Pirates Vs Pirates Production Month 2

This past milestone we did awesome with Pirates Vs Pirates again.  As far as project and design goes, we added the two new enemy types into the game and they really fit right in without having to adjust almost anything of their design.  Overall we also tweaked the gameplay of the game and it simply continues to feel better and better with each iteration.

In the end having the split focus between the game project and our portfolio class didn't end up being all that terrible, although I will say that having the artists be physically absent for half the team meetings did cause some gaps in communication and at times I felt a bit disconnected.  It really wasn't anything that prevented me from performing, it just took a bit to get back in the swing of the project.

My first task this month was to create the enemy ship.  I wanted it to resemble the player's ship but also have a unique silhouette as it came straight at you.  The textures still need some tweaking but here is where I am at the moment:



I almost feel like I should add some more spikes, and for next month I will tweak this model for the Blue Sail (bomber) ships.

The silhouette of the cannon wasn't strong enough in it's first iteration, especially from the player perspective.  It was hard to see the cannon poking out of the ship so it got a major upgrade in it's size.  Here's the comparison of the two:

New silhouette of cannons

And lastly the player ship got some more love.  I wanted to add shadows and a metal grate to the texture to make the deck more interesting.  I had to tweak the way I did the beams that added elevation change because it was clipping through the player's feet.  Since we don't have any fancy tech to support steps I decided to put them into the texture instead of having the geometry create the difference.  I still need to go back and add some more damage to the floor, as well as bake in the shadows of the placed props (crates and whatnot)

New wheel!

Floor, now completely flat!

I'm very excited to be going into this last month of production.  There are a lot of little things I want to push in my models and textures, as well as enforce that extra level of polish for the other artist's assets.  As a team we aren't rushing to catch up to our deadlines and that couldn't be more perfect - we have the time to focus on making things extra awesome instead of having to cut corners due to time.  Overall it's going to be a very fun month!

Check out the gameplay of the video here!  Next month I'll have another gameplay video as well as a link to download the final version, so you too will be able to fully experience the awesomness of Pirates Vs Pirates!