Ministry Memos: Dev Challenges
[h2]Hello Custodians![/h2][p][/p][p]We hope you have been enjoying saving the silly little fluff balls in the latest demo. We at the Ministry are back this week with another Memo, this time sharing a little bit about the challenges that the developers have faced through the development process! [/p][p][/p][p]Each member of the team has shared their own bits, let's see what they had to say.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]AZAR Majed Saliou (Programmer):[/p][p]Maybe my memory is playing games on me, or I wasn't involved with the hard parts. But honestly, MMU was a pretty chill project to work on, in my opinion.[/p][p][/p][p]Either he has supernatural coding powers or he's just really good at making difficult things look easy.[/p][p]![]()
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Tania Luna (3D Artist):[/p][p]The biggest challenge was learning tools on the fly. For example, I had never used Substance Designer and I learned how to create procedural textures that we can see all over the game. Especially for walls, floors and ceilings.[/p][p][/p][p]We love a skilled queen. She really said "I don't know this tool" and then proceeded to master it anyway.[/p][p]![]()
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Ehsan Foadian (Backend Operation Engineer):[/p][p]About infrastructure and backend operation, I didn't have any big challenges. But we will see after the official launch. ;))[/p][p][/p][p]The calm before the launch storm, brought to you by Ehsan's optimism.[/p][p]![]()
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Skouts (Art Director & concept artist):[/p][p]Had some fun ideas for the UI that didn't quite work.[/p][p][/p][p]Sometimes the best ideas are the ones that live in our hearts (and concept folders). We'll try to get you some concepts of the UI for the next Ministry Memo so we can see what we were robbed of.[/p][p]![]()
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Gary "Dave" Philpott (Creative Director):[/p][p]The entire lighting system actually, we had originally intended to bake all the lighting but this proved problematic in certain situations and looked too fake considering we wanted players to move everything around. A mix of realtime and baked was considered but then a third party plugin (not naming names) came and crashed the party on that.[/p][p][/p][p]In the end we went with a really well optimised baked global illumination, which in simple terms allowed us to use realtime lights and still get most of the benefits that baked lighting gives us. This actually worked out great and fit the style we were going for much better than fully baked.[/p][p][/p][p]When life gives you lighting problems, you make... better lighting solutions? Gary's got this covered.[/p][p]![]()
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We hope you've enjoyed this week's Ministry Memo, we'll be back next week with some more fun insights from the team![/p][p][/p][p]Meanwhile, this will be me for the remainder of the weekend[/p][p]![]()
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