P.I.N. Point - Sprint 2
P.I.N. Point - Sprint 2
My name is Kyle Ramser, and I am currently working on the game P.I.N. Point. P.I.N. Point is a fast-paced, motion-based game where you play as an assassin hired by a mysterious company to take out several targets in a cyberpunk city of tomorrow. Our team just completed our second sprint, and while there were a lot of rocky points, I believe it went a bit better than our first one, and we were finally figuring out the basis of our group by the end of it.
Our team has had a very difficult time getting our feet under us during that project, with cards that seem like they’re only worth one point ending up taking far more than the set 8-hour mark, and several changes having to be made to existing cards. For my cards specifically, I was put in charge of creating the grappling hook, which I had initially thought would take me 4-6 hours maximum to complete. When I started working on this card, though, I realized that with no concept art and very little reference, I had to come up with the base idea for it all on my own. Just iterating the basic design and idea ended up taking me about half of the time that I thought the whole card would take, and once I had that, it took much longer to shape the whole model and fix up everything about it, such as ngons or hidden faces that had shown up while I was initially figuring it out. Looking back, I think that firm references work a lot better for getting an idea across than descriptions or “styles,” and I should have taken on an extra card for the design of the grapple, or bumped the points up to 3 to account for the time I spent iterating the design.
On top of this, all of the cards that I had completed last sprint ended up being too high-poly for the building. I was attempting to find the perfect sweet spot between detail and performance, since the player will be incredibly close to the walls themselves in-game, but I ended up overshooting the count a bit and had to go through and retopologize all of the walls after already starting on the creation of buildings. This ended up wasting time that didn’t need to be wasted, and definitely helped me learn what is too much and too little when creating a modular building like this, where detail is key. On that note, I am planning to create LODs for the buildings as well to help the performance of the game, but I believe I now have the walls, windows, and balconies in the perfect spot.
Besides this, I do think the buildings that I created ended up looking good, and the grappling hook, as difficult as it proved to be, ended up looking great, which also solidified the art style for our game. This will help in the next sprint, as I won’t have to take all of the extra steps of coming up with ideas for a “futuristic design” or trying to play around with a model until it ends up working. On top of the retopology, the grappling hook, and the building prefabs, I was able to finish up the trim for the buildings, as well as the roof access hatch for the buildings, which both ended up turning out well.
I do want to make it clear that while this sprint was difficult and a lot went wrong, my group fought hard until the end. I wasn’t the only one who had issues with a lot of the core pieces of the game, and everyone was working together on the game to make it all happen. I think we all learned a lot, and with the basics of the game out of the way now, we are more organized and ready to start adding in the pieces to make our core loop prototype into a functional experience.
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