Safety nets.
With the semester coming to an end, and deadlines getting closer and closer, we have to write more and more âdocumentationâ blog posts to cover our behinds from the lecturers who loom over each of our projects.Â
Character Woes.
Character development on my end has been fairly relaxed, with the process of our character simply going as follows;
A draft is produced, and a character is decided, in our example, Iâll take Kevin who is a bit of a meme because of how many versions of him there are.
âKevin is the friendly face that you are first introduced to in the game prologue, heâs the guy that looks like heâd throw everything aside to help you outâÂ
So my first thought would have been, golden retriever, loyal and friendly right?
Oh dear lord, what is that? This is the first draft of Kevin, friendly-looking? sure, but it looks like that dark entity that resides in the dark corner of your bedroom.
We quickly revised that made him appear to be more of a dog this time around.
But ultimately, we had to rework him again with the direction of the other characters in development. Compared to them, he seemed like he was from another game altogether which was not good for us.Â
So this time, following the procedures for the other characters created, we made him look more human-like, whilst retaining the character design elements that made him, himself.Â
The end results are a drastic improvement over what we had before, with Kevin becoming a well-dressed individual that looks very dependable and characteristically âstupid friendlyâ.
The eyes are put in engine, donât judge me.
Now as nice as all of this is, I wished it didnât take as long for it to have come to where it is now. Looking back at the 27-28 different versions of Kevin makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking sometimes.Â
One last look back before moving on.
Since I have run out of things to talk about, letâs look back on this project overall and have a bit a critical review;
Things I liked about this project is the evolving nature of it, this project went from a plane building flight sim to a social-based adventure title with flight in a couple of months. The ideas generated for the group really reflects on the process of the project overall, and at times, it doesnât feel like we are doing just a uni project but instead gives off more of a professional environment vibe when we are all on task and giving it our all.Â
With that being said, I didnât like how far weâve moved off from the original idea. Call it developerâs remorse (like buyerâs remorse) or whatever, but I do look back often and wonder what would have happened if we kept the original darker themes that we had, as I do genuinely believe it would work better with the narrative we have.Â
Overall project management has improved greatly, weâve definitely been limited in scope due to bad time management in the past but this time around. Weâve definitely been able to keep on task whilst being able to reorganize and prioritize more urgent tasks rather than letting them drag us down like in the past.
Aeronautica has been much more than just a project that we are doing for university, it is for me, a summary of everything we have learned and plan to take forward with us into our current and future projects. It is all the mistakes, all the small victories and the hard work weâve put through our time in university.Â
Stuart talking about Kevins design



















