The first week of the second semester is now over and boy do I have a busy week ahead of me. Trust me, you'll pity me a little bit. Read on!
First of all, projects class wasted no time in kicking the semester into high gear with the announcement what we are going to start pitching possible thesis games which will be the main thing we will be working on for the rest of our careers as masters students. Almost everyone in my cohort will be pitching the games in their design documents that were required last semester for Game Design I. We aren't required to pitch those game by any means, though. Personally, I am still debating whether or not I will do that as well. I've had two ideas since being in this program for our thesis projects. The first was my game about attachment, which you can read about in the design document below. The second one was an asymmetrical cooperative game about trust that I have been talking about in the last two months. One of my classmates is extremely interested in pitching the latter for me, which I believe is a testament to how good the idea could be if done correctly. I'm leaning on pitching it with him but I want some feedback on my design document regarding scope before I make my decision.
I'm taking a Game Art class which I am pretty excited about because I simply do not know that much about the art pipeline in dev. We had a short class with Gabe Olsen who works at Disney here in Salt Lake City, and he gave us our first assignment - create a 500 triangle model in Maya for an action here. I almost dropped my pen. I've barely used Maya and now I'm going to create a 500 triangle character. Because our class was super short and we didn't go over the basics of modeling or Maya, I'm going to be hitting the Digital Tudors pretty hard this weekend so I can shop up with some progress by next class. I'm excited yet slightly worried.
Finally, the Ubisoft team has settled on some redesigns for our game. Now it is up to Jason, Troy and myself to create a 10 page design document that knocks the pants off of those folks up in Montreal by Friday at 4 PM. Its almost surreal really. I'm about to send a design document on one of my games to one of the most illustrious studios in the entire industry. The pressure is on, and I'm pumped to get to work with the other two guys and turn out an awesome doc.
That's pretty much it right now. Not too many projects but the ones that I am working on are the most important in my time as a student of the game industry. Whew!
Well, I'm going to get started. I'll update when I have some more news.
-Andrew
First Week Back, Tons to Do
