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!
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| 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.
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| 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 |
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