I’m just about done with Guppy, my watercolour fish-simulation game. Still need to work on sound effects and music.

Meanwhile, I made a short experimental game about the deciphering of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and I’ve started working on a new prototype: Hellas

It’s a game about Greek mythology which takes place on the surface of a vase.

I’ll probably do some new interactive animation posts as well in the near future. I have some games I want to analyze, but haven’t had time to do the writing and video capture.

Stay tuned.

A look behind the scenes of Tangled,

Andreas Deja starts blogging,

and Valve explains how the Meet the Medic short came to be.

Molyneux, Mechner, Chahi et al discuss the making of their classic games,

Google zooms all the way in on the world’s art,

DICE explains the moves in Mirror’s Edge,

and Gambit talks to various Looking Glass alums.

RPS has an interesting spoiler-filled interview with the writers on Portal 2. They go into the how and why of the characters and story, and how people on the team were given free reign to try ideas and expand upon the basic premise.

Again, SPOILERS… Avoid if you haven’t played Portal 2 (and still want to):

Jay: … there’s never a, “Hey, you go do that so this crashes into that.” It’s just someone’s like, “Oh, Wheatley’s taking over now? Oh, I’m going to go try this!” And there’s that ethos at Valve where the passion goes through. If someone wants to contribute in that way, they will happily work on it for hours and hours, because they’re like, “This will be so cool when it’s in the game.”

Chet: It doesn’t take as long as you’d think. It would take a lot longer if somebody mapped it out, handed it to an animator, and said “Animate this.” But instead when you’ve got the animator say, “Oh, I’ve got this cool idea. I want to do this thing,” they tend to work a lot faster because it’s something they want to do. That makes a big difference.

I think trusting developers to bring their creativity to the table rather than just giving them a list of things to do is always going to give more interesting results.

When you get to be involved in the entire creative process, contributing ideas, then collaborating with other disciplines to put them together, that’s when game development is at its most inspiring…

J. Shea explores believability in fiction,

Victor Navone ponders animating limited characters,

Double Fine joins the podcasting world,

and Gamestorm collects indie design sketches.

Adam Saltsman goes into subtle detail on creating Canabalt,

Eric Guaglione shows an early 3D test of Roger Rabbit 2,

the University of British Columbia knows how to stitch panaromas,

and Peter Kelly (ILM) has Useful Tips on animation.

Happy 2011!

If you’re animating humans, act it out, shoot your own reference! Or if you don’t want to break anything, look at athletes…

Part of it is studying the anatomy to know how the bones and muscles work, the rest is body language and character, studying all the little mannerisms that make that person or animal unique.

Incidentally, if you’re animating birds, animator Brendan Body has done much of the work for you! He goes into a lot of detail analyzing the mechanics of flight.

Putting in that work up front and really thinking about it will not only make the end result more believable, it’ll make your job easier, less time spent going in circles wondering why it’s not working, more spent creating a character…

Raving Rabbids Travel in Time, a game I did animation on, came out last month! I’ve updated my reel with a few new pieces. It was a fun project to work on.

A gorgeous light-show on a 600-year old clocktower,

great interviews with indie game developers,

Monet and web-design,

Dovi Anderson (Pixar) on animation lists

and an interview with Glen Keane. (en français, translation here)

Next: Red Dead Redemption

Last post I talked about proximity as a gameplay device.

Red Dead is another game that does some interesting things with this… I was somewhere in Mexico doing odd jobs for The Resistance, when ‘man of the people’ Reyes asks me to ride shotgun on a stagecoach. Now, you can choose to sit down next to him, OR if you happen to think he’s kind of a hypocrite, you can ride alongside on your own horse instead, to which Reyes responds:

“I guess my company is not good enough for you anymore, hm?”

You could argue the only gameplay consequence is missing some exposition… but it’s a great step towards making social cues matter in how your interactions with NPCs pan out.

You can also greet people as you walk or ride by. If you press the interact button when close to another character your avatar, Marston, tips his hat and says “hello”, or replies if the other has already spoken.

The game is full of little touches like this. NPCs call out and gesture to you when they want to ask you something and wave excitedly when you come back. If they’d implemented “He went THAT way!”-gestures as well, the mini-map would’ve been rendered all but obsolete.

[I found playing with the mini-map off a lot more enjoyable as it made the game less about riding from mission to mission and more about really exploring]

Of course, you can’t talk about Red Dead Redemption without mentioning the horses. While you could argue they are like the cars from GTA, there’s a believability and life to them that goes beyond that…

Like Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, they are characters you come to care about and this is in no small part thanks to the fluid animation and all the little details in their behavior, from the head-shaking when you push them too hard, to the intricate interaction with the terrain.

If you whistle anywhere in the world your horse comes to find you. It’s possible to keep the same horse throughout the game so you can get quite attached to the creature, to the point where some players felt compelled to mourn the loss of their horse when a stray bullet, or cougar took it…

To me this is the whole point of game animation: creating interactive characters you can believe in…