Caesium - 2011, Semester 2

During the second semester of classes I worked on the Caesium Project with the second semester class. My main role in this was Animation Lead and much of the time I spent helping out those animators on my team which needed it. Task wise I was always busy working on various models and textures as well as making a large number of the game screens.


As Animation Lead for Caesium I ran the animation team, trouble shooting and solving as many animation and art impediments as I could. My early tasks included creating one of the simple enemies that had been approved through concept and creating an art pipeline document. To that end I modeled, rigged, animated, and textured the BombBat.

This allowed our programmers to being testing code and troubleshooting a large number of the problems that always arise with importing assets and code to an engine. I also modeled the main boss that the player would end up fighting against at the end of the game. During the first sprint I worked on him, the BombBat, the various gameplay screens, and created the art pipeline.

Most, if not all, of the concept art for Caesium was create by Jose, as was the texture on the final boss.

During the second sprint I was mainly focused on rigging a number of characters, modeling the Tri-Pod enemy and creating the in game tutorial 'thought' bubbles. As a team we began to see just how big the game was going to be, but we ended up having more than enough time to get all of the animation assets into the game.

When we began porting to the Andriod during the third sprint it turned out that we were unable to use the terrain editor in Unity and were forced to create the map in 3ds Max. I recreated a near copy of the terrain we had in Unity in 3ds Max and we then used that mesh in the engine. I also created the animations for the main boss and added armor to him per the design request from Seth, the product owner. As the player dealt damage to the boss he would lose pieces of armor to visually show that he was growing weaker.

One of the last things that I added to the game was the set of statues for indicating where the power-ups were located.

Overall this was a good experience for me. Serving as a lead was a challenge for me since I prefer to work alone and would rather be given a task than hand out tasks than be in a management position.