Time to get started!

This was the first week of classes here at Champlain. And for our team, work began on Monday. We had our first meeting of the semester, and it was nice to reconvene and review the things that we’d discussed in December. Before winter break, we created a spreadsheet of everything that we wanted to see in the game. It was a huge product backlog, with items and desirables across all three of the disciplines. Plus it was color coded, so that’s pretty cool.

When we met on Monday, we started narrowing down that list to fit the scope of the project. We have 15 weeks (though it may be closer to 12) to create a product. Game development-wise, that’s not a ton of time. But I think during that meeting, our team did a pretty good job at scoping the project accordingly.

Project planning aside, that first meeting, and our work-session on Friday, were both great ways of getting a read on our team’s interpersonal dynamic. In short, it’s really great, and I’m looking forward to working with these guys for the semester. What’s nice about the micropup team is that the original members already formed a really solid foundation. And those five original members have been nothing but welcoming and helpful to me, Steven, and Jake, the new additions to the team.

I’m really thrilled to take on the role of animator this semester. It’s definitely nice to be able to focus in on one specific aspect of the project. Plus, creating animation is a big passion of mine, so to be able to focus on that is pretty exciting. While I still have more work to do this week, so far I’ve been able to rig Sprout, our game’s main protagonist.

Sprout was concepted and created by our team’s lead character artist, Christie. And she’s got a whole roster of characters in the pipeline, which should be a lot of fun to animate and bring to life!

I also made a quick animation to test out the rig and the general mesh deformation.

The rest of the week I’ll be working on basic locomotion for Sprout. This includes; idle, walk, jog, and jump animations.