How I created an avatar – model and animations.

SLIDE: platformer has been in development on and off for a year now. Yet, you still control an orange ball of a main hero. A proper player representation – an avatar – has been loooong time overdue.

For some time I’ve been hoping for a proper 3d artist/animator to show up, with his shining armor and a white horse, he would surely deliver awesome avatar. But it looks like I’m not really worthy of hero-modellers’ attention, or no one really heard my telepathic cries for help.

So I had to actually do something myself. Well, apart from procrastination.

That’s the first time anyone can see new avatar. Yeah, it’s still small. But it’s not a ball anymore!

Yeah, but what exactly should I do?

Well, there are several criteria for my game’s main hero:

• I should be able to pull it off – and I suck at modelling and animations
• Avatar’s size is rather small – no tiny detail are allowed, just shapes
• It should look like a part of the world I’ve created so far
• It should look like it can perform those types of moves that exist in the game – most notably squishing while sliding along floors, walls, ceilings and in-betweens
  • Its height should be close to its width. Kinda like circle or square…

It automatically means no humans, humanoids, animals and robots. Nothing with limbs, facial expressions and such.

So I had the options:

• Simplistic and futuristic vehicle exploring foreign planet
• Abstract-shaped animals
• Slimey oozeling-like creature

Vehicles did not turn me on, I could not imagine abstract-shaped animals, so slimy-ooze it was.

This is the first draft of what I thought my slime-dude could look like.

Side note: I’ve been thinking about avatar long before I had the visual style, and among other things I considered:

• A particle flying along some sort of electrical chain
• A soccer ball – like it was kicked and now the ball has got to hit the goal
• An girl in a hovercraft on a hostile planet (I could not help but picture it in anime-style). I feel like I should make it readable and post somewhere…

 

Anyway, making slime-thing seemed pretty simple. I mean it’s pretty easy to model something like this, but how do I go about animating it?

This is the way slime-dude’s model looks like now up close. It’s almost as cool and detailed as Drake from Uncharted 4 =)

I mean, I know the basics of the technology and process involved in rigging characters with bones – you make a mesh, create a skeleton, assign bones to vertices of the mesh so that when you move bones the model deforms and you are ready to animate. Even I could do it. I can’t do it well, but if I were to make a stickman waving a hand, you’d understand that it’s waving a hand, not taking a piss. At least that’s a starting point to get better from.

But how do I create a skeleton for something that should become any shape? Experiments with bones yielded nothing relatively resembling what I hoped to achieve, leaving me severely demoralized.

As a last resort I had to ask google for an advice (to think of it, maybe that’s where I should have started 😀 ) – and it helped. Turns out Unity supports blendshapes (since version 4.3). Basically it allows to have direct control over each individual vertex’ position. I can transform my mesh into anything I want as long as the polycount does not change.

It works like this:

• First, I need to create an initial model – the one that will be transformed into all other shapes and things.
• Now I need to create “poses” – the shapes to turn into. In order to make sure there are no weird thing going on during said transformations, I just copy-paste initial model and move vertices until I’m happy with the result.
• Once the poses are ready, I have to tell the initial pose about the existence of other ones – it’s simply done with the morpher modifier (in 3ds max).
• I import (or export?) it in Unity – that’s where I actually create blendshape animations. What I do, basically, is say “at this point of time your shape should be 90%poseA and 10% poseB, and in 15 frames you should be 0% poseA and 100% poseB”.
• Finally a little bit of coding is necessary to tell the game what animation should be played at what conditions (ie play run animation if the player is running, play slide animation if the player is sliding etc)

This is how animating looks in Unity. Really simple – for simple animations, like mine.

To think of it, it is essentially identical to any keyframe animation. the difference is that I have to manually model those keyframe-poses once, and then I can transform my avatar into them.

The clear upside of this approach is the level of control – if I want to, I can transform a ball into a house and then into a car and then into an octopus and so on.

