Daniel Blog

 Milestone 8 Hours: 7 Unfortunately another week where I did not have much time to work on the project, but the time I did spend was very useful. Pretty much all of this time was spent towards optimizing the game as we tested it for a little on the VR headset and it was, well, laggy to say the least. The biggest challenge this week was finding out what was causing the issues. We thought to begin with it had to do with the clusters of objects, which was mainly just because of the really high poly count, but even when we reduced it it didn't seem to do much. So we then decided that maybe it was because the clusters were being made in blender and exported rather than just using single trees (some sort of complicated object shadow problem?). We ended up figuring out it was actually the grass, and we think it was because it had a very dense poly count, lots of faces in such a small area. So we essentially removed it and will add it in again later in a better way (PNG grass or displaceme...

 Milestone 7 Hours: 15      This week we had beta presentations, so we worked a LOT on it. Most of the week was making sure we had a functional experience. As a group we essentially put in a whole day to just to getting it working and combined. We worked a lot separately, so combining everything together was really satisfying and ensured we had something made for the beta.      The biggest challenges this week were mostly just combining everything together and really pushing it as far as we could in the time we had. Once we had inserted everything together, we tried opening it on mobile and boy oh boy did we realize that we needed to work on optimization. The models were clearly too high poly, so (since I did a lot of the models and had the files) I went and I decimated almost all of them, reducing the poly count by almost 80%, which made it functional on mobile. The biggest individual challenge was the models being too high poly, but as a group I thin...

 Milestone 6 Hours: 5.5     This week a big challenge was just having enough time to work on the project and get all my work for other classes and work done. What I did have time for however, felt very productive and useful for the beta that is coming up this week. We managed to get the script done so we contacted the VA for our project and have plans to record the dialogue this week. We also decided we may need a second VA for narration which will help with our accessibility. Other things I worked on this week included tweaking the music a little bit, and the big thing I worked on this week was getting some models done. Alex sent us some sketches which we started modelling, and I managed to get a pretty good grasp on some of the environment models which I will be continuing to work on in the upcoming week.      The biggest challenge this week was with modelling and making sure I tried to optimize thing as best possible. A lot of our shapes were fairly simp...

 Milestone 5 Hours: ~ 12.5 hours      I spent a lot of time this week on the music, not only did I have to go in and edit it, but I also spend a long time finding free/royalty free looping samples that I could use to build this music with. A lot of the challenge was composing something that fit the mood without being too much. I ended up settling on something that is inspired by minecraft music, which I spent a lot of time researching how to build a track that followed that kind of sound. Piano as a base, with some light bells and strings in occasionally. I also added (and am still working on) getting some environment sounds in like the wind. The track isn't fully finished but it's getting there and I got some feedback from my group and they all seem to like it and think that sound is on the right track.      The biggest success was definitely composing something that worked and felt like it would fit our experience, despite not having much experience ...

 Milestone 4 - Getting Started     Hours Spent: 10 hours           To get started this milestone I worked on a lot of things. including the Alpha presentation, really narrowing ideas down with the group. I managed to get a little bit of a jump on getting some information on what the music is going to sound like and how I can go about creating that. We also managed to cast a voice actor to play our singularity, Gea.      First off with the Alpha presentation, creating it went pretty smoothly. We were just finishing up the proposal document, so a lot of the information wasn't new and it was just being transferred over from that, which was pretty easy. Our biggest challenge on that was how many other things we had to finish so we didn't have much time to practice. Luckily for me memorizing scripts isn't too hard, but we didn't have time to practice so it was a bit of a kerfuffle for presenting as a group.      Secon...

 Daniel Gagne - Milestone 3 Hours Spent: 4.5 hours      This week we really focused on getting our documents together and different group items set up. I set up the trello board and the github project. We also worked as a group to figure out who would have which roles, and what those roles would be. We also discussed starting our presentation and now that we've settled on an idea really nailing what our goal is for it. Our minimum viable product has been discussed and written out, and I think we're all pretty excited to start working on the project and see what we can really build.      I think that most challenging thing this week was definitely getting everyone's roles split up and trying to figure out what the most evenly distributed roles could be. In the end we figure we'll probably all do a little bit of everything, but we'd list our main role, our secondary role, and anything else we do is just extra. I ended up being the audio person, since I'm...

 Milestone 2 - Selecting an Idea Hours Spent: 2.5h This week we really wanted to narrow down our ideas from the large list, to maybe a more specific idea that our group as a whole thought was good. Our first step was eliminating all of the ones that nobody was hugely interested in so we held a little vote session where we had three votes each to put into the different ideas and we managed to narrow it down to around five ideas. We had a few choices that we felt were better as modifiers rather than whole ideas, for example the escape room could be combined with a larger idea to really strengthen an idea. The most difficult task was removing ideas we thought were good but just didn't think were plausible or felt a little too vague of an idea.  So this brought us down to even less ideas until we finally settled on one idea that ALL of us had voted for which was that YOU are the art. You create your character and from there we are going to expand on ideas once we get our idea chec...