The Path of the Game Dev — Day 21

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Big day today!

Started off the day continuing to punch through the Cinematography course. To be honest, it’s really really cool to see how cutscenes are made in Unity. It took a while to work with Cinemachine and get my bearings within the 3D space but I’m good now. The repetition really helps!

One of the most time consuming parts of today was setting up the cameras for the intro cutscene. For just a single one minute cinematic, it took me about 30 minutes just to set up the cameras! Of course that’s because I started out manually moving the cameras around instead of moving the scene view and then snapping the camera game object to align with view… oops.

Anyway, it’s really inspiring to see how even the smallest changes to even camera placement can drastically change the scene. I tried my best to follow the Director’s Notes as best I could and when I compared them to the examples in the course videos they were quite different. The mood absolutely changed depending on how far away the camera was from the subject or even how far it was rotated along the different axes.

But since it’s Friday we also had another amazing presentation. The Projects Team had a chance to share the game they’ve been working together on for the past two weeks — an advanced space shooter called Nova Star. We got to learn about the challenges they’ve faced both individually on a technical level and as a team on a communication level. That part was really interesting to hear about since I’m currently working solo on the coursework. In all of my previous job experience I’ve had to work in small teams — as a team member, as a lead, and as a manager. I’m hopeful that those skills serve me well in the future!

Biggest takeaways from the day: It’s a biiiiiiiig ocean out there.

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