Feedback from Industry
Me and Amber made a massive list of companies and individuals that we wanted to email and ask for some feedback on our work/portfolios and our game so far. We emailed around 40 people including companies such as Natural motion, Hello games and Media molecule. A couple people have gotten back to us and here's the TLDR version of the feedback we got on our game;
Jolyon Webb from Natural Motion:
Make Burnard larger.
Work on Burnard's shape and particle effects - shrinks, wobbles, changes colour and emits sparks.
Make a moodboard of gifs and videos showing how we want Burand to look.
When animating get him to look around so you can see his eyes.
Paintover a 3D environment from the camera view to make a visual target.
If we were having the camera high then we need to make sure that everything looks legible and attractive from this view.
Make sure the characters read well from above like in DoTA.
Gavin Price from Playtonic Games:
Look at their artists twitter accounts and analyse their work.
Gareth Noyce from Triple-eh:
Create a "art bible" make a small scene finished and textured with the correct lighting and camera.
Figure out what the final colour palette will be, do we need colour grading?
How are we using negative space and lighting to show off the characters?
By messing around with these things will we have to change the level design?
Think of the level as pictures; how will this inform the architecture, use of colour and space?
Mess with UE4's default lighting and post processing settings to get the scene looking less basic.
Olive's braids could be done with a normal map and the topology around her neck is messy.
Portfolio's are not bad but possibly need rethinking when it comes to choice of texturing colours in projects.
Use modding for portfolio work as it has a target and style to match your work to.
Trying to be a generalist in the industry is extremely hard, get a specialty and excel at that whilst still doing other bits on the side.
Pull apart what other developers have done before you and move away from playing games, to the point where you can analyse the designer's decisions and why they did something.
If we want to make a game then do a 1/4 of what we want to do and get that finished.
Going to uni won't mean you are the best, we need to be doing personal work as well.
Unless we get this game on the market we are competing against 100's of other people with the same skills looking for the same jobs.
Talent only get you so far, hard work gets you the rest of the way.
That's all the feedback we have gotten so far but it is all very important and helpful. We have also made a trello board for our FMP so all 3 of us can contribute to it so we know what needs to be done and what people are working on at the moment.