On the other hand this control is achieved by manually moving each and every vertex to a “correct” position.  Which is OK in my case – my avatar is pretty minimalistic – but it can easily become too damn gigantic amount of tedious work to pull it off.

All the poses I could come up with. I use them as keyframes to animate the slime-dude. Some of them look weird, right?

So here we are, above are the poses I’ve got so far, and those are enough to make basic running, jumping, sliding, standing, yawning, squishing, stretching, attaching, pushing the wall, birth and win animations – of course they need a lot of work but at least I have something to improve now.  Except for the death animation, but I suspect I would have to do it somewhat different.

By the way, if you are a ninja-animator with mad skills (or at least if you know stuff) I’d be really grateful if you were to share how you would approach animating such kind of character.

BTW, SLIDE: platformer needs your help to pass the Greenlight process, so hit this link and leave a vote. Thanks! =)

SLIDE – demo available!

Hi there!

Last couple of weeks were interesting.

First of all I’ve created a demo version with 10 first levels for everyone to play. Yay.

• Download Windows version (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B07zfqYROVkSbVpmSEFjbTVIbHM)
• Download Mac version (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B07zfqYROVkST0hLb1NxcEZLZnc)
• Play in browser: https://googledrive.com/host/0B07zfqYROVkSVEh0Y0VacExsYmM/SLIDE%20web%20v012a.html
  Be advised – if nothing is loading, wait a little bit, refresh the page and wait a bit more – usually it helps.

And I had to come up with the name for the game. So, it’s called SLIDE. Because we have a nice sliding mechanic =)

Also, there is an open indie game festival happening in Russia and I am participating. I cannot say that there was that whole lots of feedback, but the precious few comments are actually not bad and helpful. Whether the haters do not post stuff or the game is universally likable I do not know. but what’s important is that there are people who like it.

Also I’ve spent like 7 days working on the hero, but I have to admit I was not able to produce anything I would like – my modelling and animation skills are not much worse than my taste level, I guess… That lead to bad mood and I was hugely discouraged, which resulted in a real strong decline of productivity. Quite conveniently there was a TESO beta happening right at that time, so I took 2 day-offs and had a good rest from my game. I’ve replaced the orange ball with the orange low=poly ball for now, and I would have to resume to the avatar later, but now I just can’t waste more time on it((

Last 4 days I was not creating new content – I was reorganizing the project – brought some order in the naming convention, asset structure and stuff like that. It took me almost 4 days, but it was worth it – now everything is neat and clear, and I can easily work with previously made levels.

I’ve also worked on a color palette of the game – now it’s a bit softer and pleasant.

Now, for the plans.

We still do not have sounds in the game, or any deat\birth animations.

We are also planning to submit SLIDE on Steam Greenlight. Sure, we have a Greenlight concept pagem but not whole lots of traffic there =)

So, we are staying busy.

Ok, that’s it for today’s update.

See you later =)

Slide – gameplay video

 I filmed my playthrough of those 5 levels I talked about couple of posts ago.

Now  I need to deal with the model and animation of the “main hero”.

Also, I desperately need someone’s help to draw the “logo” of the game. You know, for the greenlight\desura\IndieGoGo\preloader picture.

I’m available here, or on twitter @ArseniyShved

Do not forget to follow this blog and tell someone about it. C’m on, I’m serious. Do tell =)

Stuff’n’Stuff 07: Why are We Smarter Then Everybody?

In the “Fail of democracy” article, among other things, I suggested that the endowment effect was the reason of our inability to value others’ ideas over our own.

Indeed the mere fact of owning something creates an emotional attachment to that thing. My pen is better than John’s one because mine is cheaper. Jack’s pen is worse than mine because mine is more expensive. Actually my pen appears to have the best possible price and quality ratio.

I seriously doubt that developing a game is less complicated than owning a pen, so there should be other factors at play. Not to mention that the endowment effect is not the correct one.

There are 2 similar but different biases:  the Ikea effect and the NIH effect.

The Ikea effect basically means that labor enhances affection for its results. It makes us favor something that we’ve made over other things, even if both are 100% identical.

