Content with Hours:
Exporting last week's animations proved to be much more problematic than I expected. The first issue was with the skin of the character not exporting properly in the fbx. It took me a few hours to even figure out what was going on, since I could not find anything online. Turns out that a few vertexes were missing skin weights, which maya had no problem with, but the fbx export did. However, after figuring it out it was an easy fix. On the other hand, after I sent the animations to Ryan, he had an issue blending between them in unity, and I had to put all the animation for the scene in a single fbx, which was easier to figure out, but much more tedious to actually do. Unfortunate that this happened, but it will not happen again.
(4 hrs)
Because of the time lost with this issue, I was not able to animate as much as I would have liked. I started on a run cycle for the "shoot the alien" game but I am not sure how to approach the rest of the animations for that game. I also made a looping "floating in space" animation that can be stuck in several scenes as a fun decoration.
(3.5 hrs)
Content Positive:
-All issues with exporting animation are fixed.
Content Negative:
- Lost a lot of time fixing issues between Maya and Unity
Total Hours for the week: 7.5
Post Mortem Reflection:
80 DAYS Post-mortem: Letting the Game Tell the Story by Jon Ingold
I chose this talk because 80 Days is a game I very much admire, but still find it oddly flawed. Many of my questions were answered during this talk. A good portion of it is Jon Ingold talking about the short history of his two-person indie studio, which is somewhat important for understanding how 80 Days came to be. Inkle was founded in order to create simple and intuitive text games, more interactive story than game. They built an engine specifically for this and worked with different writers to bring their stories to life in an interactive format. They did just that with their first few games, and then created Sorcery, which incorporated some more complex elements such as maps and items.
The idea behind 80 Days was to re-skin Sorcery, based on Jules Verne's novel of the "Around the World in 80 Days". Ingold explains that they thought it would be a simple game to make, with most of the content created would be the text. He makes it seem like they started working on it right away and it evolved into something much more complex. The way he tells it it seems like the game was developed more during the process than in planning. Some games are carefully planned beforehand, and some evolve and grow in the process. These are the types of games that win "Excellence in Narrative" at IGF and Game of the Year from Time Magazine.
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