Re-scoped

Well first of all I'd like to appologise, if anybody has been following my blog, for the sudden lack of posts and also how long I am waiting between each one.
As I mentioned in my last post we have been in the production phase for our new spy game game for the past couple of weeks, and with having milestone deadlines set each week (and they've not been the same day of the week each time either) it means that it has been rather stressful with trying to get everything done by each certain deadline. In fact I've been submitting animations for the main character each deadline, and yet it was only yesterday that I actually had all of the animations finished, rendered and spritesheeted to the standard at which they are going to be in-game.
Granted we had to have some animations in for testing purposes, and also for review purposes, but I felt like I had been wasting a lot of time putting things into spritesheets not only for testing purposes but also to keep the programmers happy;

1) they, and when I say they I mean Ollie mostly, needed some visual representation to see exactly how the player was moving, and as he is responsible for the main character coding-wise, as I am with the animations, there is only so much you can take of looking at red boxes with dots and numbers on them.

and 2) they kept telling me that they needed to know exactly how long and where each animation would be place on each spritesheet. In a sense I can understand that as it's always good to try to keep as organised as possible, but on the other hand a lot of the animations had still not been done; And the thing about sprite animation is that you can get them looking as smooth and nice as you want when modelling them in 3D, but essentially they will always look different once made into 2D sprites. This makes it very difficult to estimate exactly how many frames each animation should be, which co-insidently has an impact on the position of the following animations as they have to be moved across.

So anyway just to break up this text a bit I will show you a quick 'action' screenshot of the spy. Bare in mind that since this screenshot was taken he has been tweaked and is also rendered from a totally different direction;
AND obviously he is just holding a placeholder gun, HA!




Our Spy caught sneaking with a fake-gun, whoops!

Anyway like I said this is not the final look as the diffuse map has changed a little (his hair was made to look better, he has been given some, rather bushy, eyebrows and actually has a proper silenced pistol).

So yesterday was yet another deadline, the equivalent of Beta you could say, and so our game is looking a hell of a lot nice than at any other time. All of the spy animations are in, and some of the environment too. I also must add that the environments are looking sweeeeet as hell. Simon and Isaac really are going to town with it, as is Richard with his in the ninja team. Seeing them really makes me wish I was doing some environment stuff, more modelling, because now I am responsible for all the animations (the enemies included). This means that I'm basically not doing anymore modelling and not creating anything new, and essentially not doing anything in the area in which I want to be going in.
Doing the animations is good for a couple of things, though. First it allows me to learn something new and really improve myself in that area (well ok I'd done a little bit of animation before but I wasn't really very good);
and also when I get to see how the final animations look it is a great feeling to bring that character to life.
I would say that I'm hoping to have this done with a bit of time to spare to jump into the environment stuff for a couple of days, but somehow I really doubt that this will happen. We have practically 10 days to get everything done (possibly even less) and I still need to do all of the animations for the different enemies AND work at the restaurant weekends. Yikes :s

Just to quickly ellaborate on the title of this thread, basically the game has been re-scoped a number of times over the past couple of weeks and so is now very far from the original brief, which was a big push toget done in the time frame we have been given, and even bigger push to have got it to look good too. The new scope is basically to have a small but highly polished industry standard game to go on the app store which GamerCamp would be proud to be assossiated to, and we would be proud to present in our portfolio.

Please bare in mind that the are all old animations and the textures have been re-done, the animations tweaked and other various changes to it. But seeing as I haven't posted in a long time I thought I'd treat you to a GIF =P

A change in my methods

Ok so as you may have noticed I'm not posting quite as much as I used to. Truth is that I am very busy with my uni work and that everyday is pretty much the same thing as the previous. We have our list of tasks that we need to complete by each milestone (each milestone is pretty much the end of each week).

To put it quite vaguely we are all pretty much a little behind our tasks. This last week I was supposed to have the spy modelled, textured and rigged but all of these tasks took a lot longer than we had anticipated (we'd given e 2days to do all of that and it pretty much took the whole week, especially the weights painting which took a while and was a right pain in the ass).
So anyway that's pretty much done now, so hopefully we should be able to start animating him today.. Though we do still need to add some acessories, and I have no doubt that some of the weights may have to be re-painted. It's bound to happen.
But other than that everything is looking pretty sweet and we should end up with a nice game, although I have no doubts that we will probably have to drop some features.

Monday 14/10 - 3D at last, 3D at last... thank GOD almighty 3D at last

aaaah yes it's a play on words of MLK's speech, I've not doubt you worked that out yourself. Well as the title suggests today we've started modelling in 3D....in Maya, and I have to admit I'm starting to get the hang of it and I do quite like it, even if it did crash on me about 5 or 6 times today. Just have to keep on my toes and save all the time.
First thing today was to deligate tasks to each artist as to what we would be modelling for this week, and I am basically responsible for modelling the main spy character (which does include texturing and rigging for animation... daaaamn I hate rigging, but we all have to do it. And I suppose it's another skill where I could do with improving). This is pretty cool though as the spy is the main character and the one constant that will always be on the screen, meaning that it's kind of a big deal that I do it right; And as other people will be animating him too, it means that my mesh needs to be nice and tidy so that it's easy for the others to animate with it. This is good though, as it's throwing me right in there where I have to up my skills and work to a high level in order for things to go smoothly... oh and yes I've got other tasks such as creating doors and such.

