This past week in Game Design was a short one. With everyone in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday, our group actually started working on a couple new things within our project. The enemy movement script was successfully transported into the demo Unity level. I started working on boning the chicken model.
A unique challenge I faced this week came when I started boning the chicken. Unlike past models I've worked on, the chicken is made up of several different objects which are grouped together (instead of being one large, cohesive mesh. This means when I'm assigning bones and envelopes I need to be mindful of the different groups one bone might effect. One bone might have multiple envelopes assigned to it and I need to keep track of all of them as I start to animate those bones and create motion. Next week I will: -Finish the chicken skeleton -Fix envelopes -Start animating bones
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Recently Warner Brothers came out with a trailer for their new movie, Detective Pikachu. This movie is going to be based of off Nintendo's detective Pikachu game which came out in March of this year. This isn't the first movie based off a video game. Movies like this have been coming out for years to mixed success. It isn't even the first Pokemon movie. The first Pokemon movie was release all the way back in 1998. In the past many of these movies have flopped. The recent World of Warcraft movie died in the box office and most of the recent animated Pokemon films haven't even gotten that far.
However, I have reason to expect that Detective Pikachu will be different. For one, it's live action. No Pokemon movie has ever been brave enough to leave the animated style of the kid's cartoon TV show. This is important for several reasons. The biggest of which is that it creates a more adult feel in the Pokemon universe. This shows that Warner Brothers is thinking about the actual content they're creating. If you want to make a Noir style detective film, you shouldn't be using the happy-go-lucky animating style of a children's TV show. In the trailer we see them making great use of this medium too. The Pokemon themselves are rendered stunningly and show a maturity that any old fan of Pokemon can enjoy. The reason I'm excited for this movie is that it looks to be clearly aimed at original Pokemon fans. The people who originally grew up with Pokemon and are adults now. This movie looks to be tailored to give those fans a kick of nostalgia with a minimum of the cheesy childhood humor that these movies normally employ to keep younger audiences entertained. Will it be good? No one can truly know at this point. But, I'm optimistic and you can be sure I'll be there as soon as it opens in theaters. -Detective Pikachu the Movie? -Why it's different -Why I think it'll be a success -Some closing thoughts This week in Game Design there was a little bit of a lull in the work. I, myself, focused on my sound design interview for UNCSA. This is probably one of, if not the, biggest interviews I will do this year. I spent my time perfecting my portfolio. UNCSA is my top school and I want to make sure this interview goes as well as it possibly can.
The other members of my group worked on their own areas of the project. The EnemyMovement script I created was put into our demo scene. After a bit of tweaking and debugging, we got the script to work well in the demo floor. However, one thing to note is that we haven't tested this script in VR yet and we will likely have to continue to work on it when we get it into the actual game. Another of my group members focused on texturing the chicken enemy. After several failed attempts to make the model appear scarier, the texturing is going smoothly. I expect the chicken fully done very soon, maybe even as early as the end of this week. Next week I will: -Start animating the chicken in 3ds Max A new year of theatre shows is upon us at DSA. While I decided to sit out on doing sound for our first show, Godspell, I'm back to work on our next production of Dead Man's Cell Phone. This is a play by Sarah Ruhl that explores human connection and how technology both connects and isolates us. For this play our director wants it to have a distinct noir-mystery feel. We plan to incorporate this in our sound design by using smooth noir-jazz during transitions. I started doing research on the kind of music we could use and found a lot of good royalty-free music online that our sound screw could use in the show. The noir music clashes with harsh technological sounds throughout the script. There are a lot of phone rings that are used throughout the course of the play. To find the best phone ring to use I started by asking my director what her idea was on how the ring should sound. She envisioned something like the original blackberry ringtone. Going off of this i found several possible blackberry ringtones. However, what I realized is that to set this play in the modern times many of these ringtones are outdated and not easily recognizable as a phone. To solve this, I shifted my focus to I phone ringtones. My director liked the idea of having a more recognizable ringtone and in the end we settle on two versions to try out later in the blocking rehearsals. I'm very excited to be working on another theatre production. I had a great time designing sound effects for Anne Frank and while I didn't do everything perfectly in my first show, I'm looking forward to continually improving my skills as a sound designer. -What is Dea Man's Cell Phone? -What I'm doing for Dead Man's Cell Phone -What I'm excited about going into this production This week in game design I focused on scripting the enemy movement. This took me a while as I needed to learn how to use the NavMesh Agent to allow the enemy to wander around as well as follow the player. I looked up example scripts on google and the unity website. I was able to get everything to work in an example tutorial scene I got for free off the unity asset store. Next week I should be able to work with another of my team members to import it into the tutorial level and have a working enemy at last.
Once that's done the chicken model was finally finished this week so I can start animating. This is good timing since it would be nice to have animations on our moving chicken enemy to make it scarier as it chases you. We also now have the whole first floor of our school modeled and textured in unity. This is good as it will give our enemy some area to move around before in chases the player character. Next week I will: -Import the enemy movement script -Start creating chicken animations This week is the start of a new quarter in our school year. Accordingly I am starting some new things for our group's game. Now that we have a good play area for character's to move around in, I can start to work on scripts that add some functionalities to our game.
Namely the script I'm am starting with is the enemy movement script. We want the enemies in our game to move around randomly, then attack and follow the player when they get too close. To do this I'll have to write a script that uses the Nav Mesh Agent component in Unity. To research how I might do this, I've been searching online for suggestions on various forums. I also downloaded one of the free unity tutorial games to look at how the Nav Mesh Agent component might be used in a real game. The Chicken model is currently being simplified so I hope to have a working code in place before that's done. Then I can just focus on animation and give the code to another of my teammates to implement into the game. Next Week I Will: -complete an enemy movement script for our game -work to add in the scripts I create |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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