The Future is Uncertain

This week was the hand in week for the Cut Scene and it was a stressful week, it was a week of changing ideas and uncertainty. We managed to get the animations off the motion capture PC however when we applied them to the models they were all messed up, we had no idea why probably because we rushed them as we had little time to get them off and there was a fair few.

Over the weekend I created the environment, this is where my idea ended up changing because originally I wanted to create the castle from my Game Design Document but I think I was being a bit optimistic when I had that Idea. It was after watching an episode of Game of Thrones did I come to the idea of having my two guys just meet in a throne room where they would fight but due to my animations turning out all wrong I had no choice but to make it very simple.

Luckily our tutor had provided us with a folder of animations where I had obtained a walking animation from here I chose to make my Cut Scene very simple and from there it was just going to be two guys walking up to each other in a thrones room and they exchange some dialogue. Now the audio side pretty much got sidelined throughout the whole project because it was my belief that you couldn't really make an effective audio side when you're still developing the 3D side and because of the way the course was laid out the production of the 3D ran till the deadline and with certain aspects being where they were it wouldn't have been possible to get it done any sooner. 

That being said I managed to during the week prior to the deadline I managed to book out a computer with audio software and quickly produce a soundtrack which I made 1 minute long. With the intention of taking a section that liked depending on how long the animation turned out. The dialogue was a last minute decision especially on what I wanted to say, it was pretty much a last minute job with the audio.

The animations definitely caused a lot of heart ache not only did they not work properly but they effected the weighting of the characters and I found myself constantly having to re-weight them depending on the animation which I thought was highly annoying at the time. So in the end I just left the walking animation as the most complicated and weighted around that animation and for the rest I key framed.

However in the end I managed to put it all together even though the week before I wasn't feeling confident in its completion and even though so many things had gone wrong It turned out OK and I was pretty proud of what I had made especially for it being my first character/animation piece of work.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Create the environment 
• Render animation
• Complete 2D Game in the first week of the Holiday - sort out enemy spawning, add colission and add scoring system
• Work on 3D Game - add characters in, environment and weapon