Post 12-08-15 : KPI, Pushing Play Test Back, Opening Day

Had my KPI meeting last week and got a lot of good information from it. For a long time I've wanted to be a freelance concept artist specializing in character concepts but for a couple of years now I have wanted to start my own company and have a larger end goal, creating an MMORGP. I understand that this will be a difficult goal to achieve and still have  lot of work to do before then. I still want to try my luck in the competitive world of concept art but it is no longer my final goal. I still need to research current concept artists and read blogs about game companies but lately I've been very busy with the CIU project and the current studio project to make up time for personal work.

Unfortunately we had to push the play test day a week ahead because neither team was ready, but it did give us an extra week to work on it. Since then we have made a playable game, we did, however, still have issues with communication. It took forever to get the assets we needed from the animators and we still don't have a few (tree, bully texture). Jo had made 14 different houses but because some of them have a lot of curves in them where we need to put in windows and doors it will be a bit difficult to work around, perhaps we will just use those ones for the background houses.

On Saturday the 4S1 team (placeholder name for the Virion team) attended the Opening day ceremony, first time I've been their as a presenter (can't speak for the rest of the team). Unfortunately Hayden couldn't make it because he had to deal with a possum problem, oh well. I was a bit nervous and anti-social at first but eventually got over it and started to help others and show off Virion. The Oculus was in the same room and everyone was into that making it a bit harder to get people into our game. Luckily we got quite a few groups playing and enjoying themselves, I never heard a single complaint about our game and ended up having a 40 minute match with one of them. It seemed like we have reached our target audience but we also noticed that the younger generations got hooked into it too.

I wish we could have gotten at least one audio student in on this project, I am not very good at making sound effects but still managed to make all we need before Thursday. The children now have voices, screaming, laughing, knocking on doors, footsteps, and eating sounds to go with their animations, sometimes making games makes me feel like God. I have also completed the bush, fence, and trading box models and added them to the scene, players can now properly stash candy and trade with the NPCs. I also completed the background and sides filling in the empty space with streets and houses, it now looks like a proper neighborhood. There are still a few things we can do before the play test tomorrow but I think we are ready with what we have now.