By Louise, Producer and Studio Manager
As you know, it’s GDC 2019! Droves of game developers are heading to San Francisco to meet and share ideas. But what happens to the devs who stay behind?
Here at Cooperative Innovations the core team is cracking on as usual while Simon, Brian and Emma are at GDC, and there’s definitely an enthusiastic vibe this week! As Producer it’s up to me to make sure we’re all heading towards the same goal, even during short sprints. We’re a busy team, so we’re focusing on three projects – maybe if we keep busy, we won’t die of jealousy over GDC…
Our main game, Raiders of Erda, is having some fine-tuning done on its code functionality: Jak is writing a tool which will enable our artists to pin-point areas of improvement in their meshes and optimise performance.
The tool will help the art team spot areas to improve quickly and easily when importing into the game engine.
Having made some progress with characters for Raiders we’re getting further with animating the enemies – at the moment Chris is focusing on melee-style stances and movement.
Raiders of Erda is also having a much-needed art pass by Fran and Laura! Here’s some LIVE work in progress shots:
AND! We’re working hard on our top-secret unannounced game. Our designer Adam is creating a joystick affordance using a combination of blueprinting and C++, so lead coder Scott is on hand for any complicated maths…
The code base for the game is in early stages of development, and Greg is helping turn blueprint interactions into excellent C++.
Our final task for the sprint is to create a Coop Mannequin – or ‘Manny’ for short! From Black Books, of course… Manny is going to be our best practice, highly-optimised model for enterprise VR products, and we’re looking forward to how she turns out. Character artist Nele and animator Chris are working together on this and we’re hoping to have a functioning model soon!
And, er, the ‘Manny’ version:
Meanwhile, production will continue with planning projects and milestones. My other goal for this period is to start work on a Production Glossary, which will be my go-to guide for game dev terminology. This isn’t a normal glossary though: the terms within it will be defined by the people who use them, so that when we’re having discussions and meetings I can make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
On Monday I headed to the Northern Power Women Awards as we were shortlisted for the small organisation award! It was an incredible event full of excellent women and companies working towards improving gender representation in the workplace.
And finally – hard work must be rewarded! We’re all heading to Leeds Kitty Café mid-week lunchtime for important bonding (with the cats!). If cats can’t distract us from our GDC FOMO, then nothing can.
