Cyber Force is a game that players perform as an ethical hacker hunting bugs in programs. Players enforce justice in the cyber world. The core mechanic is to find out the bugs among programs but the player need to be careful with his power – abuse will cause a domino effect and more bugs.
Platform: PC
Engine (given): Unreal
Theme: Iteration on Brute Force
Audience: Gamers 20-40
My contribution to the project
In this project I perdormed as a Technical Artist. At first I was the only artist, and my team decided to use the minimal art style so that I can work more on tech-art things. After the personnel change we got another artist Cody, so after that I mainly focus on the effects inside the game. Specific works I have done are showed as follow:
- Growing effects and particle effects inside the game
- Map build
- UI assets
- HowToPlay video (together with Ray)
- Help publish the game
Different things to do next time
This time I really worked as a tech artist. I’m not very good at art work compare to other artists, but this time I found out what role is the most suitable for me. I forcused on the effects of arts, use program methods to make it better. These are still basic tech-art things, but they really enlightened me. So next time I should try more tech-art things to help the artists work better. I am really happy when doing my work.
Things I learned from participating in this process
Positive lessons:
The first thing is of course my attribution of Tech-Artist. I can apply the knowledge I got from my tech-art class to our game, and try to figure out how a tech-artist can do in a real game project. I didn’t need to do the art things I’m not familiar with, but help to make the art work better. That’s the best thing.
Second is the great communication between team members. This time our team got a good communication with each other. We had clear feature lists, and clear assignments for each member. Due to the great efficiency, we had playable version in every sprint, and discussed together what we could do better in the next version. That a very awesome experience.
Third is that our game got good number of downloads. Though not the most among all the groups, this still gave us confidence. Some downloaders also gave us feedbacks on the gameplay and art styles. Then we found that our game still need many improvement. So it is very important to test our game by normal players so that we can found some problems that we take for granted.
Negative lessons:
First is that we lose a team member. This is a terrible feeling that we lost one of our main programmers. In real world we may not be such lucky to find another great programmer. It’s really bad feeling.
Second is that, as a technical artist, I still failed to implement the skeleton animation from Maya to Unreal. Finally due to time limitation, we decide to not use it.
Third is that we seemed to have some AI misunderstanding during our development. This is maybe because of our language expression. But finally we all got them done.