Post 22-08-15 : Project 3 Lowering Scope, And Focusing On CIU And Planing Career Path

We ended up taking a lot out of Sugar Crash. Now there is no stashing, inventory limits and trading scene, dropped the amount of houses down to six, the amount of candy to three and lowered the overall candy amount (still tweaking the amount), trading is now done with a button press, and bullies are used as restrictions the player has to pass. The value tree and the moon timer are no longer necessary as the game ends when the player reaches the final goal and candy has no value, only liked or disliked, so they have been removed too. The goal is still to eat as much chocolate as possible but there are two goals to complete which are "treasure stashes" that the player needs to get to to finish the game.

I plan on starting a company so Sean told me it may be a good idea to focus on project managing, so I need to get good at documenting and hold the "vision" for future projects which is what I've been doing for Sugar Crash. I also want to try getting into concept art (as it was my original career choice and may still be what I want to do) so I've been thinking about doing something artistic for my elective, I was thinking about doing fundamentals of art but as so many people have told me I am apparently already a decent artist so maybe 2D animation instead.

Sean and I spent most of last week working on the CIU project. We chose to do a character creator simulator which I thought would be too over scoped for the amount of time we had. I managed to use an old model I made for the male and female body types (just changed height and width to make them look different) and I also created a script that allowed the player to change between these to models. Unfortunately (and thankfully) the work I did wasn't required because Sean found something called UMA which gave us models that we can alter and scrips to help us do it. We still needed to create the scene and UI which meant more scripting. I created the script to control the cameras position when switching between changing the body and changing the face. I also created the face UI adding buttons for each category (forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) and the sliders for each of those. After Sean created the function for altering the character's mass I was able to do the same fore the body height and all the facial features. Players can now change gender and body type, alter mass and height, and change arm and leg shape, head size, forehead shape, eyes, nose, ears, mouth, cheeks, and jaw. I was surprised and pleased that I managed to get the facial features to work properly, good to know that I'm not completely useless at scripting.

Over the holidays I plan on working on my scripting and art skills to make sure I can do more than documentation when we work on VIRION. It is also something I want to do for personal projects in the future. As I plan on making MMOs I also want to research companies that have made (or focused on) MMOs as well as MMO games to learn more about what goes into making one, the programming, currency, marketing, etc. I under stand I have a lot to learn and a lot of games to make before I can create an MMO but hopefully VIRION will be my first step in reaching my goal.