In our brief we were given the game and character name 'Sparks' and a list of potential mechanics to choose from, we gradually refined all of our ideas and decided on building 2 set game mechanics; an open-fighting section and a more stealthy stealthy approach:
- Day cycle: in which you would play as Sparks the robot, defending defending his village against the enemies [called Larch during development] from the forest. buildings would have hit points, so the player would need to fight off the attackers before they destroyed the village.
- Night cycle: once the day cycle was over and the enemies have left the village, Sparks would be sent on a mission into the forest where the enemies dwell to retrieve the resources that they had stolen. In this area you would have to make your way down a set route whilst staying out of the sight of the patrolling enemies.
We were going to attempt to make an open world game with a day/night cycle - The idea is now laughable considering how very little we knew at the time and how inexperienced we were in both working in a team of 9 and with the programs we were using.
After the initial organising of what our goal was, our asset production was organised like this:
CONCEPTS >> ORTHOGRAPHICS >> TEXTURING >> RIGGING >> ANIMATING >> IMPORT TO ENGINE
We assigned each one of these roles to 2 team members, these would be responsible for managing their part of the development process and that it kept to set deadlines to make sure that the pipeline ran as smoothly as possible.
We all played a part of the concept stage, blocking out the game itself with a paper-build of the levels which churned up some interesting ideas about how the game would potentially play out. It got everyone involved and gave the whole team a visual idea of the size and layout of the assets.
My main role in the team was to keep up to date with what each individual was doing each week and make notes on their progress, what needed doing/changing/had been finished. I took minutes on all our meetings and made a weekly update on our production website.
Alongside this, I was joint character rigger for the game. This was Craig's and my own first real encounter with rigging and animation in Maya. During this project I researched and learned and used joints, IK handles, animation, weight painting, curves and controllers to help with the animation progress. It was a lot to get through we only had 2 characters to animate thankfully!
Rigging Sparks
The main character had a mechanical body; all of the main parts were detached from one another. This made the ideal stepping stone into rigging in my opinion, with all the limbs being separate parts it meant that I was able to focus on learning about the joints etc and didn't have to worry much about weight painting the model and the textures being stretched etc.
Larch [enemy]
The best way I found to weight paint it was to make small animations moving the joint that I wanted to weight paint to see the influence of the joint and then add and remove it where needed. This was a tip given to me by animation tutor James Manning and it was invaluable to this project and those followed, since you cannot get a clear indication on how a model will stretch and move until you actually move it!! Regardless of the atrocious topology of the model we were given [around the joints], I still managed the rig it so that there was very little to no stretching around the knees and shoulders.
The demo had quite a few cracks on the programming side as we only had 1 and a 1/2 programmers on our team, but the asset production was constantly in flow and the final asset quality was excellent from everyone. The demo has the level of polish to it that we were hoping for from the beginning.
Trailer for Sparks!
Credits:
Jamie - Team leader, Unity implementation
David Treharne - Modelling, Audio
Chris Turner - Modelling
Craig Fox - Rigging
Daisy Spiers/Toby Clement - Concept art, texturing
Megan Goodwin/Matthew Jackson - Programming, implementation
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