This was the last week we have on the Vertical Slice build, and I’m pretty proud from what we’ve come from. All there was for me to do this last week was to finish off refining the security guard animations and make a particle effect for a portal that takes the player to the next level. Vertical slice had taught me a lot of the pipeline that is needed for an indie development team. Where I thought that the game had looked like it had turned in the wrong direction, it came around in the end and I’m pretty happy about that result. There were a lot of places for improvement in a team and personal improvement.
This was the first project that we worked on that left most of the animation on me while the others were working in the preferred areas. This left a little pressure at the start, as I didn’t know how we would approach the different animations. The jump was one of the few problems that we faced when it came to making the animations all animated. It was hard to understand what we needed to but we were able to get through it relatively easy without too much content be laid to waste. There was a lot of discussion, especially when it came to the arm, but again we were able to get through it. Some things that we’ll need for the future is me being to use unity and be able to be confident in adding my own animations to the build so that I can personally test the animations myself rather than waiting. Some parts of the rigging progress I’ll need to able to understand how to edit the rig and add my own parts to it. I did learn a lot from trying to replicate Juane’s rig for the security guard we he was absent. Another part of rigging is that I need to improvement on is my skin weight painting so that mesh doesn’t deform when that animations occur. The list could go on, but I’ve got a log of what needs to be looked out for in the future. I’m glad that we were be able to do this at the end of year as it gives us a taste of self-driven game development the aid from the tutors to keep the team on track.
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This week I had to work on finishing on the research essay for the other class as it was due on that Friday. This meant that I had to prioritise this over the prototype until Friday afternoon. As soon as I had submitted, I went to work straight onto the animations for the security guard. The main two animations that we needed was the animation where the player would lose the security guard. There wasn’t too much reference when it came to this type of animation so I got real stuck.
After being unable to finish that animation, I went home and started again with a different reference. Zac suggested I take a look at the types of animations in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and the Sly Cooper series. What I noticed is that these two types of animations were quite short and you didn’t really realise what the animation looked like. I went to having it way more simplified whilst still using the stopping animation from the failed animation before. I was also in the mood for doing another animation so I decided to start on the animation where the security guard would spot the character. I remember that Dylan wanted an animation that looked like a a karate move. I started this animation without any reference but I started to find it hard to get the timing right again. So I decided to record myself doing the animation to get the motion on the legs and the arms to look realistic and have better flow. I also tried writing down the key positions of the animation. Stated the start of the jumping, when it started to arc, when it started to fall, when the character makes contact with the ground and when the character recovers from the ground shock.
This week, was just getting a good review from Armageddon. Me, Jaune and Conrad were the representatives for our game while the other team members were steadily working on the game. It was an interesting experience being in an Exhibitor at an expo as big as Armageddon. Even though it was the Wellington, there was a very large amount of people there.
As the targeted age for our game was toward the younger populous, it seemed that we did attract just that type of player. It was really encouraging sitting next to them and they saying that it was quite enjoyable. Some of the major issues that was brought up was the fact that the double jump usually didn’t work when jumping from platform to platform. Another was that the grapple points were too hard to see when playing for the first time with conflicting signs that were displayed next to them. When you came up to the lights, there would be a Y symbol and then before the lights, there was a button press. Other requests were that the character would maybe need more customisations, but I didn’t take them too seriously. It could be a good addition to the game, to design your own protagonist for a play former. Overall I thought the game was received well at Armageddon and the general statement was that “it’s been a while since I player a platformer” and that “it was pretty fun”. The last comment was not a joke, but I still thought it was pretty funny. Armageddon is around the corner and things have to really rushed in order to get something for the exhibition. After the meeting with the tutors, we had to discuss a lot about the direction of our game because we had noticed that it had taken a completely different approach as the mechanics didn’t have that comedic value that it did in the prototyping phase of development. We decided that we should really consider that these suggestions but for now we should work on just giving players a map to run around in and test out the movement in the game. My goal this week was to work on remaking the main characters jump animations and work closely with the programing team to get it looking better.
The first thing I worked on was the run animation for the character as the normal walking animation sped up didn’t really fit well. I decided in this time that I would animate at 60 fps as the character would be moving at 60 fps in engine. The reason I was working at 24 fps beforehand is because I was just working with the default frame rate and didn’t realise how it would translate into engine. This change didn’t really hinder my animating abilities but actually made it easier because of the more fluid movement. The only problem was that the computer had started to slow down when I selected all the bones and started to play the animations, the work around was obviously not to select every bone while the animation was playing. When talking to Zac about the changes that we needed for the character, I had to take note on how the new character controller worked. This meant that I had to look through the characters animations that came with the character controller, and try replicating a similar movement with him. Before, the jump worked in pre animated sections where the character had animated transitions and falling states. Juane had suggested another alternative through animating through blend trees in engine to make for a more fluid transition and animating style. This meant that the jumping animations had to be changed from animations to poses instead and the engine would interpolate through these poses depending the Z velocity of the character. This week was a bit of a rush as we had to prepare for Armageddon this coming week (from the 2nd of June to the 4th). This meant that production had to be a bit rushed and some features had to be sacrificed to be able to make it in time for the exhibition. As well as this, the tutors were also heading in to talk about the games state the coming Wednesday. The main goal for the week from me was trying to get the rig finished for the security guard as well as get some animations out in time before the Armageddon build.
