These past two weeks were actually so incredibly productive for me! I spent a lot of my time the first week finishing up cleaning up my animations in MotionBuilder and getting them ready to bring into the game. Since I already had experience of using motion capture in games from my game workshop game, I had somewhat of a sense of how to do this process, but I had always had trouble perfectly looping animations so my walk cycles were never 100% perfect. However late one night while I was working and following a tutorial that Steve Pettit sent me I stumbled upon a feature that was not taught in that tutorial. Basically what it does is that it easily and painlessly transfers the rotation and transformations of a keyframe from the first part of an animation to the very last frame of an animation, resulting in a perfect loop! This literally made me cry tears of joy because it is going to make my life so much easier as we continue to go through our motion capture pipeline. The animation I am most proud of is the male walk cycle because I was able to go through the base animation in MotionBuilder and then add a whole bunch of supporting key framed animation on top of that to give it a much more realistic look. The resulting walk cycle was pretty good! I’m uploading that to SketchFab and will be showing that below. (I just realized the animation on SketchFab has some skipping at the end. I promise this is not the case in game.
I spent the second week while on Thanksgiving break learning how to implement characters and animations into Unreal Engine 4 using Persona. This took a lot of time but I was finally able to implement the male character animations into the game. I ran into some problems with Persona automatically blending two animations together, but I found out that making those motion capture clips longer could sometimes fix the problem! I also got all of the dragon animations into the game.
Pros: I was so productive and spent the majority of my Thanksgiving break working because going home to visit "family" is overrated. I was also able to learn Persona and I feel like I'll be a lot more helpful to the programming team when I'm working in engine now. I also found that it's so much fun to work in engine! Cons: The blending between some the run and sprint animation is not perfect and it really irks me, but it shows that our pipeline work so this will be fixed during winter break. The idle animation looping is broken now also... I will also fix this over break. Time spent: 30 hours. Up next: MORE ANIMATION INTEGRATION. ALSO I'M GOING TO CUBA THIS WEEKEND AND IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME AND I'M GONNA BUY SOME CUBAN CIGARS.
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The majority of these past 2 weeks for me have been spent on taking a step back and looking at the bare bones of our game. We created a sturdy paper prototype that we have used for many in house play tests and all of these have provided amazing results. We learned so much about the gameplay, map size, how many players should play, and so much more. I am personally very excited that Dr. Wagner advised us to take this step because we were able to play test our game without having to create a digital version of it.
I have to admit that after our horrible presentation last week I was very scared for the status of our project. I believe that none of the faculty believed in our project and I hope all of this work that we’ve done will be able to change their minds. I also started doing some simple 3d concept models for more rustic and rural houses located in and outside of the keeps in the environment. These two models are shown below and are based off architecture found in the Lord of the Rings universe. Pros: We finally started prototyping the game and found that with 4 teams the game actually can get really fun! I started making art concepts which I had a lot of fun doing I’ve been watching Ruben work on the networking, including helping him test it, and he almost has the split screen networking working on both machines! This is so exciting!!!! Cons: We really disappointed our advisor and probably the rest of the faculty but I know we will be able to make up for the lost time. The labs still don’t have Unreal Engine 4! This is really starting to anger our team because it is so unfair that we don’t have access to the programs we need. Over the course of the last few weeks I have become more comfortable and enthusiastic about our game idea. The changes we made last time were pretty significant and put me off a little bit, leading to my negative first PPJ. I want to note that I wrote a similar PPJ for my Game Workshop project, Moo Dairy’s Shoppin’, and ended up loving the game and worked very hard on it. A concern I had was that due to my lack of experience and interest with more strategy-heavy games, I would be less participatory in the game design. This turned out to be untrue, and I have been much more active in our meetings. We also created a paper prototype as suggested by the faculty after our pitch. I spent a good amount of time with it, and once we got past adapting our game to the table top format, we developed a better understanding of our game. I think it was somewhat fun, but that is also taking into account that the action oriented gameplay will be fun as well. I created a quick conceptual model for the split hexagon idea, but we are still not sure if we are going to do it. As it stands we are going to have hexagonal islands to match the gameplay, but the downside is that the levels will look fairly bland. A solution to this that we found is to have hexagonal islands but split them into 2-4 smaller ones with varied shapes, and when the island is captured, they will form into a hexagon in order to attach to the team’s island. I am not sure if we have confirmed that it will function properly in game, and it would mean more work for the art team as well. Hopefully this helps bring us to a conclusion. Since I am supposed to rig the Dragon, and we don’t have a model yet, I did a practice run for one. Going off of Riley’s concept art, I did a basic model and IK rig (with no controllers) for the wing alone. I do not have skin between the wings because I did not want to spend too much time putting this together (it would be a lot of weight painting), and because it is possible that we will have a particle effect in it’s place. Overall, the rig went well, here is an animation test: I am less nervous about this undertaking now, and have some notes I can pass onto Riley to make sure the topology of the dragon model does not give me a hard time when I rig it. Here is an example of knee topology that we can use on the wings as well: Pro:
Starting at Week 3, most of the time was spent in our individual programming/art teams, where the programming team focused discussing changes to the game play, trying to figure out exactly how we wanted this game to play, along with adjusting our initial game design based on the Week 2 presentation with the faculty. On the art side it has been mostly been concepting, with creation of character and environmental concept art, as well as some rough models for the greybox. After the disastrous presentation, we had spent a lot of time pulling ourselves together. We still believe we have a good game idea, but lack of sleep and practice is what led to the failure we had for communicating this idea. After meeting with Wagner, we took a step back to nail down the details of the pitch, game idea, and game concept in general. With Wagner’s advice, we developed a paper prototype, to try and test different game mechanics and design choices, and made significant progress on how the respawning and Island movement will work, along with how combat encounters between 2 teams will work We also developed our GDD (see below), which has almost all of the primary design choices for the game, and will help guide the programmers with their work. As for the programming side, there has been some progress, with Networking IPConnection working, as well as more work on the primary game mode, with more progress on capturing islands and monolith building.
-Insert Network IPConnection picture here- https://docs.google.com/document/d/13H5HFZIjrCVwLf61U1Nqzdoz6kGS2KMzmQpwi87XvwU/edit?usp=sharing So far we have been off to a somewhat slow start, but that is okay since we have not officially started production. Especially for my position, there is really not much I can actually do this week, and we are still not 100% on each aspect of the game. We had 3 meetings throughout the week to even further discuss our game design after presenting to the faculty. We made some pretty big changes, and the game is now more of an action-strategy game than the party battle game it started as. I think these changes overall are an improvement on the game as a whole, but personally I am not a fan of those games, and because of my lack of experience with them I don’t think I will be able to contribute as much to the game design meetings as I have in the past. That and the generic overall theme we seem to be decided on, I hope I can find something I enjoy working on soon.
Pros: -Game is more fleshed out Cons: - No actual production from my end - I like the game even less now |
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