next »

[ephoete]

Chat mapper what an excellent piece of software. Never heard about this one before and gonna use it from now on thanks to you.

No wonder for indieDB, your game is really promising and I can bet it'll be a hit on KS once you guys will reach this milestone.

[Mr Underhill]

Thanks ephoete! Means a lot to us!   Btw Nick our programmer's running a virtual machine on his mac just to use Chat Mapper  

ANIMATION OVERHAUL!

In Gibbous news, we took a deep breath, had a sip of coffee, painfully realized ingesting liquids while still holding your breath is not such a good idea and decided to overhaul character animations in a 98% proportion. Namely, (almost) no more cutout, which means redrawing thousands of frames. We're powering through it, though!

I really like how Buzz looks a lot more like a classic-era cartoon rather than a moving illustration.



Also, something that was really giving us headaches was the sheer size of the animation files. To break it down, we're not using an atlas since the character sprites are huge (Buzz's are 1024x1024), and it would take hundreds of separate animations for stuff like emoting, reacting to dialogue lines, etc. So we've decided to export everything on separate layers (head/s, arms, legs etc) and building the animations per se in Unity. This means me hovering over Nick (our programmer)'s shoulder and painstakingly putting everything together by hand, for what are (for now!) hundreds of lines of dialogue.

BUT IT'S WORTH IIIIIIT!

...we hope.

Also been working on some cute been-idle-for-a-while animations for Buzz and Kitteh which I can't wait to share with the world.

KZZZTTT Transmission over

[Richard Kain]

I have a bit or a personal technical inquiry. You're using the Adventure Creator on Unity, correct? How is the lip-sync implementation on that? I'm working on a lip-sync Unity plug-in of my own, and I'd love to hear about other people's experience using some other tools.

For Adventure Creator, are you using the SAPI solution, or the Moho solution? I read up a little bit on the tutorials, and realized that they allow you to use the same command-line program that I'm using.

Also, I love the animation on your cat character. Some of its attitude reminds me of my own fuzzy monster.

[Mr Underhill]

Hi Richard!

To be honest, it's not likely that we'll be using lip syncing in AdvCreator. The thing is, we don't do fancy close-ups or anything like that when characters are having conversations, and we're already up to our necks in animations already... We'll have to wait until we get the proper voice-overs to see how it works, and if we're not happy with just generic mouth movement we'll probably go for the SAPI solution.

Anyway, how far along the production of your tool are you? We're interested in looking into all kinds of solutions. Looking forward to hearing from you.

[Richard Kain]

Anyway, how far along the production of your tool are you? We're interested in looking into all kinds of solutions. Looking forward to hearing from you.

The initial version is already on the Unity Asset Store. It's called "Cheshire." It's free at the moment, so take a look if you're interested. It uses the SAPI program as well, but provides a GUI for Windows. For more information, you can check here. It's really just a hobby project at the moment, animation has always been a personal passion of mine.

I'm currently working on the next major revision for it, and am interested to find out what features different developers would want from it. Right now I'm focusing on providing a custom animation class that will be able to play back audio-synced animations more reliably on mobile devices.

I understand that a smaller, indie team might not have the budget or resources for full voice acting in an adventure game. But it is a genre where fast, effective lip-syncing animation would be useful. The tool I'm working on is designed for smaller teams on a tight budget who just need something that works.

[Mr Underhill]

Thanks, gonna keep it in mind. For now we have so many moving parts (literally, too!), and are also hoping to get professional voice acting for the demo, so this will be a spring-bound prospect at best.

[DwarvenArtisan]

Wow, really great animations you've going on there! Haven't played a good adventure in a long while, but I really, really like the style of your game and I'm very eager to see how it evolves!

[Alberto]

We'll have to wait until we get the proper voice-overs to see how it works....

First I just want to say I'm excited about this game, it looks great so far! With regards to the voice work since you're using Unity you might want to check out an editor extension I made called Easy Voice. It uses TTS to generate sound assets that can be used for prototyping so you don't have to wait until you go and record. Hopefully this is something that can help the game along, and if so I'd love to hear how it's working for you.

Easy Voice: http://u3d.as/content/game-loop/easy-voice

Keep up the great work!

[Mr Underhill]

Thanks for the heads up, Alberto! Your editor's a great idea, we'll be looking into that kind of stuff soon. Thanks again!

[Mr Underhill]

Short Unity Video

Hey peeps. We made this short Unity video 'cause we were having some technical difficulties and we wanted to show how the project was organized etc, so it's more of a utilitarian thing, but you can check it out anyways.

Disclaimer: animation REALLY stutters in the video, it's not representative of how the game actually runs.




In development terms, we've come close to something like 6000 animation frames for the demo alone... Ok, to me, being an animator, that doesn't seem a lot, but programmers generally seem to think that's   insane. Anyway, we're looking into maybe not going full 24 fps... Maybe.

