Week 7 and 8

During Week 7 there was a change in team leader, with Rob taking over from Molly. This turned out to be a good move for the team as the new leader made a new plan of action to get us on track for alpha presentation and the communication between the team improved. Rob also made sure no one was taking on too much work or vice versa by reassigning some job roles, with the terrain being split up. I took over control of the tunnel as I had all the assets inside the tunnel. Molly took over the role of Unity, Reece was tasked with animation whilst Luke and Rob did other environment work.

I felt that this would help as I wanted to see everything get into Unity for weeks prior and reorganising the job roles made this more likely to happen.

There was quite an in-depth conversation about whether or not the mine cart track should follow the exact centre of the tunnel. Although this would be more accurate to real life, I felt that it wouldn't look very interesting for the player to simply be following a track through the tunnel. It would also make the idea of dodging pillars and crates less easy to implement as the player could just safely follow the track through the centre of the tunnel as there would be no central pillars to dodge.

Week 8 was the alpha presentation so our group went through a crunch to get everything done in time. We made sure that everything was modelled, UV'd and had at least base textures on. I focused on getting the tunnel and tracks textured.

When working on the walls of my tunnel I found an issue with the normals on the walls. The original normal map that I added was too rough but the walls needed some form of normals to look rock-like. To counteract this I smoothed the normal map in Photoshop with a small amount of surface blur. This reduced the noise yet kept the effect of the normal map. I added in some lighting to show the effect this would have when put in game.

No Normals

Harsh Normals

Smoothed Normals using Surface Blur in Photoshop