Tale of Tales “8” VAF Mile Stone Plan REPORT Step 2: Animation (Jan 1-Feb 29) Team work These have been two insane months. With hardly any team work experience, Auriea and I jumped in and started managing a team of some 15 people through the internet. I don't remember if we thought this was going to be easy. In any case it wasn't. But in terms of experience it was invaluable. And our general focus has been also in trying to work with as many different people as our budget could afford in order to really be able to judge if they would make valuable members of the team for full production. This has not been the most efficient way of getting things done but we are much wiser and stronger now, as managers and even, yes, I think I can say that, as a team. Concept art Lina Kusaite and Gorik Lindemans have produced stunning work for our project. Their job consisted of thinking about characters, objects and architecture that make up the game world and making drawings that illustrate these thoughts and could be used as a basis for 3D modelling and texturing. To do this job well, or as a result of it, they have helped shape not only the story behind the game but also several game design elements. Lina's focus has been on the main characters and the garden. She has been extremely (pro-) active and has worked much more than we are paying her for. And we had already doubled her salary. Gorik has focussed on the courtyard and the life the palace. While having been at least as obsessively active as Lina, his work was never as focussed and we did not succeed in making him nail down everything to a point where modellers could really work with it. But his contributions to the realization of a believable game world have been invaluable. We have decided to work again with him later on these concepts. Lina Kusaite The Wicked Fairy is an hybrid insect-human who lives in the Wicked Branches that grow into the Sleeping Palace and threaten to destroy it. The Sleeping Princess is the central figure of the game although she does nothing but sleep. All sorts of interesting vegetation and decorative elements were added to the Palace's formal garden, like this bull statue that the player wil encounter in the very beginning of the game. Gorik Lindemans The people who inhabit the palace have very particular facial features. Before everyone fell asleep, a wedding was taking place near the Chapel in the Courtyard. And then the Palace was cursed to sleep for 100 years, 200 years, ... 500 when our game starts/ 3D Models Meerkat Studios have finished the remodelling of the main character of the Deaf Mute Girl in a Pretty White Dress. She might not look as interestingly strange and lumpy anymore more. But she is much better built technically and has a much better shape now. They are still working on the texture. Meerkat have also modelled the character of the Priest Prince, who dies in the beginning of the game. We have been extremely happy with the quality and timely delivery of this Estonian studio and plan on expanding our relationship with them. This will start with asking them to model the Sleeping Princess. Nathalie Routin has modelled the character of the Mother of the Girl and is now working on the common inhabitants, after Gorik's drawings. We have been a bit disappointed by her lack of experience but she made up for it with her cheerful personality and good organization. We have decided to keep her on board, in the hope that she will gain the required experience with us, but we have moved her to modelling less mission-critical characters. Dock Hayden has graciously offered to help us with these characters as well. For free. Ionut-Bogdan Suman-Horduna had offered to help us voluntarily with the modelling of the courtyard. But his assignment suffered from the lack of specific details in Gorik's drawings and ultimately he concluded that he did not have time to help us at this moment but offered to do so later. So Michaël Samyn had to take over his job, which was very inconvenient, with respect to the other things on his schedule. We have now hired Melissa Buffaloe to texture some of these arcitectural elements. Auriea Harvey has reviewed the Lustgarten room, modelled a first sketch for the Wicked Flowers and made people to populate the Park in the intro movie of the game. Roger Mitchell had modelled a stag and a bull but the quality was too low and Auriea did the job instead. Animation We had agreed with Nathalie Jean-Bart that she was going to make new animations for our new Girl character model. Nathalie, however, more or less deserted us when it took longer than expected for us to get the source material to her. So we hired Jakub Krompolc to animate the Girl based on the motion captures we had made of Martha Samyn last year. The construction of the skeleton to drive the animation of this character has taken one month, much longer than we had anticipated, and was further delayed through import and export problems. Jakub has only just now started animating the character. He is undoubtedly a very hard worker but his obsession with technical perfection rather than getting something done has made us quite nervous at times. We are still giving him a chance, though, because we haven't really seen much results that we can base a judgement on in terms of quality. So far it's looking good. In the mean time Robert Ives has made the animations of the Bull, the Stag and the Girl for the Stag and Bull fight. He did a great job with minimal instructions and delivered on time. We have hired him to make the character animations of the Mother, Girl and extras for the intro movie of the game as well. Auriea Harvey has animated the Wicked Flowers. Michaël Samyn has developed a scenario and storybook for the trailer. Programming Ronald Jones has been hired to work on our project for one day per week. His job is two-fold. On the one hand he will completely restructure the game engine to make it more efficient in terms of both performance and bug-fixing. On the other, he interfaces between us and third party programmers to build extra systems. There are two systems that have our primary foces: a data-driven character animation system and a system to create and render the Wicked Branches. Ronald is a very organized, very efficient and enthusiastic collaborator. Apart from configuring our CVS server Steven Pickels has basically learned how to use Quest3D, the software we program the game with, on our time. Some results of his research into physics simulation and collision detection have been interesting but we're not sure how reliable they are given his lack of knowledge of the specifics of Quest3D. We hope he can still deliver a system for direct interaction of objects by the player but it is doubtful if he will since he has another engagement starting next week. We have communicated with Act-3D on a regular basis. They have already made changes to certain systems of their software as a result of these communications and we will hire them to do specific work for our project. They are on call for tech support and the tips we get from them are very helpful. Michaël Samyn has