Terminus - Synoptic Project Evaluation

With our final game, Terminus, in a finished, presentable format, I'd like to reflect on the journey we've been on since we began our second year of Next Gen!

What we intended to create, back when we were brainstorming and conceptualizing, was a game that took place in a desolate, dystopian London setting with sentient killer robots wiping out the last of humanity. Inspired and driven to create a game with the themes of Metro and the look and aesthetic of limbo, we wanted to tell a story that'd bridge the gap between platforming and survival horror.

Comparing this vision with what we now have has certainly shown the ambition, and overambition, of our group. We strove to do great things in our game, which comes through with some of the scenes looking high quality and proper, even if they're a few other scenes that are admittedly quite barren. There's also a handful of scenes that unfortunately never saw the light of day, like the part where Connor finds his deceased wife and takes the headphones as a memento, or the sequence at the end where Connor is intercepted and shot upon reaching the promised sanctuary he's been making his way towards!

I ended up needing to make two main changes to my contributions to the synoptic project. The first revolving around the animation I made at the beginning of the game, and the second about the promises I rashly made at the beginning of the year.

Comparing the opening animation for our game to the storyboard I made for it, while some shots stay true to the illustrated vignettes, others simply had to be changed for the better! I described this in my blog entry for the first and second shots of the animation during the respective weeks I dedicated to them, but when I produced a 3D environment that matched the vignette of the first shot, it was bland, empty and too broad and lacked any creativity. What I later did was recycle the first shot to do the seconds shot's animations whilst reserving the first shot for an introductory zoom.

During the first few weeks of pre-production, where we were discussing the strengths of each member of our group and assigning them jobs accordingly, I not only took on the responsibility of animating the characters and other assets of our game that couldn't be animated by code, but also took it upon myself to promise rigs and animations for both Connor and the Bandit enemies that appear in our game. In the end, however, this ended up not being the case, and instead of quickly and shoddily throwing animations together for Connor and the bandits, I refined and put forward four animations for the bandits instead that are now present in the game. Again I was so ambitious and honestly wasn't thinking realistically about how long the character creation process, on top of rigging and optimizing, would take. As a result, this left me with barely enough time to do the animations for the Bandits, let alone Connor's animations too.

All my work, with the exception of texture painting in Substance packages, was completed using Blender 2.79b, which hasn't given me any problems besides exporting FBXs. With the assortment of tools and automatic processes made available both in the actual package, as well as in external plugins, everything from asset development to composition and rendering has honestly been a liberating relief and I really appreciate both my tutors and group members trusting me with a new piece of software, especially when we've become accustomed to using 3d studio MAX for the longest time.

The way we managed our work as a group, while it could've certainly helped to have the Gantt planner appear more often, went somewhat well. The weekly meetings we held kept people on track and allowed us to complement and critique each other's work to ensure everyone's working to the best of their ability.

In summary, this whole experience of putting a game together with a group of fellow bright, talented students has been nothing short of a delight. It's personally allowed me to develop my skills in a myriad of technological, academic and managerial areas.