Moba FMP Post-Mortem

This is my post-mortem write up for my Final Major Project. In this write up I'm going to talk about my project as a whole. What went wrong and what went right.

First of all my project is based on the Moba genre of games. At the start of this project I was a huge fan of the genre, mostly in the cartoony style they adopt and the fantastical elements. Of course working on this project has made me grow tired of Mobas but that was expected. I did a blog post earlier in the project explaining some of the tropes of the genre so you can compare and contrast my project to it. Hopefully looking at this you can see what I was hoping to work towards.

Right off the bat of this project I started working on concept art. I'm really happy with the short time I spent on concepting and what I managed to create in that time. I only allotted myself two weeks to work on concept so I really didn't have to much time to mess around. I was told by tutors that when working on this project not to try and reinvent the wheel. So I started designing this small environment with two drastically different sides. This is something done a lot in the moba genre and I wanted to put my spin on it. I had a basic idea of what I wanted. To put it simply stereotypical good verses evil.

These are the moba map references that inspired that idea.

I went through several design stages before deciding on working on magical ruins on one side, and earth elementals on the other. This gave me two different sides one that was arcane and beautiful the other side twisted and destroyed. I wanted three key areas for my level. One on each side and one in the middle where the two sides meet.

So looking at what worked best I decided on the idea of the environment being smashed together as if they were two different worlds.

The next step was designing the 'towers' and the base elements of the level. These were going to be key assets that were important to the project as a whole. In the genre these assets are turrets and buildings and I wanted to make them different on each side to really represent what each side was like.

I'm really happy with the concepts that I came up with. It gave me a strong point to build my level from.

The next thing I want to talk about was planning and time management. This I think was one of the places I shone the most during my project. When I was designing the brief for the project I was already sick. (And in my blog there are plenty of references to this plus tutors marking this you should know about it). So when planning my project I knew that there was a chance that I either grew more sick, would grow more stressed or would get sent for hospital. In actual reality all of these ended up happening! So I planned before hand by setting my project into chunks. These 4-2 week chunks were each including one area of the project. One was focused on concept, one on the ground assets and so on. They were designed so that the project could still perfectly function by taking away one or two of these chunks if needed. By splitting my project a part like this it made it really easy to work on despite the difficulties my health gave me. It meant I could give myself all the time I needed to recover from sickness and stress as long as I stuck to these deadlines. It was in handy as everything did go wrong and I did end up not managing to accomplish the last few weeks of time which were focused on polish and finishing work. If I didn't plan my project in this way I wouldn't have a project to hand in at all. I think not many people would of had the foresight, and perhaps pessimism, to plan this way.

The next thing is my models. Making assets has never been my strongest suit. Because of this I did work in this more stylised art style. A lot of this project has been me working to my strengths as I've learnt my weaknesses along the way. I started off the project with the largest but most simplest assets. If all things worked to plan I most likely would of reiterated far more of these assets, as I did with the back castle. I'm quite proud of the assets as a whole. Being stylised in this way an important faction was chamfering, making the objects have this soft feel. That was quite difficult to achieve on the complicated sweeping rock formations I wanted. And on top of that I had my tower assets, the cores and the turrets that are all rather complex. Especially the assets that are similar to human aspects, such as arms and faces. I'm not a character artist by any means but I'm really happy with the faces I made for my blue core asset. I gave myself a rather high limit for my tri-count but thats because I didn't want to even remotely touch it. I always work slightly too low poly in last projects and I actually found a good balance in this one despite it being stylised.

From modelling to texturing. I wanted this project to have a particular hand painted feel. Not that it was a painting, but more as if the entire level was painted tabletop miniatures or akin to them. This is an art style commonly used in the moba genre after all. After the first few assets I really hit my stride and the key part of this style, painting on the detail and making objects seem like they have painted on texture, I think I really managed to achieve. In this art style there has to be very careful painting based on the shaping of the asset to really make everything pop. This was perhaps one of the most important parts of the project to get right. I remember when I was pitching the project I was warned of this. As obviously if the textures didn't work correctly I would of been in a lot of trouble. And so I'm very happy with the results working correctly. In previous projects I've had huge trouble with unwrapping and I think I conquered this in this project. Texturing is without a doubt the part of the project I'm most happy with. I do have a big issue with it hthough as in the actual level it seems like a lot of the detail is lost, which is quite a shame. Perhaps I needed higher resolution textures. I wanted to do my project in 1024 so I could have multiple textures and materials without worrying about my project becoming too bloated.

