Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project - Making Toilets and Kitchen (Week 12) (27/03/2023)
Feedback) Decluttering and UI
Whilst gathering reference I realised that interaction wise my scene was beginning to suffer from 2 main issues. The first was clutter. Some peer feedback and personal review made me realise that my abundance of small assets whilst filling a very beforehand empty diner has made the space extremely noisy. Especially in the permanent cupboards, walls and general rest spaces. There was none. In views down the corridor it was hard to find something to focus upon as so much was happening on every single surface. I realise to amend this I will have the perilous task of deleting some of my placed props but it is better to have areas of rest than to have too much. My secondary issue was interaction wise; there was quite a limited pool of concepts and UI at the moment. I realised I wanted to take if possible in the direction of a stretch goal to make a minigame with a menu. I drafted a simple cleaning sim concept that perhaps after deadlines I would be able to push to making. The main narrative here being that the owner of the diner (a man suspiciously looking like John Travolta) has a date and needs to close up shop early. The space is a mess and there's a time minute on getting the area clean before he returns. Queue the gameplay loop. However blueprinting wise I have never made a game before and as an environment artist will focus on loops over function at the current time to ensure I am able to submit what I have in mind and am making before fussing about gameplay.
Research) Kitchen and Toilets
My main source of reference for a lot of smaller details was that of my own home kitchen. I realise that there are core large elements to ensure that my industrial variant for the diner meets the visual quota. The primary aspect is using a lot of metal and tonally grayscale pots, pans, shelves etc. Such materials are strong and definitely hold up well in the heat and grime of the kitchen. But with their modular usage I would also have to ensure I make decals later on as mentioned beforehand in my formative presentation so that there is enough grime/detail to distinguish some variety among the kitchen. Moving onto the toilets which have a similar aspect of surface texture and material definition. Much of the toilet assets are modular and clean cut ceramic material. Decals down the line would definitely spruce up the grime and wear however I need to keep a lot of aspects similarly designed to make the most modular use of them. When in regards to the toilet and stalls.
Modelling) Bathroom and Kitchen
For both my kitchen and bathroom a lot of my high poly assets were done and were in need of a review so new meshes were only completely made for elements such as the fryer. In the toilets my stalls proved to be very reusable so I ensured to cut down and make a modular set of the walls, door, lock and top header liner so that I can cut down on UV space. For my kitchens on the other hand the large size of my fridges, ovens and heavily detailed machinery did mean that optimising is much more difficult in this regard. I did however do my best to optimise UV unwraps by duplicated handles, feet, buttons and any other easily repetitive aspects. One might also notice that my fryer has a net that lacks any real definition for its high poly variant. This is due to the fact I will instead make a material alpha of a grid mesh and overlay it in texturing to capture that wireframe mesh feel. Instead of spending countless hours modelling said texture in.