Bewaaaare of upgraaades! *thunderclap*

Also, since upgrading to Unity v 4.6.2 we've been experiencing A LOT of crashes, so heads up on that! Also, the project balooned up to something like 4 GB when built, so we kinda shit our collective pants on that... By the way, the same project is just 80 megs when you compress it with the basic zip thingie.   Since then we've been looking into things like removing mipmaps ( I don't know what those things are, but I don't like the way they sound!), trimming down some animations, etc. We're probably good for the demo but we really need to find a good way to approach the project in such a way that we don't compromise too much on visual quality and also the project won't require a 50 gig download or something, God forbid.

Any technical suggestions are welcome, by the way! This isn't our first game in Unity, but it is our first adventure game with a heck of a lot of 2d frame-by-frame animation, so if you feel like you have an idea or solution that could help us out, please don't hesitate to respond here or private message me.

Back to animating!

[Mr Underhill]

What else do kitties do when they idle? Why, paw at flies, obviously! (work in progress)

[Mr Underhill]

Not an actual project asset, but I drew a pixel art Buzz just to see how he'd look.
Oh, pixel art, I like you but we must part ways...

[Mr Underhill]

There's a lot to say about Gibbous' development, and I'll do that in a later post, but for now, we're 3d printing and painting Kitteh. Phase one done! Next-up, sandpapering.

[Christian]

Wow, this looks wonderful! Do you have a date or time frame for the Kickstarter?

[Mr Underhill]

We are shooting for late spring, early summer, and we're pretty much on schedule, so I'd say late May early June.

[Schilcote]

Also, the project balooned up to something like 4 GB when built, so we kinda shit our collective pants on that... By the way, the same project is just 80 megs when you compress it with the basic zip thingie.

That means that for whatever reason you're including a whole lot of redundant copies of the same information - that's how compression works, by identifying and eliminating sequences that appear more than once. Might be worth checking to see if you don't accidentally have a hundred copies of a text file directory or something. Otherwise it's probably a bug in whatever's involved in the "building" process (I've never worked with Unity).

[Blackthorne]

I've seen shots of this around the net, but I'm glad I found this thread.  I'm always a fan of fellow adventure game developers - and this game looks great.  I'm also interested in devs who are using Adventure Creator in Unity, so this just appeals to me on many levels!  I'm keeping my eye on this.  Will definitely be looking for your Kickstarter.


Bt

[Seaport]

Wow this does look, those idle anims are great, looking forward to seeing more

[Mr Underhill]

Back to devlogging!

Long time no post here!

We've been working hard on Gibbous, running into problems and solving them as we went, thank the Old Ones.

First of all, we're really excited about a thing, so what I want to tell you guys especially about is a little handy tool called Texture Packer Pro, which saved our butts. And a lot of file size. Just to get an idea of where we were, since we're doing the animation frame by frame, at some point our 1 location, 2 character demo weighed somewhere around 4 GB. Texture Packer got that down to 168 megs!!! It's an amazing tool if you have a lot of frames in your sprite, and is incredibly easy to use, you just drag and drop your png folders into it and it automatically creates sprite sheets/atlases that use up the space as efficiently as possible. I am not getting paid to advertise their product, someone on the SomethingAwful forums pointed us to it and it's the best 50 EU we've spent so far on the game. I highly recommend you give it a try if you're having the same issues! Us struggling with keeping the file size down was really weighing heavy on our heads, so you can imagine the relief when we found this solution to an absolute clusterfuck of a filesize problem.

Progress and looking for our voices

As for progress, we are now aaaaaalmost done with most character animation, have started wiring up the rooms, and are about to embark on a quest to find voice talent. If you feel like you could contribute your  beautiful (or horrendously intimidating) voice to our project, shoot me a pm or a mail at livutz at yahoo dot com, and we'll talk!

Obligatory gif!

Kitteh is now being told to be nice and follow Buzz as he paces around Darkham, so here she is smugly traipsing around.



3d print painting progress

The Kitteh 3dprint looks like this at the moment. It being our first, we now realize more sanding was in order. Still a lot of fine painting to be done, whiskers to be added,  and the next one we do will look even better! Also, probably a little smaller.

This one I managed to drop from a story's height, and then reattach the tiny pieces with super glue. You can tell from the pic the one part I didn't manage to find was the tip of one of her ears. Oh well.



Honestly...

I was going to get back to posting here more than a week ago, but then... Bloodborne happened.

Praise the sun, Cthulhu and the Old Ones.

[Mr Underhill]

Huge update!

We have added an exta room! Wooo!

...Yeah, I know, but such is the way of the point'n click adventure. Everything is slow and painful 

...but fun!

Also pictured, a very much work-in-progress verb coin and some weird hovering scissors.