Hi everyone,
This week we have a modest journal for you, as most of the team is working on secret story pieces, refactoring existing quests (Damn you Faraday!), and continuing work on the November build update. Sadly, refactoring is about as sexy as your father in law after eating Christmas dinner, so there’s not that much to show this week.
However, we are pleased to announce that we will soon have videos accompanying our build updates, and that our weekly videos will also look much more structured and polished, complete with audio commentary and all!
We also had the pleasure of having VICE visit our office and interview Guillaume. You can get a peek at our office and see the interview here.
Art Team
Marc-André
This week, I continued working on the almost-complete makeover of the Village houses. This time, I have been focusing on compositional layout and lighting of the four Village house variants.
In everyday terms, I have been doing heavy renovations. I painted walls, installed carpets and wood planks floorings and sent old furniture to the dump. Using fitting colour palettes, I redesigned a lot of rooms to be a lot more pleasing to the eye. I also took all of the furniture and colour variants I created in the past few weeks and laid them out throughout the houses.
One thing I am very thankful for is that all of this is virtual. Moving things around in a 3D environment is a breeze. I don't like a specific flooring material? I effortlessly press the delete key. Don't get me started on real house work...
As the house makeovers are nearing completion, all current changes to the houses will be in the November content update.
Alongside house work, I managed to fix a bunch of trivial bugs that made their way into the game.
Whitney
Hey everyone! Here's the final concept for our "Statue of Happiness". I squeezed a little time rendering this to a presentable level (even though it had served its production purpose long ago). Here you can see the old version next to the new one for comparison. I couldn't find a solid reference to work off from for this image, so getting the lighting to work on the statues was a challenge.
Design Team
Vince
Hey everyone! As we are nearing our deadline for the next game update, this week was all about making sure all those refactored encounters are working correctly. We also took some time to review all our respective encounters with David and the animators, looking at the little details (and yes, the occasional glaring bug), taking notes, and then fixing all that. A spoonful of new animations, a cup of map markers that support objective tracking, a pinch of conversation mode, and voilà!
Animation Team
Vincent
So much stuff to do! This week has been extra busy. Still, between animating and setting up conversations, I took a bit of time to make a little python tool in Motionbuilder. It should allow us to handle long phrases animation without going crazy!
The system we have is quite handy for short phrases, it chains (more or less) generic animations together to create a unique bit of animation that roughly matches the voiceover. But in order to see the result, we have to play it from the beginning. Now picture this with a 30 seconds recording and you’ve got yourself some perfect nightmare material: tweaking the 2 last seconds of an ‘AnimChain’ requires you to endure the 28 first ones an insane number of times! Don’t get me wrong, Alex’s writings and recordings are awesome.
With Marc’s help, we found a way to easily import the data we need for the AnimChain from a simple text file… so now we can arrange our animation in an editing software-like interface and export it (almost) straight into Unreal!
Youpi!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team