After working on Cry Me A River I’ve learned significant skills in using Unity, Making 2D Assets/Art, VFX, and 2D animation. I’ve also learned a lot about how to research things to learn them, as prior to this project I had never used unity, 2D art, or made VFX. As an artist I’ve grown significantly. As a developer and team member I’ve learned the importance of having accurate time estimates and extrapolating them to understand what the scope of the project should be. I gained experience with working with a group of different of people I haven’t worked with before and still making a successful product.
Throughout development I worked very hard to make the environments and art for the game come to life while still being visually clear enough for a player to enjoy themselves. I got to work on art pipelines and figure out how to make everything work out. I hope my new understanding of visual clarity and shape language will help me in my future jobs as a game artist. I interpret my efforts this semester to mean I can work hard even in bad circumstances. While working on this project a lot of my family was hospitalized (and still are) and I needed to find a healthy way to get my work done. It’s been a challenging semester, but I think we did well.
Stuff that went well: Time management, Teamwork, Organization, and Production.
Stuff that could’ve gone better: Presentations, Meeting times (too long), and Rewarding the Player in game.
If things could have been done differently, I probably would have done more research about how we could achieve layer swapping. We spent a lot of time working on that mechanic and a decent portion of it could have been skipped by learning about unity and depth. For example we worked on making a way to color things as they move back in the scene, only to find that it was just easier to change their color in Photoshop and have a foreground/background version of the platform. Another thing I would do is try to find a way to ensure the narrative is woven into the gameplay, as although we had a narrative, it was challenging to tell the story in game.
In conclusion I grew a lot as a game artist working on Cry Me a River and got to learn from my teammates Sarah(designer) and Brandon(programmer) in a small team of 3. I think a lot of what I learned will actually translate well into my 3D portfolio, as I better understand colors and materials. I’m surprised and proud of what we managed to put together in such a short time and I look forward to bringing what I’ve learned to new projects in the future!
Link to the Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIo3G5DU0xE&feature=youtu.be
The first test asset made for Cry me A River:
Where we ended up:

