Second Semester Begins

This semester kicked off so fast, it's hard to believe we've already been back for two weeks. From the first day of classes we dove in head first.

In 3D for Games we immediately began deciding on some concepts for our characters based on the loose idea "What you wanted to be when you grew up." We'll be working on modeling our characters in ZBrush and Maya, rigging, and animating them for the rest of the semester. I had two main ideas - a medieval fantasy explorer/warrior, and a female 1700's Rococo Assassin - that I sketched out variations for and compiled research and images, and then decided on one and created the character design/turn-around/bio for our presentation. I don't have the sketches for my second concept scanned though, so I'm going to make a new post on the entire character assignment once I do that 8)  Next class we have to have our basic anatomy sculpt done for our character in ZBrush already, I'm so excited.

In Game Design II we each chose a Multiplayer map that we had a powerful experience on and had to analyze it in-depth, including drawing a detailed map from playing throughs, and do a presentation on all our information to the class. I chose the map cp_Badlands from Team Fortress 2, since it's probably my favorite map in the game, especially to play Scout on. Here are some of the images from my presentation:

I explained the map, classes, and gameplay strategies throughout the presentation, hence all the images and minimal text. Cooksey loved it, I was SO happy ;v;  I'm so psyched that I have him as a teacher again, he's one of my most favorite teachers ever. Our next assignment now is to study a real-world environment off-campus that we're going to base multiplayer levels on for 7-person maps. I love all the assignments in this class (B

Programming ended up not really being programming as much as Scripting. We've been learning how to do Scripting in UDK with Kismet, and it's been tough to pick up on. The more I learn the easier it's getting, but each "pop quiz" we get in class, a timed script-making challenge, has been really frustrating, and only one or two people seem to be getting things to actually work when the time's up at the end of the challenge. Kismet and the whole process just seems unnecessarily convoluted and unintuitive, but hopefully that feeling will go away after using it for awhile. Here are the first couple simple things we Scripted in Kismet:

Our first challenge was to make a level based off of the spike-trap room in Indiana Jones (http://youtu.be/G7BCRXkcW-w) with a start room, a proximity door that leads to a trap room and closes behind the player to trap them, the trap room with a spiked ceiling that drops down (killing the player if the spikes touch them), an escape door with a switch to open it, and dramatic lighting and sounds. I made a quick video of how my map turned out:

Next time I'll try recording the video in Fraps so it has sound and better quality.
But YEAH everything I'm doing is so fun, I love this semester so far 8)  I'll make another post soon on my character designs!