Latest on DogWalk

This week my focus was on the fenced-off area to the east. There is a gate that the player has to open which will give access to another item. I also managed to finally texture the creek, thanks to help from Simon. The transition from the frozen pond to the creek should hopefully look a bit nicer, too!

Most of the week has been all about minor rigging tweaks (that are not very interesting to visualise) but also animating the first cinematic animation: Pinda attaching the tennis ball to the snowman.

This week, I worked on wrapping up most of the environment assets and created props that are on hold at the moment. Then, we discussed the 'Clearing' section of the game which is a more densely populated forest and how the player might navigate the environment.

This week we were able to add more cinematic animations, we made a few cinematics where Pinda is attaching his finds to the snowman. I took the Traffic cone and gave it a spin. Other than that, a lot of corrections, tweaks that came from feedback based upon gameplay.

This week I worked on more animations for the game, also planning some animations that involved the two characters, for that I did some really simple variations to check which one was more align with Julien's idea

My focus this week was on wrapping up the most important tasks for the pipeline. There are still some details to be implemented, which I am talking to the developers (Jacques and Julien) about, but the most important parts are all standing and in use.

This week I worked on pitching different versions of the intro sequence for the game with scribbly animatics, that I put together in Krita. I also picked up some left over asset designs and and color concepting for the overall look of the game. Oh! And I worked on a papercraft font!

More work went into polish and getting more animations in and fixing bugs. But most of my work wasn't wrapped up this week sadly, so I have to share int next time.

Since the Vertical Slice milestone was approaching quickly, I continued to work on set dressing and bringing in all the new cool assets Beau was working on. I reshuffled the entire set based on a new design Julien turned over and changed the way the ground geometry is created. Also, new collision objects were made and I scattered grass, reeds and bushes around.

This week I focused on bug fixing and implementing of animations for the vertical slice. The action system for the two characters is also redone to allow more interactions between characters and props.

It was a bit of a messy week with lots of technical issues, but some texturing happened and I added a quick photogrammetry workflow to my tool belt. Also I started on storyboarding the intro animation, did a design pass on the start menu, worked on the menu fonts and researched what kind of visual material we need for a steam and itch.io release!

This week was mostly focusing on finalizing assets or changing them to fit with the overall design better.

We have been working hard getting the list of animation cycles done and where needed, tweaked the cycles to flow better between states. Since we've been aiming for the vertical slice, the target for animation was to get as much in there available for Julien to implement into Godot.

This week we continued with the core animation and also started to do some COOP animations between the characters

Finished a lot of updates for the various character and prop rigs.

Julien gave me the task of set dressing the level for the "Vertical Slice". To enable that I created some setups for making paths, the deep snow patches and of course the creek! I started placing the assets in the level, mainly around the hub area. On the side I refined the texturing of the willow tree, the creek bridge and blocked out the camping table.

This week was mostly refining but also optimizing existing environment assets and props, thanks to detailed notes by Vivien and the team.

More implementation of animations, a full animation tree and procedural animations. More features to vet the animations and if they work well in the game.

This week I transferred a lot of the animations that I did on the layout rigs to the final rigs, also I created a bunch of new animations

I did more pipeline development, as well as making sure that the pipeline we are now actively using is being used properly and doesn't break. Besides that I dove a bit into the game code to optimize the leash collision algorithm.

This week the last missing textures for the game got painted and scanned, almost everything needed for the vertical slice is designed and notes were prepared to finalize assets. I also had some spare time to do FX design and additional Pinda expressions for the animators!

This week Chocomel was unwrapped for texturing, I worked on the (UV) textures of the creek bridge and willow tree assets. The willow tree model also received some tweaks to allow the kid to climb into it.

We decided to adjust and export the assets differently without sharpness data. Instead we used support loops and weighted normals to have more artistic control over the edge sharpness. This week was mostly adjusting existing assets and re-exporting. Some additions this week are the birch outgrowths to be placed around birch trees and around the new stone walls, that are created to block a section of the level off.

Some concepting for the snowman assets, some reviewing and drawovers, some fx concepting and then time was already up! A good chunk of my week was spent on contibuting to the Art Style Blog post - go check it out :)

Way more progress was made on the rough blocking of the world level and one of the areas of the game. Apart from that more animations and art assets are being used in the game.

Worked on the final rigs for Pinda (kid) and Chocomel (dog) and the dog leash handle.