Second update of “Big Game Project”

Recap

Since the last post I have still been working a lot with the animations and polish on that area. for example we found out that unreal does not blend very well on it’s own between walk, attacks and idle, so the end of the attack sequences were a bit abrupt, I had falsely assumed that unreal would interpolate nicely between poses. So to get the transition just right I went back to motionbuilder and added transitional key frames to the animations that needed it.

Risks

It has become apparent that animation is potentially the largest time-sink of this project so far, this because of the number of steps that the process involves from start to finish and the fact that issues that requires extra time keep revealing themselves. It is however a process that I enjoy working with, so I have the motivation to push the limit when it comes to both work hours and unexplored areas of the softwares we are using. In light of this re-evaluation of the animations we decided that we are going to pause the production of new characters and instead polish the four that we have created so far, and free up more time for creating environment assets for the levels.

I am fairly optimistic about us completing this game in time for GGC now, due to the fact that we could make the decision to go into polish on the characters at this relatively early stage of production. At the start we were very eager to just push forward and produce as much as possible without over thinking it, and I think that was the right approach to have in the beginning. Because now when we are taking a few steps back to look at what we have done so far we have a lot to go on content-wise, and we can base the direction of the production on something concrete, such as a certain dynamic that is reached when the pine cone character fights the troll and uses a special move etc. As opposed to creating these scenarios in theory from just looking at the design document.

Textures

We have decided to include textures on the characters to avoid the risk of making a game that feels too plain and visually under-stimulating. To begin with we will include simple emmissive and diffuse maps with a level of detail that is easy for the eye to read from the players point of view, in our case that means breaking up the characters into at least two different color variations and to add some sort of individual trait for each type of character. The troll is for example covered in warts and blemishes and the pine cone has an inner glow that shines from its eyes and cracks of the body. We will then need to place the characters in the level to see if we need to add more textures to the environment assets as well. The most important consideration on my part is that we are careful not to go too far towards a realistic style with the textures, so to stay within the bounds of a stylized fantasy expression we will avoid using normal maps and photo textures all together.

The logotype

I have also started working on the first drafts of a logotype for the game, I made it by using the lasso tool in photoshop and blocking out simple letters. I wanted to give a primal feel to the letters, like they had been carved into stone and infused with some sort of magic runes. After receiving some feedback on the design, it seems that people interpret it more like something mechanical and that it fails to convey the setting of the game. So it is going back to the drawing board for improvement. This time I will go more for a fairy tale influence, I will look a lot at covers for old childrens books.