Today was the end of the game jam and our last day in Paderborn. After the club, Alex and I ended up sleeping in late and arriving at the games lab around 11. I got to see an update of the game that implemented the grappling hook and streams that were going to be part of the puzzle. I finished up the animations and had to go through and fix a lot of the start and end poses. I clearly know nothing about animation blending trees (I didn’t know they were a thing until today) but I am eager to learn how to do it when I have more time. It seems like a pretty integral part of video game animations, so I’m going to start watching tutorials and reading up about it while in Frankfurt next week. After that I tried to bring my rock pile into mudbox to paint, but then I realized I would need to UV the ENTIRE pile of rocks before I could do that. I wanted to add glowing algae to highlight where the otter could enter holes, but after spending a stupid amount of time UVing rocks, I eventually gave up and went back to modeling. I should have been texturing, but I was so tired at that point that I would have rather just kept modeling, and we had so little time anyway that I had to make the decision to finish the game jam doing the thing I love the most. I created corals and sea weeds to add atmospheric aesthetic and used mudbox for the first time since the single lab day we were taught it in the fall semester. It was somewhat like Zbrush so I was able to bring over the fundamental principles of sculpting with a tablet and keyboard, but I was definitely lost with most of the UI and could only create the most basic sculpts. I would also like to learn mudbox more for this kind of occasion; I can only use the school’s licenses of Zbrush so I only had access to the student version of mudbox.
Onto the presentation. I was pretty upset about how it went; I thought the game designers and coders would do a good job of presenting, but they were stumbling over their words, not pointing out important mechanics, not explaining the story correctly, not showing enough of the environment. It was also very dark, which I felt ultimately ruined the whole game. Most of the models I worked on today were not implemented. However, we were able to implement an impressive number of mechanics and all of them worked as intended, even though they were a bit clunky. All the other games were good in concept, but there was only one that I thought was interesting and enjoyable. A lot of the other teams had a lot of infighting and wrote over each other’s code, or there were no artists on the team so they were lacking visually. Ultimately I’m happy with what we were able to do, and plan on continuing the game this fall semester as a sophomore film requirement.
After that we all took a big picture and said our goodbyes. I was really sad to say goodbye to everyone, especially the few people I had gotten really close to over the past few days. We went out for burgers with the professor and two of the German students who we had all grown attached to. I have started to have conversations about returning to Paderborn to work on the game they will be developing my senior year. It’s still just an idea, but the more I talk about it the more I’m already excited to start planning it. If it were up to me I would have spent another week in Paderborn with the students, but we are off to Frankfurt for a very fun week and our German friends can get back to schoolwork and finishing up their semester.