Author: shaneh369

Today was an awesome and fun day! We got to meet with Rob, a character artist, and Shoddy who specializes in getting models ready for animation, but can also do animation if necessary. We got to meet with Rob and he showed us some really cool stuff. He does the character models in a 3d art program called Zbrush. He claims that “anything is possible” in Zbrush and we got to see many of the features it has to offer, like textures, sculpting tools, UV maps. UV Maps are a 2d representation of a 3d object, and they can be made using MODO, and then edited in Photoshop for fine tuning details. For implementation into game engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine, he imports the character model into Maya so that Shoddy can prepare it for animation. “How?” you may ask? He takes the character model and adds joints to all the places that the animator will move. Then he can edit the joints to make sure that everything is moving naturally. For animation, he sets a few key poses that he’s wants the character to be in in the animation, and Maya blends the motion between the points to make the animation look smooth and natural. Shoddy also has the cutest but one of the most energetic pugs. He likes to sit in your lap, so as soon I sat down he jumped into my lap, and then Chandler’s. He also liked licking my fingers, but he really liked just attacking them; he was crazy and jumping to try and bite them sometimes. But because he was so cute and small, it was so funny! To conclude our visit at Mighty Rabbit Studios, they gave 5 PS4 GAMES as well as a bunch of stickers and an Octodad tie!

Today was just awesome because I got to learn so much about running a business and the finance behind game development. First, we were supposed shadow one of their character artists today, but he isn’t back yet from his trip, so we instead got to hear about Ben’s career. He’s more of the businessman for Mighty Rabbit and so deals with stuff like management and finance over art design or programming. He claims it’s the same boring stuff an accountant does, but it was actually really interesting to hear about. First, he was busy in the morning, but he gave us a project to work on. We took the game idea that I’m working on – a 3d 2 player tanks battle game – and had to come up with a pitch to try and get money to develop the game. (see above for examples of our work) After we delivered this pitch, we got great feedback and how best to sell a pitch to get funding. You need to include artwork and an in depth view of your game in the pitch, but start the pitch with just a 2-3 sentence overview of the game. One thing that surprised me is that you need to have 75% of your game completed before a producer will consider investing in it. You need 75% because you need enough of your game to produce a “vertical slice” to show off to your producer. A vertical slice is basically a fully working demo of your game, like maybe a single level to show that this game will work and can be completed with funding. It was really cool to hear about, and for our last day tomorrow we will get to see character design and animation.

Today was a really cool day. We got to shadow a programmer working on Unreal Engine (similar to Unity which we use) and the coding that goes into making a game. They have this collaborative program so that everytime someone makes a change in the code, they upload it to the server and then another programmer checks it over before it is implemented into the code. This helps the collaboration between programmers and also prevent mistakes like the problem that happened to Kurt. We also got to learn some helpful information to help us code, like setting breakpoints to easily find a problem or researching online for the code to save time. As you can see above, he has the equivalent of five screens (one giant monitor split into 4 windows and one normal sized monitor) to aid with the programming process. We also got to work on our own projects in game design today. Right now I’m creating a 3-d 2 player tanks game where you try and shoot the other player before they kill you first. It’s a step up from the roll a ball program but I can do it. Today was really fun and I can’t wait to see some cool character design tomorrow.

Today we began our week at Mighty Rabbit Studios. We got to see some confidential stuff today, so that was really cool, but unfortunately, I can’t really talk too much about it. But I’ll give you as much as I can. We were shadowing a programmer working on this new game called ███████ for a company called ████████.  The thing about working on a team of programmers for a big game is that they go through at least a thousand revisions of the code each day. A 10 gigabyte game requires a lot of code and so the code is constantly being added to and edited by the team of programmers. Unfortunately for Kurt, the person we were shadowing, something went wrong and they didn’t catch it immediately (because it takes 30 minutes to compile the code and export it to the platform to test it), so he has to go through 1000 different versions of the code to see where the mistake was made. Fortunately, this time spent troubleshooting can be shortened by doing a binary search of the versions. Choose the version in the middle of the first and last one and if it works, the problem must’ve occurred after it, and so you don’t have to check all versions before it. If it doesn’t work, then all versions after that one won’t work either, so they don’t have to be checked because they’re not the root of the problem. While we were waiting for the versions to upload so he can test them, he helped us improve our games and gave us an inside look at the programming and design that goes into making one of their most popular games Breach and Clear. Another highlight of my day was going to Freddy’s with the team, as you can see below. Today was awesome, and I can’t wait for tomorrow. You can download the game that I worked on today here: https://www.mediafire.com/?io5cdguuhrfgfya 

Hi everyone! I am so excited for this opportunity in game design ! This is awesome !!!!