Production Week 8: David Hamblin, Microsoft Feedback

The last 2 weeks were very busy as everyone is putting in extra time to polish the project to the highest standards we can achieve. Great to see so many determined and hard working people in the team. We missed last weeks blog due to the Easter Break and everyone was focusing on finishing up their areas as best they could in order to prepare for our first functional build! 

It even worked just in time for our WiP industry presentation!

We had an industry guest from Microsoft, David Hamblin who gave us some glowing feedback which made us all very excited to see what we can achieve in the final two weeks. 

Production Week 6: Easter Break (hah!)

Hi it's Viktor here this time, giving you a brief introduction what have happened this week in our project. Getting close to the deadline, everyone is working hard and trying their best to finish the required areas.

With Easter coming up, we had a shorter week than usual so we had less time accessing our project due to school closures. On Wednesday the tutors requested an update from the team's producer to tell them how progress is going. I've spent more than an hour explaining everything and walking through every tiny detail with Phil and Juriaan. 
They were pleased with our progress so far, complimented on the overall design, most of the asset's quality and the lighting of the scene. Some things need addressing, the elevator area needs texture updates as they were too low quality and we had to shift our focus from making the outside environment even more alive and pretty, to make sure the elevator and generator room areas are finished to a high standard.

Production Week 5: The Final Stretch

Our deadline is looming ever closer. Going from 12 weeks, we spent 2 on developing the art bible leaving 10 weeks of production time. Our fifth week on production we aimed as a group to get as much of the ocean view complete or ''working on'' as possible. This is mostly done now and needs placing in the scene, after this we begin to split into groups to work on the generator, elevator rooms and finish the balcony simultaneously. We have had some great feedback towards fine tuning our work this week from Escape Studios tutor Christian Avigni as well as some extra feedback on VFX from Tom Harle.

We now have bubbles, fish and kelp moving in the background of our ocean view!

Production Week 4: Guest starring Thomas Harle

This week in class we had a guest artist who specialises in VFX, Tom Harle. Each team presented their projects to him so far and he gave us some excellent feedback! According to him we have achieved the ''Bioshocky'' look! And we are on the right track, but we might have to significantly trim down our scope in the reminder few weeks. As a group we have humbly agreed this. 

Production Week 3: Main Hall Deadline

This week marks the first internal deadline for our team. By this Friday we had a goal to get the majority of the Main Hall completed. Although there are some things that still need tidying and tweaking, (we are of course all still learning!) we pretty much made the deadline! See our results below! This was our first major benchmark to see if it was possible to achieve all we had planned for our level and at the moment we are feeling quite confident of what we can achieve with our remaining 7 weeks.

Production Week 2: Main Hall Overhaul

This week has been a lot of planning and redirecting the team to smaller tasks. Our producer brought to our attention we were very behind schedule and it was acted on fast how to rectify this. The creative lead and producer knuckled down, planned what we needed immediately, and re-distributed tasks among the group in order to meet our first deadline to complete the main hall area of our environment. Our team came together quickly on this and we have gained back some good time because of it! Our main hall area is almost completely transformed from the previous week!

Production Week 1: Hero Assets

With the first two weeks dedicated to art bible research and a blockout in place we are now ready to start proper production of our scene. We have been getting some assets in place with base textures and even have some lighting in place to set the mood of each of our areas.

Each week we intend to share some screenshots of how are zones are looking so you can see them develop over time! Adapting from our blockout you can see how our level current looks below:

The main hall of our station is slowly starting to take shape.