Development Blog 6
New semester means new team and a whole new set of challenges. Since this is the start of our senior capstone experience we wanted to make sure that the game we develop is one that each person is passionate about, while still being something that can be shown off to recruiters. To do this we wanted to push the abilities of each member of the team. one of the easiest ways we found to do this was to move to the Unreal Engine. A primary reason we went with this decision is that the artists felt confident that moving engines would allow their workflow to be much smoother, and the early hit that the programmers and designers would take in productivity as they learn the new engine would be made up for by the amount of polish that could be done to the game.
When it comes to other goals for the semester, our programmers were really adamant about adopting many industry standard dev-ops procedures. this doesn’t really effect me too much as I had already gotten used to testing everything I made in Wwise before pushing, but I’m glad to see the artists holding themselves accountable in adding and testing their own assets. We also wanted to experiment in VR, but with us learning a new engine it is unlikely we will move forward with those ideas. we have already run into issues with using the new engine, as the programmers and designers have to reorient themselves from the Unity workflow and get used to the minor differences in the new engine. I still believe that once these hurtles are overcome we will be able to create something better than we could make in unity.
Finally, Thinking about what I bring to the team is a difficult question to answer. as a sound designer in preproduction I find it difficult to dedicate an extensive amount of time to creating complex assets like music, or even implementing my assets before we decide on a concrete concept. However, I feel that once the concept is chosen I can use the skills I’ve learned from using Wwise in previous projects to create soundscapes that draw in players and really add a lot of immersion into whatever concept we move forward with. the one thing I worry is that I went into this semester really hoping to get a good example of my spatial audion development, but If we go with Dead Pedal, a vehicular combat game, I would have less reason to focus on spatial audio over high octane SFX and music. I brought up the idea of having some sort of diegetic menu system, like a garage, where the player spends their time between missions where I could experiment with spatial audio, but we will have to see if we have the time to add something like that.
- Ian
