Archive for October, 2009
Tutorial section development
Over the last couple of days I’ve been working on creating that start of our level, with a focus on easing the player into the concepts behind our gameplay. At the moment it starts off with teaching the player to move the character left and right, then jumping, then switching. Next up will be introducing the character to the idea of moving the camera/light to shift shadows and then teaching the player to switch in mid air.
I’m turning my thoughts to creating a character as well. I’m well aware of how many problems can arise when trying to get an animated character into Unity so I don’t want to leave it much later!
Flight of the Butterfly Documentation
Flight of the Butterfly is a live, interactive audio-visual performance by digital media designer Tim Turnidge. Created in Blender and After Effects, composed in Quartz composer and triggered through VDMX, the piece features a robot engaged in a conflict with an enemy army. The performance is combined with a music track titled “Flight of the Butterfly” by Subatomic Glue.
Development
Today has seen a new object being added: a waterwheel. The idea behind this will be that there’s a waterwheel that only gets powered when you’re in the shadow mode because a water flowing out of a pipe does not line up with the waterwheel.
Implementing this section of gameplay looks promising and would be an ideal final puzzle before transitioning to the cave area, but has caused some headaches in the character controller and collision department.
A couple of tweaks to the way the light and camera follow the character have also helped to make the game feel a little bit more polished but it’s still not 100%.
Bamboo!
I’ve started to make some meshes in Blender to create our level with – the idea being to get away from just using the Unity cubes to make our level more interesting. I have been using a Japanese style aesthetic as inspiration, so I’ve made some bamboo and a Japanese-style archway. Using a backdrop of bamboo creates some interesting movement in the shadows which I think is really successful.
We intend to create one level which transitions through a number of different zones, each with it’s own palette of colours and objects yet retaining a cohesive aesthetic. Currently the plan is to have an outdoor Japanese bamboo forest zone and a cave/volcano section with lava. At the moment I’m making models for the Japanese zone and Jason is working on the cave.
R-r-r-r-r-rroooooobboooootttttssss
Whew! With beta presentations for 412 and all the stress of getting this performance ready to go I have kinda neglected this blog for a while so it’s time for a bit update.
Much has changed since last post, I have now got all the scenes required for the performance ready to go. They’re a mixture of Quartz Composer patches and straight movies that are triggered through VDMX using a midi controller (The M-Audio Trigger Finger to be precise).
All up theres about a dozen scenes, some with more than 1 sub-scenes or angles in them. Almost all of the scenes have audio-reactive elements in them which really enhances the link between the visuals and the music and means that I don’t have to baby-sit every scene.
The enemy scenes all feature a blue colour scheme and movement from right to left to contrast with the red of the robot and his left to right movements. This dynamic allows me to mix the two together to show conflict.
I had to remove some of the more graphically intensive generative elements from a couple of my scenes because I was getting performance issues while performing, but I have tried to make up for it with less intensive graphic elements, i.e, simple bars as opposed to 3D bars and pulsing colours as opposed to pulsing shapes. Overall I don’t think this has impacted on the visual effect of the performance too much, and I’m probably the only one who will notice that they are missing.
There is also a loose story to the whole performance, it’s a little bit sketchy but I feel it’s adequate for what is essentially a music video.
More development
I’ve continued to build the level, adding some complexity and showing off the kinds of levels we intend to create post-beta. We’ve got some trees and rocks in there, as well as some moving platforms which help to add a bit of a challenge to the levels.
Jason has made a mock up of the character, he’s made to look like a little stick puppet.
Progress, pre-beta
I’ve been able to get in a little bit of work on the game in between working on my 311 robot.
I’ve cleaned up the code a bit, so that the player can switch between light and shadow modes with just 1 button as opposed to having a button for each mode. While it’s just a small change it’s made the game much more intuitive and enjoyable to play.
Physics have been added to the surfaces of all the colliders so the player no longer sticks to the side of walls (as much), and the character controller has been tweaked to feel tighter.
Slight changes to the lighting in the non-shadow mode have made it a bit brighter and natural.
Also, an extra layer/plane has been added behind the player’s layer, allowing us to have elements in the background and increasing the game’s sense of depth.
The camera is now attached to the spotlight when in light mode, this allows for more variety in views and helps the player to understand that they can control the light (and therefore the shadows).
I’ve also begun work on bringing in objects from blender so we are no longer forced to build our levels out of cubes!
Here you can see the 4 different planes we are able to work with, and the revised lighting.
Goodness gracious, great balls of plasma!
I’ve put together some renders and a quartz patch that will form the scene after the robot fires his gun. It features a ball of plasma created in Quartz and After Effects hurtling down a street created in Blender. At the moment the ball is controlled by the mouse but will be converted to run off a midi controller through VDMX. The red star shape is reactive to the music and is a modified version of the Quartz patch I used in Project 1.
Visually it could do with a couple of tweaks and some added bling but it’s pretty much all there.
More shooting animations.
I’ve been working on creating different angles for the charging up sequence, I’ve got 4 so far which should be adequate. They all loop and have the glowing plasma ball attached (which has had a bit of bling added). (edit: I have since fixed the position of the lens flare in chargeloop4.mov!)
I’ve decided on the audio track I’m going to use, it’s a track called Dance of the Butterfly by Subatomic Glue, the same artists I used for project 1.
I have begun mapping out the different scenes so that I have a better overview of how the timing is going to work.
Next up will be creating a couple of scenes for the enemies that the robot blasts!
Pew pew pew
Here’s the animation of the robot shooting his gun. There is enough footage in the middle to loop so he can charge up his gun for as long as needed then fire only when I trigger it. I might add some different angles to spice things up a bit too. Then I need to decide what it is exactly that it fires; lasers? bullets? rockets?
TimDoesBlogs
Recent entry
- 2009-10-26
- Tutorial section development
- 2009-10-25
- Flight of the Butterfly Documentation
- 2009-10-21
- Development
- 2009-10-19
- Bamboo!
- 2009-10-15
- R-r-r-r-r-rroooooobboooootttttssss