At long last

Hi everyone.

It has been a long time since I last wrote in this blog, and that has been because of the huge amount of work that we did right before GGC, but also because after the conference I needed some chill time.

Summer has arrived for real in Sweden and this is a great opportunity to relax a bit and reminisce about the project I have been a part of.

As I have told you before I have been working with the project Bane for the last ten weeks. It is a teambesed multiplayer game for the PC in an fantasy enviroment where the players main goal is to capture nodes to gather the Abzolium resourse to win the match. The students in the group wanted to create a great artefacts for ones portfolios, get experience and we also wanted to continue working with the game to get a future game release.

When I joined this group I decided that I wanted to work mainly with art. Last year, on the project SAGE, I did not get very much art done. I was producing the group and made almost all of the animations, but no art of my own, concept art, textures or models. Therefore I wanted to try and figure out this year what I want to work with in the future. If I want to create 2D art, 3D art, animations or if I want to design or produce.

During this project I have learnt soooo much. Prior to working on Bane I have made nearly no textures or 3D models for a real game project, and now when it is all over I realise how much i have developed, and that I am actually pretty proud of the art that I have produced for the game.

Also, GGC went very well. We got very good feed back that we can use in further development. A lot of people thought it looked great, and hey, then I have done my part right!

So, one week after the conference I feel happy and optimistic towards the future. I have learnt a lot, things I can surely use in the future. One thing I haven't learnt though is what I want to do in the future. As I have told you guys earlier I loved our way of working where I had a varied tasks. I made concepts, models, textures and even collaborated when creating the level. This is great for me, I realized that I even enjoyed working with creating UV-maps for a change when I had been texturing for quite some time. I hope that there will be some diversity in work later on in my career as well.

As I said earlier, I haven't figured out what will become of me further on in my career. I do like diversity in my job, yet I sill know that you have to be especially great at something, and what that is, I haven't realized yet. But, I don't feel any stress about this. I have my whole life to learn what I want to do!

As, I have said I have learnt alot, and nearly everything has been from making misstakes. Small, but important things that you need to remember every time you are making artifacts for your game. I have written about this earlier (That really long and exhausting blog post, remember?), all theese small things make up a whole that creates a better workflow. I do believe that it is a great start for everyone on the team working in the same area to write down guidelines for how artifacts are about to be produced. Then everyone can produce things more efficently, not everyone has to be there at all times to give instructions or help on things that are made.

Furthermore, which I have also discussed in earlier blogposts, the key thing to remembver is to have great communication. I think we had quite good communication in general between, at least the artists in the group, but I am sure that many things could have been better, and that if we had made this project once again, we would have done things alot different.

So this summer I have decided to focus on life drawing, in which I will take a course, and I will also try to do some modeling and animation. I made 2D animations for 3 years but haven't tried 3D animations at all, so I am really pepped to see how it works and learn a lot.

So, to everyone that have followed this blog, thank you, and do keep reading. I will try to continue my updates during the summer, posting art that I am creating.

What happens next year, I will try to figure out during the summer. Hope you get a great summer!

CIAO!