This week’s research has been the most frustrating, as I have finally undertaken art research. Thing’s are not looking great and I am becoming more accepting of the fact that my game will be laden with what is known as “programmer art”. In other words, art that is not exactly visually appealing but art that is there and functional. I have realized the benefits to this approach though, as at this early in development I am still messing around with what sort of feelings I want the game to evoke visually. Not spending too much time on individual assets allows them to be easily scrapped or changed later when you change your direction. I am currently leaning towards a few enemy’s with simple silhouettes who are mostly white with black outlined edges. Perhaps maybe even animate these black lines and make it bloody when bullets start flying. This could allow players to treat their bland, mostly black and white environments, like their own canvas’s for viscera. The systems necessary for how that would be possible is a completely different animal but at least I’m moving forward with visual aspects in my head. Modeling is a big Issue though, as in my past projects enemy’s and environments have been simple geometry and 3D shapes provided by unity. I have never created my own assets and imported them. This is a bridge I have tried to cross before and failed miserably and I fully understand how daunting it can be to model and texture assets. I have seen my peers struggle to crank out finished models for even the smallest projects during a semester and these students have been modeling for a while. This research has been especially frustrating mainly because this type of art is mainly trial and error. You must keep trying new things until you find what really works for your vision and researching a bunch of other people’s methods yields limited results. I just need to pop into some free modeling program, photoshop, or anything for that matter and start seeing what works. Obviously, after learning some basics. This will no doubt prove to be the most frustrating aspect part of the project for me as I am someone who wants things to look clean and good with no real means of achieving it on my own. Also, having to learn new programs in such a short period of time will be a difficult task. I understand I could download free assets from Unity’s asset store, but I want this game to be mostly original. Every where I go people have been saying to keep the focus on programming when you don’t know what you’re doing artistically. I find this advice to be disingenuous as I know great gaming experiences rarely stand on one aspect of their design alone. Now that I have an idea of what my goal for visuals It is now time to begin checking out video tutorials and practicing.