undershot

For the past year or so I’ve been working on making a video game. Actually that’s a lie: I made the first prototype for this game seven years ago. Back then I got the basic mechanics working for the player character, but I had no story to go along with it, and therefore no game.

This time I made exactly the same mistake, spending a few months getting the character’s motion working well before I had any idea where the game would go. But it has worked out well: the game play was interesting enough to inspire a friend to help with the script (hi Lara :) and now it’s well on the way. It’s being created in Blender.

In-game screenshot of Cargo

Cargo is a 3D adventure game. You play a snail who is on a mission to whoa! No spoilers just yet. But you can get an idea of the basic game play from the screenshot above: Cargo (the snail) can crawl on almost any surface and wraps around objects. The motion is fluid and quite engaging. A little too engaging: development is slow because I spend half of my time just playing the game. In fact, I think I might have a go now.

Fish, though common, were the most enjoyable thing to take photos of at the aquarium. They all looked so dismal. I’m sure they aren’t – they all had very large tanks, except for the sunfish. His face was eerily expressionless, the effect magnified by his human-like skin and eyes. He swam very slowly around his relatively small, padded (!) tank. I hope they have memories as short as their golden cousins.

The expression of this smaller fish particularly interested me. Sadly the photo was blurry, so here’s a simple trace.
[photopress:Dorkfish.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

Click on the image in the pop-up window to get one at higher resolution.

I’ve given up on waiting for artistic direction, and have jumped right in to prototyping for my animation. I’ve got a working rubber glove, and last night I made some tank tracks. I might write up a proper tutorial later. In the mean time, here are some screen grabs of the treads. Good luck deciphering them!

[photopress:Tread_Howto_Curve.png,thumb,pp_image] [photopress:Tread_Howto_Mesh.png,thumb,pp_image]

You’ll need to play with the position of the mesh array relative to the path. Notice that if you move the mesh in one particular dimension, the whole tread crawls. Give the mesh and path a common parent to allow animation.

A lattice (not shown) is used to add extra deformation, such as the dip in the top of the track. For my purposes, I then bound the lattice to an armature to control it.

Issues

1. Along the chain the links connect fine, but not at the ends of the array. This is because the chain is stretched to make the ends meet, and I can’t see an easy way to make them overlap. Maybe creating the teeth using a displacement map (applied later in the stack) would solve the issue.

If you use this technique I’d love to hear about it!

[photopress:sisyphus2.png,thumb,alignleft]The story for my animation is coming along nicely (thanks, Nate!) In preparation, I finally bought myself a Wacom tablet. It’s so nice. I’ve had a tablet before (thanks, Tijn!) but it’s in Australia, and this one is considerably larger.

Attached is the second drawing I’ve done with it (and The GIMP). It’s of Sisyphus, an inmate of Hades and a character in my animation. He has no parts because he’s dead. Hands play an important role in the story, which is why his are so large.

I finally came up with a decent (weird enough) idea for an animation. I was pretty tired, so I went to have a nap. I was almost asleep when I thought of it; I guess it was almost a dream. I used to have really wiggy dreams after staying up all night a LAN parties. Hooray for sleep-deprivation!

More on this later. Maybe tomorrow the idea will seem too silly…