Today did not start very well and I essentially wasted the first half of my day. I kept having problems with Maya, such as reference images moving whenever I panned a camera (which was a big ball-ache, but I managed to fix it by creating additional cameras with the images attached to them, which I then froze so they could not move). Finally I could start modelling my character, and I figured I'll use the box modelling technique as it's supposedly quicker and it's a method I've used before but don't find myself too comfortable with. It started off very well and I pretty much had the whole torse blocked out when..... BAM! maya crash. Ah it's ok you can just go back to a previously saved file and just redo the last bit, I hear you say; ah yes, well I'm an idiot because I have auto-save feature turned on but I never did an initial save, which means that I am left with nothing. NOOOOOOO!!!
Ok back to square one, this time I'm going to use another technique. I am going to start with 1 face and just extrude from there. This method can be a bit more complicate if you don't know what you are doing, but it's a lot more accurate and, in my case, a tad quicker.

So by the end of the day I had the torso blocked out, an arm with no hand and a leg stump. Beautiful! (oh I only have 1 of each because I am only modelling half of it and then will mirror the geometry when I am done). I've tested the mirror geometry and smoothed it, and I am rather happy with it. Tomorrow we will have a head, hands and feet and hopefully he will be all rigged up and ready to be animated with a beautiful texture to go with it... aaaaah getting somewhere now!

Thursday 10/11 - Preliminary results from module 1 with a touch of concepting

Right well like I mentioned in my previous post, today is the day that I get my preliminary results. I'm not going to beat around the bush here and just tell you that I received 67, 3 marks off a distinction. I have admit that when I first heard I was a little disapointed at being so close but not quit, I thought I may have done enough to reach my goal of the 70 mark, but it wasn't meant to be. Now don't feel too bad for me, I don't... in hindsight (yes, as we all know it's a wonderful thing) I think it's not so bad. OK it's not quite what I was aiming for but it's not far off at all, so it's not like I would need a miracle to turn it around and achieve an average of 70+ by the end of the year, just means I need to pull my finger out and start working even harder.
As I was told in my feedback, I can still step it up a gear or two and I know that. OK so I am making an effort and working a lot harder than I did on my Ba, but that's not exactly saying much. I think I have been staying within my comfort zone and trying to do well within it, rather than branching out and trying to better my skills in other fields.
We will see what this module brings, but already I know I have had o up myself in my drawing abilities. I know I'm not the best, I'm certainly nowhere near as good as the others on the course, but at the same time concept drawing is not where I want to go, but as long as I am improving at something each and every day then come the end of the course I will be somewhat better in almost all areas... and that can only be a good thing.

So anyway today was the last day of concepting but I still have a fair bit to do. Got quite a lot done and, after my feedback session, I got back to drawing but tried to step it up a little and push myself at using techniques that I was not so comfortable with in order to better myself in those areas. Weekend comes and I will be doing yet more drawing throughout. Can't wait for next week to start, 3D at last =D

Wednesday 11/11 - A summary of the last couple weeks

First of all would like to apologise for not posting for the last two weeks but do have a reason, of which I am going to tell you. As you may remember from my last post the space invaders project was done and dusted, the oral exam done and I had an extended weekend where I would write back my next post the following Monday.

Well I did have all the intentions of doing so but was halloween and ended up going out to have a couple drinks with the people I live with, so did not have any time to post. On that day we spent the whole day being briefed about the new game we would be working on over the following 6 weeks. I cannot tell you too much about this game as I realise that a lot gets changed over the course of production, and as this game may be published on the app store I'd rather not give you false information. Yes that's right, we are making a game for the iPad2 and have been split into 2 groups. I will tell you that we are both making platformers and that one team's main character is a ninja and the other team is a spy. So I am working on the spy team, we have 4 programmers and 3 artists in our group, whereas the ninja team have got 5 programmers and 2 artists.

Anyway onto Tuesday and the reason why I haven't posted in over a week. On this day I came into uni feeling slightly fragile but still capable of working. We were learning how to use Maya the afternoon before and were continuing the whole day Tuesday, and consequently the Wednesday too. Half way through the day I received a phone call from my mum informing me that my aunt had passed away; as I had no idea that she was even ill, this obviously came as a huge shock to me. I decided to stay in uni working, and also came in the following day, but it has to be said that it was all done with my mind a long way away from that room.

Thursday right after uni I took the train home, and then Friday I went to France with my mum to pay my respects at her funeral and spend a couple extra days with my uncle and cousins. This really did help to see that they could still have a good laugh with us, though I guess they had suspected that she was on her way out and had mentally prepared themselves, that's not to say it wasn't hard and very sad for them but I imagine they were in a way glad that she is not in pain anymore.

Anyway I came back on Monday night, and straight back to uni on Tuesday. Basically this whole week is being dedicated to concept drawing. This is where we put pen to paper and decide on the shapes of everything, from characters to ladders and environments. This is kinda fun as this is where you get to interpret the brief in any way you like, and you can come up with some very good concepts. So today has been spent the whole day concepting different ideas.

The interesting thing about today is that Emma (who was on my team) and Isaas the ninja were both switched around the groups today (remember don't get attached to your work as you may have to give it up some time) so a lot of the time today was spent bringing Isaac up to speed with our visual style.
Guess this kinda works out for us though, Emma did some amazing drawings for our spy and all the animations that will be needed; and now we have Isaac we will be getting some amazing environment drawings. I do have a suspicious feeling they will do this again through production, Richard the ninja will be swapped with either Simon or me. Oh well we will see.

Tomorrow I find out my preliminary results from my first project, so will keep you informed on those. Prob won't have much else to say as will be more concepting.