After many years of therapy, I'm finally able to talk about Otter Space without running into the woods and screaming like an insane swamp person. (Not really.)
I've started a new semester, which means I need to keep updating my blog with two new games that I'm a part of and start organizing my thesis into coherent thoughts, but because of organizational and emotional reasons, I don't want to do that without first closing off Return To Otter Space.
I learned a lot. I'll start with that. Working on a production team while juggling the rest of my classes was quite the experience; I would like to say I learned to manage my time and energy better, but the farther in the semester I got the more I was just cranking out animations and models without really having the time to reflect and revise them. I didn't even go home for Thanksgiving, though relocating my cat for a few days was a big factor in that. I worked SO HARD on my film, but my downfall was relying and trusting teammates until it was too late.
Before we go any further, here's the final result.
I cringe watching it even now. Screenings were an absolute embarrassment, but luckily I was the first film to go on the last day (because I was so late to screening sign-ups, but I'll talk about that in a bit) so there weren't a lot of people there. I wanted to prove so badly that I could do a game instead of a film and still be able to get a film out of it to show for my degree requirements, and I failed so miserably. I'd say it was all my fault, but it really wasn't.
First off, I don't ever want to be the solo artist for a game EVER AGAIN. I can't graduate if I'm dead from overworking myself. Though I have to admit, I did a really good job with the animations - I just wish they had been implemented correctly. I had waited too long to give the animations to the team member handling cinematics, but he had also waited too long to learn the unity package. I had no idea he had planned to just screen record what played in the game preview, which made it look more like an animatic than an actual render. I would have learned it myself if I knew that.
Unity is a great program, but the one important factor is that it comes with a skeleton of an engine and things like post processing need to be imported and implemented, unlike Unreal. That being said, I had trusted that the graphics programmer in the group had been working on post processing effects and shaders through the project. Well, he didn't. I didn't get any particles, even though I had been asking for them for weeks, and all the post processing was done the night before the film was due. In fact, almost everything was done the night before and the DAY it was due. Even all the sound. I can't describe the disappointment I felt when I heard the sound track. While the ship was crashing, pretty bell sounds were heard in the background. Not exactly what I had in mind. He also hadn't mixed any of the audio, even though I had given him the parameters far in advance and he had promised to look into them. I had no choice but to turn in a mess of a project that we 'finished' minutes before screening sign-ups started.
And then the video broke and I had to fix it, which put me at the end of the line and gave me one of the worst times. My team hadn't even shown up to the screenings. That hurt, but could I really blame them? I didn't want to go either.
It was all incredibly frustrating, and at some point I need to go back and get some of those sweet animations and models out of it, but I'm still not ready to face that. I learned a very valuable lesson in team management, and I won't ever trust someone when they say they've been working unless they show me some sort of tangible progress. I plan to have a vetting process for my thesis, and luckily I have an army of programmers that I TAed for in IGME, so I know who is a hard worker and I can choose some of them to bring on to the project.
There's not much I can say about Otter Space other than that I learned some hard lessons and got some great work out of my end. When I'm famous and write my book about how I became successful, Otter Space will be the chapter where I talk about my lowest point in my career. . . I mean, hopefully. If you've been reading along, (who am I kidding, no one is ever going to read this, but I need some sort of closing,) thanks for reading and viewing the mess that my junior game turned out to be, and maybe you've learned from my experience too. If you're making a game with cinematics, just. . . don't. Don't do it. Run the other way.
See you in the next games!
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