Save Game

The first game project I was part of at TGA made as part of a group of students.

As my first team project at The Game Assembly, this was where I got my first experience making games with others. It was a great experience and taught me the value of moderating expectations. Everyone had their own ideas and goals, but to make a game you can only pick one. To add to the complexity of this project, it was made on a custom games engine, written by our team of 5 programmers.

During this project I was still learning the ropes of Autodesk Maya, and thus made my fair share of silly mistakes. To my pride I overcame them with time and effort. My primary task during the project was to develop tools. This covered everything from import/export tools and our texture compression pipeline. Starting out I did not have much experience writing script, beyond creating LUA weapons in Source Engine. Thanks to a great teacher and helpful classmates I got the hang of it in a few weeks. Texture compression was oddly enough, something I had worked with before. Creating mods for Source I spent a great deal of time optimizing my textures and the compression methods. All to reduce my mods size to fit within the Steam Workshop upload size limitations. I can still, to this day geek out about what compression formats are best for specific purposes.

Outside of tools and textures I picked up slack wherever needed. This landed me the task of taking concept art and creating our skybox images and assets. I made use of Dynamics Simulations in Maya to create them. On top of that I filled the role I still see as uniquely "Tech Art", like cleaning up errors that we discovered in some of our environment art assets. It also fell on me to edit our player ship hours before handin, as it did not read well according to our designers.

All in all it was a fun and learning experience, albeit a stressful one. But just like ODST's, Tech Art jump feet first into hell!