Salford City CollegeEccles Sixth Form CentreBTec Level 3Extended Diploma in Creative Media ProductionGames Design

FMP - Production Log

Name Sam Reynolds

Date: 03.02.14

Today I began to come up with my idea. I first started off by thinking about the genre of the game, being a space simulator based on spaceships I thought of idea’s that would be a suitable for that. I began to think of what I could do with spaceships. I then began to think of how I could approach what I have thought about and began to come up with ideas. I thought about flying ships or being inside of a ship doing a mission focussing on the first person shooter side of the game and not the flying side of it. Having decided to focus on the first person shooter side I then had to think of how I would show this and what I could do for this to become visible as well as making it fit in well with the game itself. After a lot of thought on what I would do I thought that the best way to approach this would be to have the level set in a spaceship and have the objective to be to collect the black box of the ship.

Date: 10.02.14

I spent most of this week looking for images to make up my mood board, after looking through the internet for some time, I collected a wide range of images that I could off, I have images from all sorts of games, and films. I first of began to look for inertias of spaceships from movies, I found a couple of picture that would show what I wanted but couldn’t find lots. After that I began to look at spaceships from the game itself and from movies. I managed to get a lot of spaceships from the game that I could use to get a style that I would like to go with. I then began to look for some people that I could use as the character, I looked at some from Stargate and Star Wars so that I could a sort of pirate look, I got a couple I like but it was quite hard to find what I had in mind but made good inspiration.

Date: 17.02.14

After collecting some images and research I began to create some plans for what I was making so that I had something to go off. For the planning I decided that I would make a schismatic of the level so I knew where things would be and what they would be. I made this using Photoshop, just making simple squares that would help with the scale of each room with each other when making the level.

Date: 24.02.14

Today I did my pitch, I feel like the pitch went well, I got in all the things that I wanted to say and a lot of extras while keeping the length of it a decent size. I would like to have done the pitch earlier and spent more time working on the project than preparing on my pitch. Although I didn’t get to do my pitch early I think it was better because I got to spend more time putting stuff in to my pitch. As soon as I finished my pitch I began to build the models I have planned out and import them in to unity so that I could begin to test things out and get ready to build the game, during the time i wasn’t working on my pitch I was inside of unity testing out texturing, scripts and messing with lighting and rendering to get the effects what I wanted.

Date: 03.03.14

After I figured how the textures worked and how to import models from modeller that I have made, I began to work on making models that would be in the actual game, I first started off by making the corridor shell. I first off started making the outside of it using the cube tool and bevelling in order to get the shape that I wanted. After doing that I began to make the door controls, the door and all other bits that are inside of the corridors. After creating the corridor I began to separate it all so that I could texture it much easier, so the computer was separate, the door, walls etc. After I had the bits separated, I exported the UV textures I moved got each one and put them all in to Photoshop so that I could add in textures. the textures that I used where high res pictures that I found on the internet, after editing them a little I put them in to Photoshop with the exported UV textures and cut out the textures around the outline I got when exporting the textures to create a fully textured UV Texture that could be put on to my models.

UV MAP EXPORT TEXTURED UV MAP

Date: 10.03.14

After making all the corridor models and textures I came across a problem in which the imported models wouldn’t generate normals, meaning that I was unable to apply textures to them, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it without completely rebuilding them all in a different 3D modelling program. After a sometime of messing with it and trying to find out what had happened I managed to get the door controls model working with textures, all though they didn’t go on correctly the model did texture, I thought I knew what the problem was and tried to fix it with all the other models but I had no luck. I decided to continue to make models to put in to the game thinking it was a problem with just them models but I was still unable to get it to work after that, I also tried to fix it by using different machines and still had no luck, with time being short I decided to continue to build the level and look at it when I have spear time.

This picture show 3 textured Door Controls, the middle and right one are the ones that I managed to get working, the one on the right is a textured on but doesn’t show it.

Date: 17.03.14

After being unable to figure out how to fix the problem with my textures I decided that I will leave the texturing until the end of the project and if still unable to get them to work I will leave them out. It is very unfortunate that I couldn’t get the textures working but doesn’t ruin the game. I spent a lot of time at home and in college modelling out the level. Toward the end of the week I went in to unity and did a lot of scripting, I put in a sprinting and crouching script to, a crosshair script and some shooting scripts. Although I had some problems with the shooting scripts that I used and ended up using a different one I found on the internet which isn’t as good as the one I was using but it worked. After getting the scripts in and working I went back to modelling out the level and getting that in to the game. I modelled out the canteen in the spaceship and put in the tables try’s and glasses I had a problem with them colliding with the floor and they were all passing through, I managed to fix this using just a basic box collider and making it fit around the models so they would collide with other objects.

Date: 24.03.14

After my personal computer broke on the 19th I have been unable to work on my project at home, causing my progress to fall behind the times I set, I am working very hard to catch up to where I should be and will try to get the software I need on to my personal laptop to do as much work on the unity side as I can and model as much as I can in college time. I was able to model a lot of stuff in college but due to my personal computer being broke I was unable to get the game files off my hard drive and work on the unity part of stuff. Although I was able to work on other thing in unity and move them in to the actual game when I get it back. In college I managed to model out almost all of the levels rooms.

Date: 31.03.14

Having got my personal computer fixed I can get back on track to where I wanted to be up to last week, there isn’t much that needs to be done now, just a couple more models and a little bit of coding. I have uploaded all my stuff on to the blog with the acceptation of my project, which I will upload as late as possible so I can flush out any bugs I am having. During the last couple of days I could not get the AI for the enemy’s to work, I decided that I would leave it out and focus on the core of the game and get other things working instead. At the end of the week I managed to get something that could be played but was unable to get the AI to work inside of the game. At the end I managed to get everything but the presentation and evaluation on to my blog, the presentation was out inside of a file on the sheared drive and I didn’t have chance to upload my evaluation.

Date: 22.04.14

Today I had received feedback on my work from harry, I was told that I had placed something in the wrong side such as the planning and ideas generation. I changed my date in which I would have the work done by to the 16th of May. I began to do some improvements and work on getting things to a better standard so that I could get a better grade.

Date: 29.04.14

All of this week has been spent improving my work and re-arranging my blog in the correct areas.

Date: 06.05.14

This week I spent still improving my work, I added in more detail and added in some of the ideas that I came up with on to my blog. I also went in to my production log and added some more detail and some picture to show examples of how I have done and how things were done.