Lots of things went wrong during this project. I want to say that I'm not going to blame everything that went wrong on my health deteriorating but that is the key flaw. It would be useless to ignore that huge factor that almost ruined this project. I had weeks taken away for recovery after surgery. I had weeks where I was too stressed about the thought of dying to work. To put it simply imagine every work day I had in this project. There is about a 50% chance that on that day I was too sick to work. And even if I did work, there was only 1-2 hours of workable time before I became too sick to continue. This was not an easy project to achieve.

Looking back at my year as a whole, the entire year has been marred by my health. It may have gotten far worse recently but I have been equally sick since before the year started. It makes me really upset thinking about it. Because I want to serve up something better. I know my project isn't bad, and in all honesty I'm starting to become proud of what I became. There is a lot there about overcoming difficulties. It proves that as an artist I can continue going despite overwhelming odds. After all, I'm so sick that I had the option to give up and defer the year for a later time. But I didn't want that. Some part of me sees this project as a monument to that difficulty. To stress and how I couldn't do good enough. But I cant blame myself for that. It would be so easy to, but it wouldn't be right. I couldn't control what happened to me and obviously if I could I wouldn't of been sick. If I was healthy I would be handing in a far more completed project no doubt about it.

But I did hand in a completed project. It is everything I said it would be. Perhaps bare bones but it's still done. And that is a huge thing for me. Also I was told during my multiple discussions about this that my extreme sickness will be taken into account for the marking, which gives me some relief. If that turns out not to be true, I would be really worried about ruining and wasting my entire uni experience! I think everyone at this stage is going to be worried about their project and think its worse than it is and I'm no different. Despite all that went in, its still pretty good. The style is exactly what I wanted at the start. The concept I imagined has been realised. And that's great. I'm really happy about that.

For some strange reason the screenshot system in Unreal seems to want to delete some of the assets from the scene. I have no idea why that happens and can't seem to find a fix for it. It's actually meaning taking screenshots for the final of this level is really hard.

Ignoring the sickness several things I would do differently are animation and how I made some assets. I made some assets to be too modular when for this sort of style I should of modelled them fully and painted them really dynamically. I started to change this near the end for some assets but didn't have time to do them all. The difference for that reiteration was huge. Animation was another absolutely huge thing that I wanted that I couldn't achieve. It was along shot and I think it would of been hard to do even if I did have more time, but It would of added so much more to the project. I did manage to create some animation for the assets but its very simple and not perfect. I believe because of the way I achieved animation, using Unreal Timelines, that the assets warp slightly too much over time and for example might eventually twist out of their axis. Not perfect, but it does the job for the short time. One of the main things I had about this project is that I wanted it to feel like a coherent, albe it stylised, place. And that would of added a lot.

I also would of loved to add user interaction. I really like the wisp character I made near the start of the project and would of loved to do more with it. In fact this would of been a really fun project to do with a friend who did character art and have some fully animated characters in the level as if it was a real game. More lighting would of been nice but honestly the simple lighting I have in the project now does what I want. I wanted to work on the project far more as if it was a real game too. I have a soundtrack for the game which is in the level, but would of loved more sound. I wanted to set up the lore for the game in an additional comic that described the backstory and made the world feel more alive. I would of loved to have done all of these things. But ultimately I can't beat myself up too much about not hitting stretch goals.

So at the end of it all. This is my project. I can't really say whether I'm happy with it or not. It just kind of is. I can definitely say I'm happy its over. I really want to work on my own things now without the restriction of university. It's somewhat sad that because my third year has been basically ruined I won't have a good portfolio leaving but that's just something to work on. I want to work on this project again. Maybe someday when I'm better I can achieve what i wanted for this project. It's important to focus on the things that went right and when I look at it there was a lot of things I should be proud of. And honestly just handing it in now is one of them.

#FMP #final