It’s Milestone week for the Pirates team, and everyone is putting in a little extra time and effort to make our next build as cool as it can be. Because of the all-powerful NDA, I can’t give away any details on the game, but I will say that things are coming along quite nicely. All the new/revamped features are looking really good. Gameplay is getting polished. And there’s the possibility of actually running a build of the game off of memory sticks, so we can test on normal PSPs and not just dev kits. I’m not holding my breath for that one, but it would definitely be cool.
Last week I was pulled from my regular schedule to help out with milestone tasks. It’s all animation, of course, but there’s a bit more pressure to get things looking good and working in a much shorter timeframe. Normally, I spend a day to a day and a half per animation roughing out motions, checking it out in the build, and reworking things as needed. I’ve been able to take my time with the animations, because the character meshes aren’t quite done yet and they weren’t being loaded into the actual levels by the wiring guys.
Over the past few days, I’ve taken the animating pace up a notch. I’ve been cranking out 2 animations per day and spending less time going back to fine-tune things. These animations are high-priority items, so I need to get them mostly done and working in the game as soon as possible. Normally, I don’t like working at this pace, but I know it’s only a short-term deal, and I’ll be back to my regular schedule soon.
Today was an especially crazy day. The first thing I worked on this morning was polishing up the 5 animations I did earlier this week. They looked ok in game, but I wanted to adjust some things to make it look that much better. Before lunch time hit, 2 more animations were thrown on my plate. I managed to rough them out in a couple of hours and get them to the programmer who needed them for testing. The animations involved spinning the character around 360 degrees very quickly, which isn’t exactly an easy thing to do (at least, for me). I was surprised how quickly I got the roughs done – they actually looked pretty good.
I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning them up and fine-tuning the overall timing to be consistent with the other animations I did this week. Right around 4:30 PM, our designer stopped by my cube and informed me that the two animations I just finished tweaking needed to be redone. They were too similar to some other spinning animations and didn’t read well in the game. That made sense to me from a gameplay point of view, so I didn’t complain too much about doing 2 new animations. However, that meant scrapping about 5 hours of work.
I was already planning on staying late tonight, so I buckled down and started hammering out the new animations. Initially, these were much more difficult that the previous two. Instead of spinning around, the character needed to roll on the ground. Turning a character around 360 degrees and getting the foot controls oriented correctly is hard enough. Rolling a character on the ground and then back into a standing position is just plain crazy.
At least, that’s what I thought when I first started on the animations. It turns out that my animation mojo was flowing, and I got both animations roughed out in less than 2 hours. They weren’t perfect, but they were good enough to start using in the game. I haven’t seen them yet, so I hope they work out ok. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.
I ended up staying at work until a little after 8 PM, which isn’t all that late. I know Jason (my animation lead) was still at work after 9 PM, and I’m sure others were there just as late and probably later. Plus, it didn’t really feel like I stayed later. We ordered Thai food for dinner, so we had a nice break to relax and re-energize.
Although I animated faster and more frantically than I ever have before, it was still a good day. I got 4 very tough animations done, even though two of them got scrapped. I’ll still still chalk them up as good practice, and I might be able to stick them in my gallery once the game is done. I got free food (pineapple fried rice…. mmmm….). There was a good vibe in the Pirates area as everyone one checked off one task after another. And it was a beautiful day outside, even though we didn’t really get to enjoy it.
I’m very tired, but it’s a good tired. I’ll get a good night’s rest and then be ready to animate more tomorrow. Bring it on.
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