!
Since we wanted to avoid the previous hell of implementing video into the Unreal engine, I ended up rigging up up separate planes for each section of the cinematic and animating these sections in Maya. This results in a Motion Graphic that is more cost - effective and saves us any headaches with implementation. The only cost is the absence of nifty transitions between the images.
I've also been in charge of much of the UI for Ley Lines. I've been working on each of the needed screens for the game, and some minor elements for the in-game display.
Along with all of this, I've been working on some of our promotional materials. That mostly included building our website & making business cards to pass out at play testing. :B
The good news of this all? During this whole process, Ley Lines has been greenlit on Steam! We're hoping to release the game once we get our legal ducks in order. ♥ PLZ PLAY OUR GAME. OKAY.
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