Imagine that you were asked to construct a Lego car for me. Before you begin constructing it I make perfectly clear that I would own it. Another person is given exact same task and instructions and will construct exact same car. When both cars are ready you are given a chance to buy one of them. Which one would you choose? Note, that despite the fact that I own both cars, you still, most probably refer to the one constructed by you as “my precious”, or at very least as “mine”. Additionally, chances are if I price your car higher than another one, you’d still be willing to buy your car.

The more effort you put into something, the more attached you get to it. But studies show that even a slight hint of effort is enough for that effect to emerge. Attachment also increases a lot if you manage to complete the project and this factor is a really strong one. In fact, unfinished project can seriously demoralize people. Many lose interest in their current jobs if they put lots of work into a project which gets cancelled. However that’s not what we are discussing today.

The NIH (Not Invented Here) effect makes us fall in love with our ideas.

Like the Ikea effect just a bit of mental work is required to get trapped by it. As much as reordering given words into a sentence. And that is not an exaggeration, there was a study which proves this thesis.

How many times did it happen to you – you suggest an awesome idea, but no one seems to care. But a week later someone who previously declined your idea tells you that he came up with something awesome and basically repeats you (I sure hate when my boss does that). It’s not because they want the credit, or because they are stupid. It’s just the way we are. If we think we came up with something we value it over identical idea, expressed by someone else.

Thoughts are a bit trickier than that. The effect can be amplified. We tend to come up with ideas that are coherent with our views. No wonder all my dark and moody suggestions are declined by happy and lively peers.

Could anything else affect our preferences? Of course! I have no idea how this effect is called, but we tend to associate things with history, memories and experiences. Or don’t you have that old junk, that have not been used for years (not THAT junk!) but you still keep it because you’ve had a history with it long ago? The experience does not even has to belong to you. Let’s say I give you a sweater. It is unremarkable in all the aspects and most probably you have no particular feelongs towards it. Now I can tell you that Paul McCartney owned it. Or that it was serial killer. Would it change the way you look at the sweater? Even if you know I’m messing with you, most people would form a positive or negative to a completely neutral object. And if it happens to things, maybe it could happen to thoughts ot ideas? Like,”Hey wasn’t it what Hitler said before starting a genocide?”

OK, back to the track. The phenomenon of self-admiration seems to be universal and can be easily seen on the road. Have you noticed that you are surrounded by morons? Everybody who drives faster than you do is a damn irresponsible moron. Everybody who drives slower is a damn slowpoke moron. Is it just me or is it the play of several biases fired up by the extreme situation?

Now, what is the point of all of this?
Well I was going to examine my previous articles with these effects in mind, but it turned out to be a long and dull wall of text. So there you go, no dull self-observations, just a little bit of info each of us could use. And I promised to write about it anyways.

PS. On a totally unrelated topic – Otaku still hasn’t got laid and he needs some cash to change the situation ($500 would do the trick). No, not hookres! Virtual ticket to fictional America in a video-game I’m working on! More details here. Or here. It’s the same anyway. Thanks, bye!

Stuff’n’Stuff 06: Otaku, the Game

Hello.

I am working on a kick-ass game called Otaku where you literally kick asses. And if you don’t, you do everything you can to have sex.

The game is about Japanese virgin in his mid-thirties who hopes to to get laid in Miami. On this noble quest he will encounter drug dealers, big time criminals, idiots, DEA agents, strippers and the Federal Unit of Coitus Keep-out who stand for family values.

In order to complete this game I need money. And I need money to get that money. $500 would be a good start. Let me remind you: Florida, strippers and family values. Only $500. Of course you are free to donate any amount you want. Oh, have I mentioned strippers? OK. Go to IndieGoGO make a donation!

Oh, yeah, thanks for reading.
Double thanks for donating.
Extra thanks for telling everyone you know.

Also, you can find me on facebook and twitter.
And of course, if you have any comments, questions, suggestions and curses use the comments section!