After a good 2 weeks spent on another project. Time is growing tight and there’s plenty to do! Animation by day and sound design by night, there is little time for sleep. Creating sound effects was relatively quick and simple with finding sounds and editing them to sound as I (Carmen) imagined the sound to be like. Having less than a day to compose 3 pieces of background music, it initially seemed impossible. However, spending a night and half of the following day composing directly in Garage Band, using the “musical keyboard” feature and recording a variety of different compositions as well as multiple attempts of each. It has been madly fun… and yay for original music!
While we work very diligently on completing tasks at hand, having a bit of fun can help maintain one’s sanity. The carpets are often counter productive to this end.
Sleeping, while beneficial can often lead to hilarious concequences.
Dashan (his Highness) is strangely sittable. Good for your posture.
- Wait… you DON’T want the bridge?! Changes abound!
The heat is on as the team charges towards our Tuesday morning deadline. As all the pieces of the project come together, there are a few hickups. The team rose to the challenge, however, and marshaled on!
- Jason “managing” Dashan as he looks over final model integration in unity.
As pieces of the project became finalized, Dashan worked on integrating them into unity. When one piece was completed, manpower was reallocated to help everyone get straightened out. Jason made sure that no one was left empty handed and kept everyone on task.
- Dashan hides from Jason by blending into the carpet.
A well timed nap can help keep energy levels up! Especially when the nearby Starbucks closes at 9pm… come on!
With the conclusion of many of our other course obligations we’ve dived full force into visual story production and have fully taken over Class Room 2.
Dashan (clutch) pictured teaching young minds. Not pictured Nick (slacker/photographer).
The animations have been planned out by the story team, and Dashan (the Awesomeness) starts introducing the rest of the team to the ins and outs of unity and how he hopes to implement the animated cinematics therein.
In the home stretch!
With the intense work-load on our plates, team members also had a slew of other academic obligations during our ongoing work for visual story. The other project course at the MDM, Building Virtual Worlds, saw Team Talon members spread across other numerous projects and very VERY busy. Work continues, however!
Don't step on a crack or you'll fall and break your back!
Jason (our beloved PM) works with Jeff (another MDMer) on their LED project.
After our previous photoshoot with using people as placeholders, we decided to use small objects to get a better sense of the cinematography with more than one Talon. The markers are the Talons while the green waterbottle is the Gate Keeper. We’ve discovered that they are much easier to position than people. This was a great way for us to visualize the fight scene.
The Gate Keeper pushes the Talons off the platform.
The Talons jump on the Gate Keeper.
The Talons keeping the Gate Keeper in check while the original Talon rushes to the gate.
Alice as T0 (Talon) who accidentally walked into Carmen as TD (dead Talon).
T0 meets the Gatekeeper!!
We decided to take photos as references for perspectives in the 3D world. We took photos while acting the parts of the characters to get a feel of the specific camera perspectives for the cut scenes.
Alice and Carmen takes on voice recording for the first time! Being unfamiliar with the slightly outdated Mac OS as well as the software (Live), a little background with sound editing goes a long way once they got to know the interface better. Special thanks to Patrick Pennefather for giving additional advice, instructions, and (of course) voice acting! Also, big thanks to our star voice actor, Andrew von Rosenbach!
Through two back-to-back recording sessions in one afternoon, all recording has been completed!
The next day, it’s back to the sound room for editing and compiling of all recorded parts into their appropriate scenes. Also, a bit of basic sound editing provided the right effects on the voices of the talented actors. 
That sound board looked intimidating at first glance!
We used Google Documents to write the first draft of the script, which included twelve of the Talons. In the end, the script was nine pages long. We assigned all the Talons with a number (according to when they meet our protagonist), with T0 being the protagonist. Here’s a snippet of the script:
T 1: You must be new here. So what did you in? Was it the spikes? Bottomless pit? Fireballs? …Doesn’t matter. You’re here now.
T 0: Here? What do you mean ‘here’?
T 1: Call it what you will but everyone comes here sooner or later.
After Recording the voice recording, we timed all the actions down to the mili-seconds. Essentially story-boarding it with the prepared camera names and the character animated actions. For example, (C:Medium) is the medium ranged camera and (11) is the assigned action of raising one hand. Here’s a snippet of what that looks like:
0:00:000 – 0:03:100
(C: Medium) T0 (11)
0:03:100 – 0:05:500
(C: Medium) TD5 (15)
0:05:500 – 0:07:300
(C: Medium) T0 (14)
And this is what it looks like incorporated with the scripting language:
#SceneTD2, SceneTD2
0:00.000, T0/Side01.activate
0:00.000, T0.run
0:00.000, T0.path.add
0:02.000, T0.hi one hand
0:03.300, TD2/ClosedUp.activate
0:03.300, TD2.dizzy
0:05.000, TD2.both hands
2D Character Design and Inspiration
After finalizing our character description, we decided that our protagonist is a young knight who were to go save the princess. Our concept artist then went off to search for reference images and created several quick concept drawing for the character. The final 2D art and character were created in illustrator and the we added the pixelated effect in Photoshop. 3D modeling also started after the concept art was finished.
2D Environment Design
The 2D Environment for the first phase of the game was built from different kinds of sprites, also created form our concept artist. We called our first phase environment “Sky Kingdom,” and we used several references from Mario and Persona Game. We import those sprites into Unity and our level designer built the entire 2D platform in Unity.
