Galaxia
Spaceship dogfighting and asteroids!
Galaxia is a space shooter created by 13 students at The Game Assembly over 10 weeks of half time work.
My contributions
- Designed and implemented a pipeline for the technical artists (more info below)
- Helped set up an art and level design pipeline from scratch
- Minor shader work
Technical artist pipeline for Maya scripts
During this first of our projects, I designed and created a framework for us technical artists to distribute Maya scripts to our artists and level designers. It allowed us to ensure that everyone was using the latest version of each tool, and was used throughout all of the rest of our projects.
The pipeline came with the following benifits:
- Simple to set up for users, just set up a single environent variable and restart Maya.
- Script updates take effect immediately, without having to restart Maya.
- Safe and easy for script creators to release their scripts to users, a script was created to synchronize a release directory on our SVN with the location on the network where the users ran their scripts from.
- New scripts could be very easily added to users shelves by updating a list in a script with an icon, a script to run and a tool tip.
- Crash logging was automatically handled for all scripts. So if a user experienced a crash, we didn’t always need to hog their work station to figure out what went wrong, but could instead look at their crash report from our work station. We could also use this data to help identify and fix bugs that the user might not even have noticed.
- We logged who used what script when. This data was useful to spot scripts that weren’t used for instance. This data was then used to improve tools further and help focus our efforts.