Post by echocdelta on Mar 21, 2016 10:53:11 GMT
Hey everyone!
I'm currently in traveling flux due to having the GDC/VRDC stuff happen and also now currently on a NASA collaboration/production trip that'll see me returning to the office by next Monday/Tuesday (depending on your timezone).
Our home team has been really busy it appears, on multiple fronts. I only have emails/reports/clips/images from the people back home, but I can give a clear summary of what they've been up to.
Art: Art team has been doing a lot of 3D models and 2D concepts of villager pawns.
Art: I set the art team 'cultures' and direction as using real-world examples to create new ones, I didn't want to create cultural stereotypes and instead mix/mash cultural identifiers.
Art: Mock up 3D models and 3D 'sketches' of different character models
Animation: Animations for all the placeholders were completed and animators have moved to production skeletons/anim sets
Animation: Animations are in-engine and applied to placeholder pawns
Tech: debug miracle: Player can cast 'spawn town' by throwing a debug ball at the ground, which begins a new village that starts 'growing' by spawning buildings
Tech: more AI work was done as villagers now spawn and move around/walk around the villages
Tech: AI based preproduction and I've been told that entails very long meetings between AI people
Tech: Objects can now catch fire
Design: I had to remotely discuss fire mechanics with designers/tech people to avoid a possible mis-step - I'll explain here for people playing at home:
Fire was designed as 'if a building is made from wood, it can burn', which could lead to problems in the future with 'how much of building is wood, how much of building will burn?'
It isn't something we can scale, because 'wood' and 'burn' are irrelevant terms. I asked them to instead create states of 'can burn' and 'cannot burn', which is defined as 'can enter state x, or cannot' etc. etc. It's 6am here, so that only makes sense to me.
Design: UI/GUI for miracle selection is currently underway. I personally wanted meta learning from seeing images/symbols in the game world and experimenting with 'drawing' miracles, but currently design is looking at a GUI menu that allows players to select their miracles without breaking immersion (too much). I also spoke to someone from Crytek about 3D menus after GDC, so that was nice.
There might be a bunch of other stuff and more updates are incoming this week. I'll try to get our people at home to actually send smaller video or material and we'll tweet it or share it here.
Thanks for being patient whilst I was jet-setting!
I'm currently in traveling flux due to having the GDC/VRDC stuff happen and also now currently on a NASA collaboration/production trip that'll see me returning to the office by next Monday/Tuesday (depending on your timezone).
Our home team has been really busy it appears, on multiple fronts. I only have emails/reports/clips/images from the people back home, but I can give a clear summary of what they've been up to.
Art: Art team has been doing a lot of 3D models and 2D concepts of villager pawns.
Art: I set the art team 'cultures' and direction as using real-world examples to create new ones, I didn't want to create cultural stereotypes and instead mix/mash cultural identifiers.
Art: Mock up 3D models and 3D 'sketches' of different character models
Animation: Animations for all the placeholders were completed and animators have moved to production skeletons/anim sets
Animation: Animations are in-engine and applied to placeholder pawns
Tech: debug miracle: Player can cast 'spawn town' by throwing a debug ball at the ground, which begins a new village that starts 'growing' by spawning buildings
Tech: more AI work was done as villagers now spawn and move around/walk around the villages
Tech: AI based preproduction and I've been told that entails very long meetings between AI people
Tech: Objects can now catch fire
Design: I had to remotely discuss fire mechanics with designers/tech people to avoid a possible mis-step - I'll explain here for people playing at home:
Fire was designed as 'if a building is made from wood, it can burn', which could lead to problems in the future with 'how much of building is wood, how much of building will burn?'
It isn't something we can scale, because 'wood' and 'burn' are irrelevant terms. I asked them to instead create states of 'can burn' and 'cannot burn', which is defined as 'can enter state x, or cannot' etc. etc. It's 6am here, so that only makes sense to me.
Design: UI/GUI for miracle selection is currently underway. I personally wanted meta learning from seeing images/symbols in the game world and experimenting with 'drawing' miracles, but currently design is looking at a GUI menu that allows players to select their miracles without breaking immersion (too much). I also spoke to someone from Crytek about 3D menus after GDC, so that was nice.
There might be a bunch of other stuff and more updates are incoming this week. I'll try to get our people at home to actually send smaller video or material and we'll tweet it or share it here.
Thanks for being patient whilst I was jet-setting!
