As usual, it's just Robert Bailey and the developer.
Transcript:
[RB] Hi, my name is Robert Bailey, and I'm the producer and creative lead on VRoom. Today, I'm with Aidan Markham, one of our artists.
[AM] Hi, I'm Aidan Markham, one of the texturers on VRoom.
[RB] Cool. So, this is one of the dev interviews where we just kind of go over, kind of introduce, what got you into games, what got you into making games, and what he's been doing on VRoom.
[AM] Well, I guess my first introduction to video games was playing Mario Kart 64 at my aunt's house on the Nintendo 64. That was really my big introduction, as well as educational PC games. But then eventually I branched out and got my own PC. Started playing stuff like Mass Effect, was one of the first games I played on that. A lot of other stuff. These days I'm more into indie games and that kind of stuff. It's good.
[RB] Cool. Any games that stand out as a favorite?
[AM] The Beginner's Guide. Davey Wreden. That's probably my favorite game of all time. It's really interesting. He does a lot of really cool artistic stuff with it. A lot of stuff by Davey Wreden, what is it - The Stanley Parable, I liked that. Looking forward to Manifold Garden by William Chyr. That seems like it's going to be really cool. That's mostly what I'm looking forward to these days.
[RB] Cool. So what type of projects have you done in the past, game related or otherwise?
[AM] Well, I am a long time game jam enthusiast. One of the ways I got my start in games was doing Ludam Dare game jams. So I've done a lot of those. Started out with 2D games, starting out with Python and the pygame game engine. Then I moved on to Java and Slick2D a little bit. These days I'm a Unity developer, making mostly 3D games.
[RB] What do you want to do after getting your degree?
[AM] After getting my degree, I'd like to go and work for a pretty small studio. My ideal studio size I see as being roughly 30 people or less. I like that that allows you to sort of have your finger in the different pies. Because, primarily as a developer, but also someone with a passion for 3D art, being locked into one side, not being able to have any aesthetic choices or not being able to write any code, that sounds like not a great time for me. So really small studio is a good fit for me.
[RB] So what do you do on VRoom?
[AM] I'm the texturer and occasional unwrapper. So what I'll do is I can use Maya to unwrap 3D models, and then I use Gimp to texture them. I can go back and forth between the two of them and see the updates on my textures as they happen.
[RB] Sorry about not letting you do code and stuff.
[AM] It's fine, people have to have their roles. It's been really educational for me, because I've never considered my myself the most amazing texturer in the world, but doing this project has really given me a chance to focus on the texturing workflow and develop my skills.
[RB] Cool. What got you interested in VRoom and working on the project.
[AM] I first heard about it from a friend of mine, Noah Ratcliff, who said they were looking for someone. When I first heard about the concept, I just, I thought it was really cool because I'm a huge fan of the Mad Max movies, and I think VR is really interesting future technology.
[RB] That was like when I was (thinking of what I wanted to make) - I like Mad Max and I like VR! Pretty similar avenues. What are you looking forward to? With the project. I know it's coming close to the end, but...
[AM] Right now I'm looking forward to ImagineRIT. It's going to be cool to see other people's reaction to the game. As of right now, a lot of the art I've done hasn't quite been implemented into the engine yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of that stuff coming together and seeing the game in it's final graphical style. I'm also excited to play it beyond just basic testing, and trying out the steering. That'll be cool.
[RB] Cool. Yeah, it's funny because we had that stand alone blue and green card for the longest time. But we needed screenshots, so I said toss the texture on, and we were all "holy crap, the chairs!" because none of us had thought about that, because everything was red blocks, and (the response of) "oh, that looks great." Just seeing those assets come in, even piecemeal between models and textures coming in has been great. But from art team's perspective, "well, we handed it in and occasionally we see it all put together."
[AM] Yeah. It's interesting. There's sort of a disconnect as the art team, because we have all these models we've been making, and then there's the game which as of last time, didn't have a ton of the models. So it's almost like they're two separate things at this point, so I'm excited to see those two halves come together.
[RB] Yeah, especially with all the props that have come in, they're now making sure we have physics on everything, and making sure those elements in. And there's been so much work on the car and whatnot. It's like "We have these supplies" and I'm like "that's great, those will be fast, we need to make sure the gun drops when you drop it."
[AM] Totally.
[RB] But yeah, definitely. Because when I was grayboxing out the level, I was like "okay, that'll be a rock, that'll be something, and I know I have these coming through." Anything that you anticipate to be a problem coming up before Imagine and wrapping up afterwards.
[AM] Well right now, art team's doing pretty well, I think we decided not to do the shotgun for ImagineRIT, and that's allowed us to focus on the models we are trying to get in for ImagineRIT. As far as problems, I can imagine that it could be difficult bringing people who've never tried anything in VR into our game. I haven't demoed it in a while, but I think a lot of the things code team has tried to implement to onboard people a little easier has been helpful, but it's still a slight concern that it'll be difficult for people to start using it.
[RB] Yeah, I'm going to be writing up a script for demoing it, but that's a definite concern of "so, have you ever done this before?"
[AM] Exactly.
[RB] Did you go to GDC this year?
[AM] I did not.
[RB] There were a lot of VR things where "have you ever tried VR before?" and going over every aspect of that because it's even new for people in industry.
[AM] It's new to everybody really.
[RB] There was a space game that was "you'll going to end with flying away. It's going to be disorienting. But it's the end, so you can just can rip it off at the end, it'll be fine." So yeah, any parting thoughts about VRoom?
[AM] I'm really excited about the project, really excited to see it finally put together, and I look forward to see where it goes in the future.
[RB] Cool. So that was the interview with Aidan Markham, the texturer on VRoom and yeah, so there's a couple more of the interviews to get the entire dev team in here to talk about what they've done on the project. And we present at ImagineRIT this Friday on May 6th. So yeah, thanks for listening!
[AM] Awesome!
We've got one more developer left, so trying to squeeze that interview in at the end!
No comments:
Post a Comment