Hunter’s Tale – character animation with wyvern suit

When you’ve already animated the same animations with 2 different suits, it may seem easy enough to do a third one.

The fact is that for the wyvern suit we wanted something different: it’s not just the more badass-look of the suit iself, we decided to change weapon too: instead of having sword+shield, we have a giant sword (it’s as tall as the character, poor videogame characters, carrying giant swords since the eighties). That measn that there is still a covering sistem even if there’s no shield, but some movements and especially the attacks needed to be reimagined: it would have been slower and look heavier.

Still, most of the animation looks the same:

Now, the different ones:

The Idle with weapon animation was the first one that required some studies behind it: what would have been the best position to rest while carrying such a great sword?

first version was the more logic one: he’s resting so he use the sword as a staff. It didn’t look very well though, so we changed our minds and decided to have it non-rational.

The final version definitely looks better and looks like this:

The attack animation, again, needed to look heavier and slower.

 

These are some WIP and studies for defense position

Hunter’s Tale – character animation with toad suit

I want to start this post with a curios image: the mistake I’ve done with previous animations was NOT to put them into the same proportioned images: that means that when put inengine, the coder will need to change the imagepoints of every animation to make them fit together. As I didn’t want Giuseppe to hate me that much, for the following character suits animation I made a placeholder to keep them in the same position: you’ll that the final gifs looks smaller and with a wither empty range, that’s because it includes even the space for the animations that go forward and backwards.

The curios image I mentioned before is this one below: you can see every frame from every single animation put together into one image: it looks kinda funny.

In terms of difficulty, it wasn’t that hard o do this set of animations, as it was only the time to “change the suit” to the characer. They all look the same and have the same frames of the standard suit ones, So in the end it only took me 3 days to do them (take that schedule!)

 

Hunter’s Tale – Forth Video test

4th video test for #hunterstale now with a first glimpse at @MauroKenjiSerra music!

I’m so excited to show for the first time the game with music, we worked together with Mauro to make the soundtrack as much perfect as possible and now that it’s finished we can really see how it fits the game!

Again, see how the music is fundamental to define the overall athmosphere

pencil speedpaint – 20 minutes each

big boss & sherlock. not so good with faces, got to improve that

 

 

Hunter’s Tale – 3rd WIP video test

The most important thing about video tests is that are those parts that shows what the game is really about. The single animations work may be found (hopefully) interesting for the development process, but in the end it’s how the real game is that matters the most.

Even if these tests shows unfinished work and no sfx or music at all, they help evaluating the game:

-they shows the art direction for the game: it’s still not enought to get the entire athmosphere (you’ll need music and sfx too for that), you can still get to see the world the gme is settled in

-one by one, these videos defines the design of the game: not just the level design, but also the features and combat system: this helps to get future players to see that in terms of gameplay, the machanics are not new, but still consolidated ones, so that they knew what to expect.

– knowing what to expect is the most important thing for a project like Hunter’s Tale: it’s supposed to fit a specific genre, so videos must help this concept and help therefore to intrigue the future audience.

Hunter’s Tale – the GIANT bossfight, getting into the scale

This is another of those moments you realise you aimed for something too big…It could sound like a bad pun, but implementing the giant would literally take more time than we have. Not animating it, but he coding part would be harder because (as I will say in the giant animation posts) a monster this big requires to be animated in separate parts and put together inengine, so that you will only see the legs when the camera is down or only the torso when the camera is up.

Also, how could you defeat such a big boss (kojima joke)? the bossfight needed to be designed carefully, there is the risk to make it too “platformish” or to make it too “Bland”, like the other fights. This is not the case. This needed to be special, bigger.

This is why we decided to…SPOILER! Seriously, I’ve been telling almost everything about the game and the levels, I’m going to keep this for myself and let the players judge with the demo (or not). All I can say is that we fit our schedule, so there will be time for everything, hopefully.

Meanwhile, talking about scaling, I’d like to show you with this image how actually big is the giant.

Hunter’s Tale – again more UI

The idea is that you will need to accept quests in order to land for hunting/adventure/exploration in the wilderness. But how does the quest system works? There has to be a place inside the village which you accept them or you won’t be able to leave the village. I think I already told that we choose the pub to be this place. Also, as all the UI so far has been drawed to look like scrap pieces of paper, these needed the same treatment. Ideally the are separate, though, so you can keep the piece with your mission, like a bounty hunter of some sorts. Even if it’s with monsters, but still you get the point in that, do you?

Hunter’s Tale – icon

study for the game icon. It might sound a bit exhaggerated, but it’s actually the first thing you see from a page, so it needed to look right.

Meanwhile we decided to expand our social network range, please check out the polycount thread and facebook page!

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137364

https://www.facebook.com/hunterstale

 

 

The final one looks like this.

Hunter’s Tale – The ingame map

Designing the ingame map in something strange: it’s not supposed to look precisely like the ingame map and it need to have nice graphics and be understandable, otherwise orientation will result hard and therefore the game will look disorientating.

Taking the knowledge of all the maps I’ve seen in games, I decided I wanted to do something geometrical and straightforward: the map itself in our game is important in terms not just of locaing the character, but later on the escaping monster too (we’re not sure if this feature will be in the demo too)

As always, I made some sketches first and then drawed the pixelart.

This is the final aspect. Of course you will find connection and secret passages throughout the gameplay.

Forefront: more kickstarter successes

A lot of kickstarter ideas reach to see the light, but does all of them can be considered forefront?

I will talk here about projects that reached that goal not just for the fact that they earned millions of funding money, but because they got the chance to be part of it already.

Shantae:half genie hero by Wayforward

This studio has members on it that realized the original shantae series game, and are the personification of my idea of gaming: they have made so far oldproject or remakes of old games adding not just an hd graphics, but trying to reimaginate them on 2014. The ducktales HD game is an example of that: just like shantae, those games were made for old nintendo/sega consoles. I can consider this game forefront because of the idea behind it.

Broken age by Double Fine

This has been maybe the great kickstarter that started it all: Tim Shafer, a genius that started working on lucasarts games and helped inventing the pointandclick adventure games turn out with a question: why can’t we do another adventure game? of course people just throw money at them and they raised millions: the interesting thing is how not they just reimaginated the idea of adventure game, but the game itself behind it: they wanted to do a small production, but having all those money they decided to make the game a bigger hit, not without any troubles, but making in the end one of the best games of the last decade. This game is not just to be considered forefront because its idea (and because people has started doing adventure games again and wih more success than ever) but also because it has a very peculiar narration and visual style

BONUS
Mighty n. 9 by Comcept

I’m calling this bonus because it’s acually a 3d-game, but it point out more my theory of updated comebacks: he creator of this game is Keiji Imafune, who invented Megaman, and this game is its natural heir. As they wanted to modernize that concept even more, they decided to do it in 3d. The result so far as been astonishingly good, and they are planning movies and tv series too