White Mod – Development

Well maybe that title is a bit of an overstatement, but I’ll do the best I can :)

Early on in the project we decided that a Group Blog would be a great way to introduce the team and help build a community around PW. It seems that we have let our responsibilities with the blog slip a little, we are all really busy people but we are looking to get the blog back on track and hopefully find some loyal fans in the process. The post rate should increase dramatically, you’ll see posts from a number of our team members with at least one a week (Worst case). I know, sounds too good to be true, but we’ll make it happen. I’m not sure how many people will read this, but I know that we would like the number to be greater, so tell a friend :)

Anyway, now that’s out of the way I can talk about how the team is getting on. My pc decided to throw a hissy fit. Obviously fearful of the full force of Bob’s code it decided to blow up. Reluctantly i dipped my hand into my pocket and bought a new one, it was a long time coming, I had to run UT3 on low settings up until now.

A main part of the organization of our team is achieved through our documentation. We obviously have a DDoc but there are other documents that all of our team have reference to. This week I have been working on a guide to importing meshes from Maya to unreal. I also created an inventory for all of our assets which indicates the status of any assets we plan to create, from looking at the inventory you can tell easily what is complete and what is not, it makes designating work to team members much easier. If you’ve read this far you are probably thinking “how boring” and I agree, but this is an integral part of keeping things flowing. I’d been putting the documentation off for a while but I’m glad it’s finished.

I’d like to switch gears now and talk about a level that has been in concept stage for quite a while. This is the map that will see the introduction of our own art style into the project. The other maps are using a heavy number of Unreal assets and as such don’t stand apart from UT3. I’ve been working on a visual design document to help guide the art dept, this level should be a test for us as we are looking to use all of our own assets. I’m looking forward to this because there are some more organic features here than in our other levels.  Below is a concept for the map created by Bob.

Bob's handy work

Well that’s all folks, hope you stick around to see how we progress and maybe leave us a comment if you like what you see.

Thanks