Week Two: In Which The Level Is Remade From The Grid Up

Just a few quick things I did after last weeks blog entry in this paragraph. I started on making bump maps and normal maps for some of the textures, just to get some practice for when we'd have our finalized textures in the game, I like to think I've gotten pretty good at that. I've also been trying to make a shader, a toon shader to be specific, I have it working in a separate file from our actual game, but will have to do some more work to implement it fully.

Now on to my big project for the week, rebuilding the level. Last semester when we made our level instead of making it in Maya and importing it, we instead made it completely in openGL; This caused problems with lighting as well as making it nearly impossible to edit, at least with any ease. I went into Maya, and taking all the main point of the track, completely rebuilt it, there were a few edits after to make sure everything lined up with the old track, but for the most part it worked out well. Now that the level is actually in Maya and can easily be edited, I have been able to go in and change around a few pieces and add in objects to make our game more closely match the vision we had for it last semester. By the time our game is complete I hope you can look forward to some amazing scenery as you race around the track.

Later on this week expect some impressions from LittleBigPlanet 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, and an in-depth criticism of one of them, as per my homework requirements.

- N. Gale