My Role and Work I Did

My role in this project was that of an artist. I was in charge of the narrative for the game and assisted in the level design and environment art. I created a solid narrative for the events of the game we planned to make and even made a background document about the narrative as well. I also searched for assets to use in the project for about 5 - 10 hours, and despite not being able to find everything we needed or wanted, I managed to create the base of the environment and level design. I was going to do more with the environment side of things, but due to stress and burnout, there were several days where I couldn't find the energy to work on the project.

The Most Difficult Part

The most difficult part of this project was trying to find assets to use to create a destroyed mall environment. I searched on Fab, Quixel, and multiple free assets sites and barely managed to find enough things to create the environment we were looking for. However, there were a good number of things that I couldn't find that would have made certain parts of the environment difficult to do had I made it that far.

What I Learned

There were three main struggles I had to deal with during this project. The first was communication, but this was not for the entire duration of the project. During the first couple weeks of project, there wasn't a whole lot of communication between me, Riley, and Kylar, which resulted in us not entirely knowning what the others were doing and getting behind on the project. This changed in the last week of the project, and there was a lot more communication between the three of us, but by this point, we were quite behind on things. The second struggle was dealing with the burnout I have been experiencing since the end of February thanks to academic and financial stress. There were multiple days where I would open the project to work on it and then sit in front of my computer for hours doing nothing. I don't have any actionable plan or methods I can employ to help with this problem, and it may get worse in the coming weeks due to finals, but I can try to set a more strict and concrete schedule to assist with staying on top of things. The third issue was that of scope. I and my teammates can agree that the scope for this project was bigger than we could handle, however, we wanted to try to challenge ourselves a little with this big scope and thought that we had a good idea that was acheivable. Unfortunately, we bit off too much and were not able to finish everything we wanted. That being said, I don't really have any regrets and I am happy with what we were able to achieve with this project, and although they never made it into the game, I can say we had a lot of good ideas. Overall, this project went a little better for me than last project, but I still have ways to improve.

What I Am Most Proud Of

I would say I am most proud of the structure that I created as a base for the mall. I followed Riley's reference image pretty closely and was able to create something that resembled it a lot, despite the minimal resources I had to work with. I also really like the changes I made to the sky sphere to add to the feel of the environment.