Latest on Project DogWalk

Julien gave me the task of set dressing the level for the "Vertical Slice". To enable that I created some setups for making paths, the deep snow patches and of course the creek! I started placing the assets in the level, mainly around the hub area. On the side I refined the texturing of the willow tree, the creek bridge and blocked out the camping table.

This week was mostly refining but also optimizing existing environment assets and props, thanks to detailed notes by Vivien and the team.

More implementation of animations, a full animation tree and procedural animations. More features to vet the animations and if they work well in the game.

This week I transferred a lot of the animations that I did on the layout rigs to the final rigs, also I created a bunch of new animations

I did more pipeline development, as well as making sure that the pipeline we are now actively using is being used properly and doesn't break. Besides that I dove a bit into the game code to optimize the leash collision algorithm.

This week the last missing textures for the game got painted and scanned, almost everything needed for the vertical slice is designed and notes were prepared to finalize assets. I also had some spare time to do FX design and additional Pinda expressions for the animators!

This week Chocomel was unwrapped for texturing, I worked on the (UV) textures of the creek bridge and willow tree assets. The willow tree model also received some tweaks to allow the kid to climb into it.

We decided to adjust and export the assets differently without sharpness data. Instead we used support loops and weighted normals to have more artistic control over the edge sharpness. This week was mostly adjusting existing assets and re-exporting. Some additions this week are the birch outgrowths to be placed around birch trees and around the new stone walls, that are created to block a section of the level off.

Some concepting for the snowman assets, some reviewing and drawovers, some fx concepting and then time was already up! A good chunk of my week was spent on contibuting to the Art Style Blog post - go check it out :)

Way more progress was made on the rough blocking of the world level and one of the areas of the game. Apart from that more animations and art assets are being used in the game.

Worked on the final rigs for Pinda (kid) and Chocomel (dog) and the dog leash handle.

Apart from overseeing more work, all the logic for the core navigational challenges is done and ready for more testing. With the levels set up, I started assembling the actual game and making it ready for gameplay testing.

This week I worked on finalizing the topology of the main characters so they can be unwrapped for texture painting. I also managed to sneak in some time for modeling some roots and blocked out the creek bridge.

This week I finally finished setting up our fundamental asset pipeline, allowing us to nest assets into each other in Blender to work on sets and assets separately and exporting everything seamlessly into Godot in a procedural way. I also spent some initial time on exploring our options for shading and communicating with the Developers about solutions to the shortcomings we run into.

A lot of layout rigging updates for the two main characters, the camera, snowman and props. And one simple animation test where the Pinda character puts a tennis ball on the snowman.

Lots of helping out on the characters, lots of painting textures for the characters, lots of reviewing assets, lots of painting textures for the assets, some design for assets - almost running out of designing to do and textures to paint! Kitsu will be spilling over if we don't slow the hell down! ! ! YAY. :)

There was a lot of testing and planning happening for the animations of characters. Apart from that I got to work a bit more on the test level and giving some direction for the art assets. There's a new built of the game to try out, but still in the same test environment.

This week I continued the texturing tests for the environment, mainly the creek bed and water surfaces. I blocked out the willow tree and assembled a test environment to figure out which kinds of procedural terrain modeling we need (more on that next week)

This week I split my time between making new scanned textures, so that new environment assets can continue happening and starting to give feedback on some that already exist. I also provided some mouthshapes for Pinda so that animators can mess around with them already for animation testing. Also some paper dog fur was hung to dry and be attached soon!