26/09/2010: project has ended succesfully :)

Hi all,

three months ago I promised to post another blog entry ... after my presentation/demo and examination. The concept of 'after' lasted 3 months; I am sorry for that :)

Well, everything went great. I am officially a 'Creator of animation productions' now! During the morning I had a quite thorough examination concerning the 2nd year of the course and in the afternoon I did the demo of 'Le Village Perdu'. Everybody was happy with the result and they gave me a lot of points :)

If you want to see the final video of the game project check out this link on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOw9jicSd4.

My 'game era' hasn't stopped 3 months ago luckily... Next year (february-march-april 2011) I will teach a course at Syntra Hasselt on Microsoft XNA game programming.  I will teach 2 courses of 8 days each. Currently, I am writing the course material. There is really a lot to say, and 8 days is not much!

This blog post will probaly be the last on this blog.

Thanks for reading my blog and all support during my 1 year quest!

bye,
David

26/06/2010: Today is the Day

Okay ... today is the day. I will have to present my game this afternoon ... a game on which I spent a lot of time (approx. 1000 hours, which is equivalent to 125 working days).

Currently, my DVD writer is doing overtime to burn all those discs (it is 1h45 in the morning). It was a lot of work to create the DVD menu and add subtitles, DVD extra's, ... but the result is really nice. I am happy with the outcome of this week:

1. Refined the DVD cover: the DVD cover has been finalized and printed in a copy shop. The prints are okay, but there are some inconsistencies in the prints. That's a pity...
2. Created a DVD label: bought some 'Micro Application' DVD labels (250! Why do they sell so much labels?). The 'Micro Application' brand is quite good since they give really decent software to print out the labels. Too bad that our HP printer does not print that well...
3. Debugging and extra's for the game: the boss is quite heavy to beat right now :) Also, a game over and a congratulations screen have been added. I did also spent some time on starting a new game after having played a game (= the reset functionality was quite buggy) and added some 'you have been hit' animations.
4. Rendered and gathered all necessary content: I had to play the level two times (since the boss was able to beat me the first time) to record all necessary video for the DVD. To record the video Fraps was used (really nice application but the size of the captured files is huge!). To process all that data I had to use Adobe Premiere. That's a cool application but there are so many buttons it feels like being in a plane cockpit.
5. Created a DVD menu: this took me quite some time, but the software 'Sony DVD Architect' helped a lot. The DVD is fullly loaded with all work that has been done the last couple of months and there are even some extra's on it :) There are even subtitles in Dutch :)

Tomorrow I will post a new blog entry, hopefully as a 'Creator of animation productions'! Today or Sunday, there will be one big post on this blog with all 'final' content ...

20/06/2010: 1 week left!

Counting down ... Saturday is the big day. In the morning I will have an examination and in the afternoon I will have to present the game!

So what has been done last week?:

1. Processed most of the remarks I got from my coach on the intro and outro. I think 80% of the remarks have been worked out, for the other 20% there was no time left.
2. Created a credits shot. The shot is quite nice and the music is really an added value.
3. Created a DVD cover. The cover took some time to create but the result is cool.
4. Other stuff:
1. I tried out some screen capture software to capture the intro, game and outro since the trial version of Fraps only allowed 30sec of recording. After trying a lot of free software I decided to buy a full version of Fraps since it seems to be the only tool that records the best quality without hassles. 
2. The domain urdams.com is a fact :) I will try to set up a website on http://www.urdams.com/levillageperdu this week.

 The DVD cover

14/06/2010: two weeks left!

Today, we made some time to party for my birthday :)

Besides the party, following things have been done the last couple of days:

1. Creation of a main menu video: I did some recordings of the church in our village and processed it in After Effects (night effect based on the day to night conversion tutorial on video copilot, some cartoon effect and - took some time - motion tracking on the roof of the church to put in some light in the tower). The main menu looks really cool now!
2. Created the level boss behaviour: the game has now a boss that behaves like a boss. To be honest he is a little bit too difficult to beat, will have to tweak the parameters :)
3. Created a basic HUD: the HUD displays the health of Simon in the upper left corner of the screen.

 I also uniformized the text fonts used in the intro, the main menu and the HUD: everything is based on Gill Sans Ultra Bold.

Saturday, I also got my final coaching session: got quite some remarks on the outro. As such, this week I will be working on those remarks and the ones made on the intro. Since time is going fast, it will not be possible to process all remarks.

Before (video)

After (video)

09/06/2010: outro is ready

These last three days were quite productive ... I was able to finish the 4 shots for the outro. It was less drawing work than the intro (4 shots instead of 8), but there was more animation work to do (= figure animation).

Yesterday I also did some audio recordings in the garden (walking on grass, walking on stones, wood-on-wood sound, wooden door that is closed, ...). It was fun but the recording device is not really good. Next time, I think I will need some gadget like the M-Audio Micro Track II.

Today was also a day with crashes and odd behavior of software - which sometimes drives me crazy!:

• Windows 7 does not like corrupt WAV files: there is a hotfix for it, but the hotfix link that is sent to me doesn't work :( So, until a fix is possible, I keep task manager open and kill the explorer.exe process if it 'runs away'.
• Quicktime is unstable (I don't know why Apple is complaining about stability issues of the Flash player if they cannot make a stable Quicktime viewer?). Mostly, my video card driver crashes when playing a movie in Quicktime, but sometimes I even got a blue screen with the necessary reboot afterwards.
• After Effects also crashes once in a while. I noticed that is moslty occurs when I'm doing something in AE during a rendering.

Anyway, here is the outro of the game:

Tomorrow, I will work on the credits shots and the main menu for the game. I suppose After Effects will be my main tool for that.

06/06/2010: all backgrounds ready!

All backgrounds are finally finished, and that's great news :)

Also great news:

• Got one more week until the end of the project, so June 26th is the new deadline, which gives me some more time to work on the gameplay of the game.
• My coach and classmate were really pleased with the end result of the intro!! They gave some remarks that I will try to process in the days to come, based on 'the quick wins' principle :)

Not so great news:

• I got a cold (how is that possible when temperature is above 25°C? probably a vitamin shortage)
• Sunday I am a 'backup bijzitter' for the Belgian elections ... thank you (not!) Alexander for the lost day!
• Radio Nostalgie live stream is not streaming well ... is everyone taking all bandwidth on internet or what?

Things to do in the next 3 weeks:

1. Create 4 shots for the outro: animations and special FX
2. Create a cool main menu for the game
3. Create a cool credits animation
4. Add a HUD to the game
5. Finetune the behavior of the 'level boss'
6. Make some changes to the game figures and animations (= remarks I got from my coach)
7. Work on the gameplay
8. Process the remarks on the intro
9. Create one nice big shiny DVD box
10. Create a presentation and demo
11. Study (a little) for the exam

02/06/2010: one more background

One background has been created this evening (took me about 2h30min, I have to work fast since the deadline is approaching) ... so two more to go :)