Week 19 - Off the map week 1

Off the map is here, already, I can't quite believe it. I remember hearing lots about it when I was a first year scrub, I saw the work the now third years produced and seriously questioned if I could ever produce something to such a high standard. Now I'm here though I guess I feel quite a bit more confident especially in regards to teamwork etc.

The off the map project is a yearly competition held by the British library, in conjuncture with game city. This is the first where crytek arent involved which means we aren't actually limited to using cry engine. This was good news and bad, it's good because as a year we have become quite proficient in unreal 4 but it would of been quite nice to try out one of the other major players when it comes to engine. This week definitely started out quite interesting, we were assigned groups based upon who we had worked with in the past and how we worked together. Also for the DMU project hand in we were given the limitation of the level being a 2D side scroller, this was a controversial topic for a lot of people. A lot of people had already started planning there projects previously and some had a lot of problems working with certain members of the their teams in the previous project, many spoke out against this however I was raring to go. The sound of a side scroller sounded a little bizarre at first, i can see it being quite simple in execution but possibly limiting too; as time passed and I realised what we could achieve with a side scroller I got quite attached to it.

After  lots of complaints from various people on the course, the tutors finally caved and allowed you to choose what type of project you would like to do. At this point, as a group, we actually got quite attached to the idea of doing a side scroller. We had plenty of team meetings and started to plan what we wanted to do as a group. As it was the first week we kept it simple.

One of the main team discussions of the week was about the style of the project, do we go stylized or go for something quite realistic. We also actually found that the majority of the group were actually characters artists, which was quite bizarre; maybe a mistake on the tutors behalf? Who knows. Either way it's still a little up in the air at the moment we aren't going out of our way to make a decision yet. One thing is for certain, I'm certain we will aim high for this project, we are in fact aiming to win the project so, morale is high and I'm trying to keep the moment I built during the last project going.