Catching Up

It’s hard to escape the curse of the two week new year’s resolution. According to this site about 30% of people will give up by week two, so I don’t feel too terrible. Overall, I discovered that trying to find a project to learn, explore, and complete in the course of a day ended up sapping a lot of the fun and enjoyment out of the process. Plus, getting sick for a week doesn’t help either… I’m going to switch gears and try a different approach over February, with an emphasis on more incremental projects at a pace I can enjoy.

With that said, the past few weeks have been busy:

Maya

My work with Maya treks on. It’s been interesting to slowly make the mental shift from Houdini to Maya after working with Houdini for so long. There is definitely a different emphasis between the two programs, with Houdini focusing on the developer, whereas Maya puts the user or artist front and center and focuses on workflow. Maya is certainly just as pluggable as Houdini, but it’s a bit more work to figure out how everything snaps in. I finally discovered the Maya Devkit which has made understanding the inner workings a lot easier.

Mini-Project #1

As I mentioned before, my current goal is to shift away from daily one-offs to a longer term project. For this, I decided on remaking a classic arcade game (Pac-Man) in the style of a modern interpretation of it (Pac-Man 256). I loved the 3D endless maze style in the remake and I’ve always wanted to remake the original, so it seems like a perfect project. So far, I’ve modeled the individual tiles in Maya, built UV maps for each, and made some simple textures in Photoshop. I’ve also done some preliminary work in Unity to procedurally generate the maze.

Global Game Jam!

My girlfriend and I participated in the Global Gam Jam last weekend, taking our team of two over to IGDA GBC’s venue at George Brown College. It was a great experience because, more than anything, it makes you realize what can be accomplished in a 48 hour time frame. We ran with making a TwinBee-inspired vertical scroller in Unity using hand-drawn 2D assets made in Illustrator. The theme was nominally ‘ritual’, so that informed our decision to make it about a Morning Ritual (a particularly common title from the looks of the search page…) involving coffee and devils. I’m really proud of our result, even with the gameplay being pretty barebones. You can play it here!.