Bad Drop

For the past two semesters I've been product owner on a third and fourth semester game design project. Originally it was meant to be created using the Unreal Engine. By the end of the first semester's worth or production we had something very near a complete alpha. However, at the start of production for the second semester it was determined that we would switch from the Unreal Engine to the Unity 3d Engine. The change was made in large part due to the need of our programmers and animators to be able to have an easier way to import assets into the game. In the following 16 weeks we met and surpassed what we had in the Unreal Engine and now have the game at a beta state.

During the first semester of production on Bad Drop I was the environment guy. I created the map, outposts and environmental props. I also spent time placing the default Unreal enemy 'bots' around the map and setting up the pathing that they would follow.

A large portion of the time I spent on the project during the first semester was spent on creating the full design wiki for the game. It includes all enemy stats, the placement of enemies, the types of augments, the variations in power of the augments and the original concept of the game.

When we switched over to Unity during the second semester of production I needed to recreate the map that the player would interact with. Before my idea had been chosen by the group we had to create a short design for our game and present it. Out of the three design that had been presented mine was chosen. During that time when I had been creating that original idea and design I had created a simple mock-up using 3ds Max. It was relatively simple to import that file directly into Unity, saving myself, and the rest of the team, time on getting a working map up and working.

Early in the project I also model, rigged and unwrapped the medium enemy used in the game. This gave us a simple enemy that we could begin testing animations and importing with. The original design for the medium enemy was created by Evan Thompson, an intern that we borrowed from the 2d department. The enemy was later textured by Luke and then animated by Brett.

Out of the many things that I worked on during the project, creating the main weapon, the BFG, was by far the most fun. The game became based around what the player could do with this weapon and needed to reflect that. It was during the process of modeling this weapon that I decided that, in regards to creating assets in game production, I am a low poly modeler. Even though the BFG seems to be highly detailed the final weapon has less than 2k polygons.