Not knowing how to create a rig in blender, the process took a whole 8 hours to do. I had to take a lot of reference from the main players rig and just scale the bones into place to fit the security guards mesh. I had a lot of trouble figuring out why the default pose in pose mode was not fitting quite right with the mesh and I had spent way too much time trying to fix it because in the end it didn’t really matter because of the weight painting. Also another problem that I came across was that I couldn’t figure out why the bones weren’t mirroring properly. The bones had a different roll on either side when I had mirrored it. The fix was simple but again took too long to figure out. It was a small menu where you had to “Set Roll” and don’t move the mouse and Left click. This was a very frustrating day as it was just filled with very simple fixes with little understanding on how these modifiers work. Once I had the base of that done, I went on to try and make a prototype weapon for the security guard, but was unable to do so as it would be too time consuming so I decided to put that aside and try after Armageddon. From there I went straight into working on the animations for the security guard. Everyone really wanted to see if the animations for the character to accentuate to silhouette of the character (almost scary that the security guard is running towards you). The way we were going to make the character look funny was that we contrast that scary run with a funny way to mess with them. An example is that the security guard may slip on a banana and fall over in a flamboyant fashion. This week was all about finishing up the level placement while looking into way of doing the animations. We had a huge discussion about the physics of the arm and how it may not work. The concerning bit about this change is that this may change the last living aspect about the original character (and in my opinion a little about the game, we should have already gotten over the fact that this game shares little resemblance from the original game). We decided to have the arm not physics based and just have it all key-animated. This meant that there would be a lot and polish that needed to be put into this. The robot arm that Juane had made for the rig, worked with a separated spline that would have been used instead of the physics arm. Because it had so many bones in the arm, I was afraid that it may be a bit hard to animate but it wasn’t too hard to control if you only manipulate the controller of the end of the arm. Having decided that we were going to go with the key animation approach, I decided to get a list of all the base animations that we needed from the programming side and once the list was roughly done, I decided to start the bases of animation. Only starting this on Friday, I got the walking done and half of the grapple animation that needed to be completed the next week. When Josh implemented these animations, it gave me a lift of motivation to make these animations look great and it was great for team morale to see all the characters move.
This week was just getting everyone on the same page and getting straight into making the game as we were spending too much time just discussing about what we could potentially change in the game and not actually implementing it. One of the major changes that we needed to create for the game was the character design. Even though the character design was appropriate for the third prototype (Grand Theft Office) we decided that it would not be suitable for the game we were going to change to. So this week was just working on the character concepts with Conrad to make a more suitable character design for the change of theme. We decided that the character would start in an Area 51 themed area. This meant that the character design would have to look like an alien. The top two on the third page of concepts was some derivatives of Conrad’s design that everyone seemed to like so I did some poses and some clothing changes. From that, Juane wanted to start modelling the character so we let him get to it. Whilst the character was being modeled, I decided to help with some of the asset creation to start the process of the level to come together. After being back from the holidays, I had to refresh my muscle memory in blender and get back into the work flow of 3D so it took me a while to get going again. For next week, I’ll be helping out on making enemy designs as well as modelling and weight painting them. We want a viable product with a good gameplay loop in about 2 weeks as we will be showcasing our game at Armageddon 2017 in Wellington. This will be one of the great opportunities to get feedback from other developers and players of the demographic we will be aiming our game at.
The holiday was to getting use to the idea of making the Office game and getting into the right headspace. To get me going and getting really invested into the game, I played it a few times in the holidays and tried to come up with some ideas about level design. While I was working on these ideas, I was able to bounce them off Josh who wanted us to come in the holiday if we weren’t busy. We were able to come up with a solid level design philosophy that had little changes from the original mechanics. From here I had a good idea on what our game was going to be and was on board with these types of changes and were discussed on the first week back into the game.
After we had discussed these changes for the game, I personally thought we were going to extend on what we had but from the discussion it seemed like most of the team, wanted to head in a different direction. At first I was worried that we were heading in the opposite direction at which had changed and was too different from what we originally had. A lot of the details were still shaky and it felt like we had no direction. But I was sure that we would make it through with more meetings to be able to chisel out the bigger details. |
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