Genius Gallery: A 3D artist's LD58 postmortem - Part 3
Part 3
If you missed Parts 1 or 2 of my postmortem, here are the links: - Part 1 - | - Part 2 -
(As always, if reading isn’t your thing and you just want to see the pretty pictures, scroll down 😉)
When it rains, it pours
I'm sure some of you have had an experience like this before. The jam is going reasonably well, you're doing your best to keep things moving along as smoothly as possible. But right when you begin to feel comfortable, disaster strikes. Well that's exactly what happened to me on Sunday morning.
Personally, I blame the game jam gremlins.
Note: I should have included this section in my previous post, but unfortunately I got the date mixed up for which day this happened. I only realized this after going through my teams discord chat to grab the image above. Honestly the entire jam blended together so I've been relying on a combination of file save dates, github repo history, and discord to keep track of the order in which things happened.
Well when I woke up from my long nap and sat back down at my computer this was staring me in the face. This is not the kind of thing you want to start your day off on any day, let alone right when you're in the middle of a game jam. Now I'm fairly computer literate so I didn't panic immediately, but I definitely had an unsettling feeling in my stomach. As far as I could remember I never overclocked my RAM so this message didn't make sense. My first attempt was to pretend I didn't see it, do a hard shut down and turn it back on, hoping things would boot up like normal and that would be the end of it. After all, is says 'system is boot up with default settings', that sounds fine... default settings is fine, right?
Wrong. It booted up with the same error, because of course it wouldn't be that easy. So, I had to go into the BIOS and hope that I could change some settings until I could get it to start up. Multiple back-up plans were already going through my head. Maybe one of my sticks of RAM went bad, so I could try removing one? If that doesn't work I could swap it out with the other and try again? If neither of those things work, as a last resort I could always remove my hard drive, place it in an external enclosure and try to finish the jam using my laptop. I at least took comfort knowing that whatever the hell went wrong, I would not let it defeat me.
Thankfully after a few different cycles of changing a BIOS setting, restarting, reverting it back, and repeating the process with another setting I did it—I got it to boot up! I've never been so happy to see that stupid little windows loading circle, and it finally displayed the login screen. Crisis averted! And it only took me 12 minutes of troubleshooting. I could finally get back to work.
Later that day...
Getting back to where I left off at the end of Part 2, it was Sunday evening and I had just finished up some of the Beast assets. For whatever reason I skipped over the last few Beast items on the list and went straight into the Fantasy/Warfare category. As far as I can remember I was just looking forward to making a few cool looking fantasy weapons while I still had some creative energy left in me.
Fantasy Weapons
I started off with the shield since I knew the ice shield would be a simple recolor, plus if I made a buckler it's basically just a curved disc with some straps on the back. The fact that I was able to get those 2 assets done in under half an hour gave me a little more comfort to spend a bit more time on the rest of the weapons. The bow and fire arrow was a pretty quick job as well—just a duplicated spline sweep, a cylinder for the grip, long cylinder for the arrow shaft, salvaging part of the phoenix feather to create the fletching, and then I just had to make the arrow head. As simple as it is I feel like it turned out better than I expected.
I did however spend a good bit more time and detail on the glowing sword, magic staff, and thunder spear. I wanted to give them some more visual interest than just your bog standard medieval weapons. After all, these were supposed to be fantasy weapons. Sure the glowing sword is glowing, but it's got a double taper to the blade with a big ol' gem inside of it! That only makes sense in a fantasy setting. I followed suit with similar stylistic choices for the magic staff and whatever the hell a 'thunder spear' was supposed to be too. I was now sitting at 40 exhibit assets and it was right around 1 A.M., not bad at all. That left me enough ime to tackle some easy ones before my final few hours of sleep.
More beast items and some misc simple assets
I realized I had skipped over some of the beast items so I immediately started knocking those out. The unicorn horn was dead simple and kind of fun to texture since I was able to use the edges of the twisted tapered spline for the edge cuts on the UV. I'll have to remember that if I ever need to model a chocolate and vanilla twist ice cream cone. Then I knocked out the black ice gem in just a few minutes as it could just a simple re-color of the aether crystal. The giant pearl just felt too easy, as it's literally a sphere. At this point just dropping in a sphere and calling it a day felt wrong, so I took the dragon egg base and added some accent pieces for some visual variety. Next on the list was a dragonstone... but I had no clue what that was supposed to be. I noticed @zavi-reinagel was in the discord voice channel so I dropped in and our convo went a little something like this:
Zavi: What's up?
Me: Hey, uh... what's a dragon stone?
Zavi: »begins to describe a dragon stone«
Me: »interrupting« What if I just made a dragonball instead?
Zavi: ...
Zavi: OMG. That's way better.
Me: Heck yeah! We should change the rarity to 'Mythic' though.
Zavi: YES!
And that's how I got a dragonball into our game! 😆 Once again it was mostly just a sphere, but I went ahead and added the stars inside (even though they don't show up during gameplay 😩). I once again slightly changed up the base from the dragon egg/pearl, giving it a feel and color combo to fit the theme. After that I just had an 'unmelting ice cube', which I wasn't sure exactly how to go about. In theory I suppose it would be a perfect cube, but that felt wrong. So I rounded the corners and made it look like perhaps at one point it was beginning to melt and just decided 'ya know what, this melting this just isn't for me'. By the time I had wrapped up these assets it was now 3:30 A.M. and I had 6 more assets finished.
Still fueled by caffeine I figured I would knock out one more model before getting a few more hours of sleep and preparing for the final stretch of the jam. I didn't care if it was something that I spent a little more time on, as long as it looked cool. So I scanned the list for the perfect specimen: Fossilized Amber.
One hour later, it was done. I got all of the assets set up in Unity, made my final push to the git repo for the evening, and set off to grab my ~~40~~ ~~30~~ 25 winks. 😴
End of Part 3
There's still the final day of the jam left to cover. I probably could have included it here but I felt like Part 2 was already longer than it needed to be, so I decided to break this one up. If you've been following these posts I apologize for making you wait one final time.
For anyone reading who hasn't yet, please drop by our game page and give Genius Gallery a play!
I'm once again off to play and rate more jam entries! Leave a comment if you'd like me to play yours!