More Animations

Over the past two weeks I have been working on the animations for the game so now the dog goes for a bath and eats his food properly (Timing was out) as well as other things. The dog now navigates through the different animations.

Below is an image with the new background

My job in the final presentation was to show off the game for the audience. I was pleased with the progress that we had made to this point but I was hoping we would have been further along with more functionality implemented. Our feedback was mixed. People thought the dog was cute, but we had it pooing too often so many people were more busy laughing at the trail of poo than paying much notice to the game itself. Reducing the pooing was the first thing that I fixed after the presentation. Seeing the ball moving on screen and seeing the dog walk around were both really rewarding, it made the game feel like it had life. Unfortunately the mini-game was not re-skinned in time which was a real set back. The other major feedback we got was the need to keep polishing the visuals.

New Found Hope

Over the weekend I had a look into the inbuilt animator in Unity, and surprisingly it was far easier than I had expected. Below is a picture of the new dog in mid walk cycle and as you can see in the top panel that I have already created a few idle animations.

Below is a picture later in the week, the dog has a new eating animation, the bowl now fills and empties, and I have started filling the scene with assets while the background is a placeholder so we get a sense of depth while the proper one gets made up.

So far I haven’t come across any complications apart from the animation being time consuming. We have a week break next week so I can work through that and get as much done as possible.

Workload just got unbearable

We found out earlier this week that the IDM group had internal problems of their own and as a result their 3D modelers had decided not to work on our assets for the 3D menu which meant we would need to do it ourselves and we were already falling behind as is. So we sat down again and had another look over our entire project to see if we can work out a way to make it easier to handle.

After a while we managed to narrow down to only needing 3 mini-games… but even that was still too much, so we looked at a few games that our lead-designer brought in on his tablet and we found one that we all liked. The game reminded me of a Tamagotchi, where you’d have to look after your pet to earn points for accessories. We decided to remove the currency and accessories and have the player work for a mini-game.

Here is a sketch of what our designer was thinking for the background. He was trying to exaggerate the Australian theme since the overall theme was already cartoony.

Then our lead artist took it and tried digitalising it and added some colour as well did a mock-up of a dog. We were trying for a blue healer looking dog to stick with the Australian theme.

I’m getting pretty concerned since I realized that the game would be heavily animation based and the Unitys’ animating tools are all new to me. But I’m going to try and learn the basics over the weekend and try to make a start on the new game.