My Time on Pogglewash

On Pogglewash I worked as the Technical Artist for the project, I helped mostly with the Art Animation Content pipeline in which I would import the animations into the Unreal project and make sure they were integrated with the gameplay systems. Because of this I also managed the animation blueprints for both the player character and the Pogglewonk creature, implementing any necessary features for the animations such as blending or manipulation of the skeleton's joints.

Along with maintaining the animation blueprints, I also provided assistance with other art-related aspects of the project. One example was helping with the materials of our game. In our game, we have pollution spheres that when next to props, will cause a pollution overlay on top of the object itself. This was done by turning the material of the prop into a material instance and using a material function that created the goopy pollution texture. Once it was a material instance I added a float to act as the opacity of the goop to have it slowly fade away as the player cleaned the area.

Due to the vast amount of props and also the limited availbility of me during the late part of the project I needed to teach the artists to help set up their own props. To do this I created some YouTube tutorials that showed them the step by step process on how to create the materials in the material graph editor, how to make it a material instance, and how to set up the actual blueprint in Unreal so the prop works properly in game. To also help further I created a document they can follow with a Q&A for them to refer to questions they asked already.

Although I worked as a Technical Artist, I needed to step up for my team to provide leadership due to restructuring of the team. Halfway through the project I took over as Technical Director of the CS department. As Technical Director I was tasked with maintaing meetings with the programmers as well as keeping track of their current work. When I took over as Technical Director I also had to understand more of different engineering fields for game development such as AI and Audio since I needed to be able to provide assistance if needed. I also had to help manage the pipelines that had some involvment with tech, needing to work with the other departments to make sure that we had a programmer allocated to their needs.

Pogglewash was my capstone project for my school, it was the one project I put the most time into and the project I am most proud of. I got to meet a lot of new people during my time working on this, and I learned a lot about myself and what I want to do in the industry.

 

Plus! We were the first game team to have merchandise of our game Project!