P.I.N. Point - Sprint 5

P.I.N. Point - Sprint 5

My name is Kyle Ramser and I am currently working as a 3D artist on a game called P.I.N. Point. P.I.N. Point is a fast paced assassin shooter, where time is money and the faster you take out your target, the more money you earn. We just finished our fifth sprint, and the game is coming along pretty nicely. Our programmers have completed our movement system, which has made the gameplay feel closer to how our designer imagined it, and more of my art is being implemented, which is making the game look a lot more complete. This sprint went very well overall, and it is clear now that we have hit our stride as a group and have the process down at this point, after a rough start in the first few sprints.

Starting with the negatives, I had to redo the buildings again this sprint, which used up a bit of my time. It didn’t take too long, but it always feels like a waste to redo something that was already completed, so it was not a big deal but definitely not a positive. Otherwise, there weren’t really any problems, just more learning experiences through things I had never done. The primary example of this was the main character's hands. Rather than doing a full model, we decided to just make arms for animations, and with how close the model will be to the camera, I had to make the model highly detailed. I based the basic shape of the arm off of the maya default model, but built the whole thing from the bottom up.This was the second time I had ever modeled something humanoid, and the first time I had ever done fingers, and while it took me a little while, it was a really fun process, good learning experience, and I was happy with how it turned out.

As for the positives, I was happy with all of the work I was able to complete, and I finally finished almost all of the hero items for the game. I finished 8 cards, which amounted to 11 points, and included the model for the player arms, the interior apartment, and the door frame, the textures for the police drone, the shock gun, the grappling hook, and the window set, as well as the rebuilding of the building walls. I think these all turned out very good, with the most notable pieces being the grappling hook and police drone textures, and the model for the player’s arms. These were all incredibly fun and were some of my best looking models and textures to date, especially with the level of difficulty for each of them. For the next sprint, I am looking to finish the modeling and texturing of the interior buildings, as well as the texturing for the player arms. If all goes well with these, I am also planning on adding some neon signs to spice up the city and provide some artificial lighting that will make the scene look a lot more interesting.

Overall, this sprint was a good learning experience, was really fun, and went smoothly. My teammates all worked well together, and all of the previous issues in the past sprints were since remedied. The producer did a great job, and our designer worked hard on cleaning up and perfecting the game scene, as well as building the main level. I am extremely excited about how the final state of the game will look, especially seeing all of my other groupmates work up to this point, and I’m excited to get to work on sprint six.