The three characters I have created so far in action poses.
Introduction
During the later half of this semester we are taking the course of “big game project” in which we, the students get to create a game on a larger scale than the previous projects. Only this time with more experience and less production time… I work in a group of four people, two programmers and two artists. The game we are making is called “Glade” and it is a dungeon crawler that takes place in a nordic folklore inspired setting. The main feature of the game is that the player will be able to play as all characters in this world, “If you can best it you can play it” is our catchphrase for the gameplay. So you would start out playing one character and then unlocking new ones by defeating different bosses or leaders of the different types of creatures.
The temp-level and the base mesh character.
The Team
The first week was focused a lot towards getting everyone on the team up to speed on the game concept, André Åström and I were on the same team while he was constructing the concept in the first place. I had already started working out some of the graphical aspects by creating a basic temp-level and a base mesh character just to get a better perspective on the artistic scope of the project. Based on the time it took to create those assets I drew the conclusion that we could complete this project with just one artist. However I also realized that having two artists would be crucial if there should be any time over for polishing the assets produced. The weekend before easter the course administrators held a whole day of presentations for the different concepts that the class had produced. This was held so that the concepts could receive feedback on the design, and also to recruit team members to join up and make the games. André and I had already teamed up, but we still needed one more of both programmers and artists, and so few days after the pitch we were able to recruit artist Max Nordlund and programmer Georgios Chatzoglakis. Once they were on board with the concept and the task we had ahead of us we could start producing assets for the game.
Production
The character collage at the beginning of the post just about sums up my work on the project the last two weeks. All three characters are almost complete with all their animations. In the beginning there was a lot of iterations I had to do in order to get it right, just figuring out how to structure a suitable pipeline for producing 3D characters with rigging and skinning and then directly have them implemented in blueprinted animation trees where a number of flaws were visible right away. For example I had assumed that Unreal would have a neat way of tweaning between a fully extended attack pose back to an idle pose, however I then realized that the interpolation between those points does not make a very appealing transition. This was something that was discovered in the first imported animation however, so the time loss could be minimized by dealing with the issue in the animations I made after that discovery.
I estimated that the task that would prove to be most time consuming for the artists would be animating the many characters we need for the game core features to be appealing, This estimation was based on both the previous courses work with animations and feedback received from the experienced staff of the university. To deal with this potential time-sink we structured the character development into a set of feasible milestones for the scope of the project. We determined that what we would need for the games core features to work, those consisting of different playable characters and an appealing combat system, we would need a minimum of four characters with their own unique animations for the presentation of the game during the Gotland Game Conference.
Based on this goal we decided that we would start by creating the four characters with the basic animation set of Idle, Walk, Basic attack, Get hit and death. Along with one character which would have a higher priority on being complete with all additional attacks for the programmers to work with in the engine. Once those milestones were reached we would go on to complete the remaining animations for the last three characters. At this point of the production we are almost at the step of completing all four characters and implementing them in-engine.