I’ve been doing daily updates over at Eve’s new DevBlog, Titan Seed, but for those of you who are interested in the project but don’t feel like checking in daily I’m going to providing these weekly digests. Now, up until this point Thursday has been the day reserved for writing Friday’s Problem Machine essay: However, I started Titan Seed last Friday, which means now I need to write up the weekly digest on Thursday. Thus, Friday’s essays are now scheduled for Sunday, and Tuesday’s are targeted for Wednesday.
(At some point I should update the schedule page, I don’t think I have since I’ve made it and it’s massively misleading now… oh well.)
So, what have I been up to? Many things!
First: The run cycle.
I am not an experienced animator by any means. I’m starting off by animating the run cycle as a silhouette in photoshop, and when I have it looking close to how I want it I will be exporting the frames, printing them out, and then drawing individual frames based off of those silhouettes. I’ll then be scanning those back in and coloring them using the same process I’ve used on the other Eve project game art.
It’s not perfect, but it captures some of the feeling of damaged grace I want the character to possess. A good start, I think.
Second: The Titan Seed
I started by building the architecture of the intro area, both in order to help me figure out the general shape and to potentially actually be the final interactive form of the area. Then, improvising off of that basis and using sketching + photoshop coloring methods that should be more or less consistent throughout this project, I drew a rendition of the area. If all goes extremely well, I will be able to use this as the main visual component of the area itself, though I will have to separate out the background elements since they’re going to be animated during the intro. I’m not sure if I’m entirely satisfied with the look of the tree, but I’m at least PARTIALLY satisfied, which may have to be good enough for now. We shall see what tweaks I can make to improve it in the future.
Third: The Music
https://soundcloud.com/problem-machine/something-old-something-new
I dug up an old half-finished track which I thought might work pretty well for the last part of the first area, but not really the first part. I polished it up and got it ready to go, thinking that perhaps I could write a separate track for the first couple parts of the first area, and got to work. However, this track ended up being, itself, split into two distinct parts, one of which was too fast for the first part but might work fine for the second, the descent into the chasm. So I went with the flow and integrated the original promising sounding track in at the end of the new stuff, then added some segues. The overall effect of this track is very evocative of the mood(s) I wanted to establish in the first area, though some of the transitions need a bit of work and I have yet to decide how I’m going to actually handle the track-to-track transitions in-game.
Those are the major points of progress. I’ve also been putting a little bit of work into figuring out the flow of the second area and general plot flow of the first chapter, as well as several miscellaneous programming tasks, but there’s not much cohesive from that that I can put here… yet.
Well, thanks for reading. On to week two! Wish me luck!