programmed the basic structure of the trailer, including most camera animations, in the game engine. It is unlikely that the trailer will actually play correctly in the real-time engine because load times of assets will prevent proper synchronization with the music. But it will be a proverbial piece of cake to make a video based on this real-time version. Consultancy We are negociating with Act-3D, the developers of the software we use to make 8, about the production of a special animation system for use with the Girl. This system would make adding, changing and blending animations much easier and it would connect with the Artificial Intelligence much better. It is not cheap and can only be finished in May. With the exception of Act-3D, we have stopped consulting with experts or contacting publishers in favour of concentrating on making good demo material. So we decided to put as much of the budget into hiring people who could help us make things. We have made an loose appointment with Ernest Adams some time in April or May. And he has already advised us on artificial intelligence, among other things, via email. The discussions with Gorik and Lina, the concept artists, have helped a lot in refining the game's design, so much so that we feel a lot more confident about it now. If we are going to work with Meerkat Studios more, it will be important that we meet with them. Best in their offices in Tallinn, Estonia. They have expressed an interest in investing in the production by offering us extra man hours. Server We have set up a CVS server for this project. CVS mean "concurrent version system" and it is a way to allow multiple people to work on the same piece of data while keeping track of all the changes that have been made. On top of that, the computer that runs this server is in a remote location and has an automatic backup system. This will ensure that our game code and assets are safe. Fees to be paid Note that these are not official bookkeeping results but simply an approximate indication of where we spent the money. Out of the STEP 2 Budget: Auriea Harvey BE management, 3D modelling, animation 4000 Michaël Samyn BE management, 3D modelling, programming 2000 Gorik Lindemans BE concept art 1000 Lina Kusaite BE concept art 2000 Nathalie Jean-Bart UK character rigging 500 Jakub Krompolc CZ character rigging & animation 1500 Nathalie Routin FR 3D modelling & texturing 2000 Meerkat Studios EE 3D modelling & texturing 2500 Melissa Buffaloe US texturing 300 Roger Mitchell UK 3D modelling & texturing 400 Robert Ives SE character animation 2000 Veerle Verschooris BE business setup & legal documents 500 Hardware BE video card & network equipment 500 Travel costs BE meetings with collaborators 1000 Total 20200 Out of the STEP 3 Budget: Auriea Harvey BE 3D modelling 2000 Steven Pickles DE programming 2000 Ronald Jones CH programing 2000 Lina Kusaite BE concept art 1000 Odon BE server hosting 250 Total 7250 Ionut-Bogdan Suman-Horduna and Dock Hayden have worked for us for free. Conclusion We have made a schedule for making the trailer. This was not an easy feat since the process of making assets for a game is actually a long chain from concept art to modelling to texturing to animation to programming. And whenever one of the links fails or doesn't deliver on time, the rest of the chain is affected. As a result we have had to reschedule many things several times and when it became clear that we were not going to be able to finish things in time within the available budget, we cut a few features. Some of these unexpected delays were caused by working with many different people, which in and of itself had certain benefits towards building a team. The trailer has been scheduled to be finished on March 26 but it is still uncertain if this will actually happen. To push this forward, we will now abandon our desire to work with as many people as possible in favour of hiring people of whom we know they can deliver on time without needing too much of our time. In other words, shift focus from Goal 3 (team) to Goal 1 (game) in order to have a better chance to reach Goal 2 (Publish). This will cost more than planned. With respect to the Three Goals of this Mile Stone Plan, we can conclude the following concerning Milestone 2. Despite of all the troubles communicating with collaborators, we did add more assets to the game and made certain elements of the engine more reliable. Overall, though, the game currently resembles a construction site. Everything is broken and waiting for new and better elements to be put in. We hope this can be done sufficiently by the end of March when we want to finish the trailer. But it will be hard work. And will probably require some cutting of features (or clever camera work so you don't see the mess). We have done nothing in terms of acquire funding or building relationships with publishers or potential investors. We have, however, been invited to give a presentation of the game at the Dorkbot event of April 9 in Gent. This Milestone has been the milestone of team-building. Not only have found and worked with many different people for many different jobs, we have also learned how to manage this group. And we know a lot better what to look for in future candidates. We have hired and we have fired. But I think that we're on our way to building a solid and trustworthy team. Planning We need to change the planning a little bit with respect to the mile stones. We will not be making an artificial intelligence demo as planned for Milestone 3. At least not as an explicitly seperate project, apart from a small illustration of what we mean by artificial intelligence or rather autonomous behaviour, in the context of “8”. The game engine will be redesigned (mostly by Ronald Jones) in a modular way so that systems like autonomous behaviour can be easily shown seperately. Also, the animation system that we are having Act-3D develop for us, will only be ready by May. This animation system will allow us to make the autonomous behaviour of the Girl much more interesting. This month (March) we will finish the trailer. The following two months (April and May) will be almost exclusively devoted to developing assets (models, textures, animations and sounds) for the final Gameplay Demo. Rather than experimenting with many new people or relying on voluntary aid too much, we will try and work mostly with people of whom we know for sure that they deliver high quality work on time. To finance this, we will use some of the money of Milestone 4 (the 6000 reserved for modeller and sound designer) and contribute some of our own (Michaël hasn't been paid for 2 months e.g. in order to afford hiring other people). During this time, the entire game engine will be re-written as well and a new animation system will be developed. In June, the assets will be polished and connected to the new game engine. In July we will make presentations to investors and publishers with the trailer, an autonomous behaviour demo, a gameplay demo and concept art to illustrate elements of the game that have not been built yet.

Document written by Michaël Samyn on 5-7 March 2004