B.R.A.V.E - MyDream Contest Entry - Journal 8

Following suit with B.A.L.L.S I thought I should blog about my progress. I got about halfway up the ranking. I guess my blogspot isn't enough to be considered a full fledged website about the game, so I'll work on that this month, as with my game design doc.

So I got the pathing / job system in place in a prototype form for the humans. They follow the standard Torque pathing system, but I used the parameter 'internalName' to give the humans an instruction - so far I have wait, load, dump or animate. This allows them to look like they're actually performing a task.

I've also started animating my basic male and I overemphasized the run cycle but I like it. It made me start thinking about changing the run cycles to suit how they are reacting to the environment. So a human will still perform their job, but if there are aliens nearby their run cycle will appear to be more skittish. Probably a good visual cue for the player if they haven't realized an alien is inbound.

I'm gonna grab this book to work on the animations.
Animators Survival Kit

I want to learn speed painting as well so I can concept my stuff before building. I'm learning from this site
Digital Painting Tutorials

Here's some dev shots of the latest work. Next I'll be refining the job system, then I'm going to get the harvesters to grab humans, strip off their skin, organs and fluids into the tank and spit out a skeleton. The tank will slowly fill with human tissue which is used as a resource by aliens. But mainly I like the horror it provides, as a reference to the tripods in War Of The Worlds.

I've added a basic score hud as well.

Oh yeah I also am experimenting with the material system, so now the materials on the ships are starting to take shape.

A human waiting, using the job system.

A running man - working on the animations.

Experimenting with materials - POW.

Experimenting with materials - Harvester shine and transparencies.