The much coveted vacations have arrived, perhaps not for everyone, but for most people this is the time when they turn their gaze to their favorite vacation spot, and having packed their bags and completed their last commitments, they set off to indulge in a period of leisure and carefreeness.
Those who decide for the sea, those who decide for the mountains and why not, even the countryside in a cool farmhouse can be the ideal solution for those who are looking for some relaxation and healthy living surrounded by nature.
I this year, like last year, will be spending the vacations here at home, quite happy to be able to continue the development of the adventure that has now been going on for a good 2 years… well not bad for a novice.
Of course, it would be the best to be able to work on the game relaxed on a deck chair at the beach, with the sound of the waves playing in the background sound, but knowing me, I would eventually avoid continuing in order to devote myself to pastimes more in keeping with where I am, so better to avoid temptation and finish what I started.
This last level, it is putting me to the test, I had started with the idea of creating a series of scenes that would take the player by the hand and accompany him to the end, but although I managed to maintain this idea to some extent, I managed to complicate it because I wanted to insert a little more color here as well, thus turning this game session into another series of small puzzles and objects to search for that will gradually make the desire to savor more and more the moment when the end of the story will be revealed and we will know what the fate of our protagonists will be.
Inserting Mike and Andrei in the finale helped me a lot, with them I created funny and hilarious scenes that are intertwined with more serious moments; I am proud of the result I am getting.
In addition, the presence of these 2 characters, gives me the opportunity to create the scenic ending that I envisioned.
At the moment my idea of the final movie to be enjoyed is divided into 3 main moments on which I am working; the union of these 3 sequences will come to a duration of 5 minutes and even more, so as to make the “official” ending fulfilling for those who had the perseverance to finish the game, after all, the movies at the end of the game are precisely for this, to reward the player for his efforts.
And now I will take 5 minutes of your time to tell you how I created these short movies(if I can call them that), I will premise that there will be many ways to get them and that my method may not be the best, but in the end by following this procedure, I manage to get what I am looking for and so I continue on this path.
Let’s take a character, our protagonist; he is assigned main animations that will be the ones that will animate him, the waiting stance, walking, running, crouching, jumping, and anything else that will be necessary throughout the course of the adventure.
A rule is assigned to these actions, for example if the character moves, his speed will increase and so if it will no longer be equal to 0, so the animation will change from holding position to walking, by increasing that value even more, the animation will change from walking to running.
This is how it works for the other main actions as well, thus creating a whole list of animations to be performed depending on the rules that are active at that time in the game.
But if this character has to perform an action that will be represented only once in the whole adventure(I give a silly example: picking his nose), I think it is useless to go and load the list I mentioned before with this animation that we will use only once.
In this case, I create a clone of the character to which I assign only the animation of sticking his fingers in his nose, and I take advantage of a change of camera shot to replace the subject with his copy thus obtaining a scene similar to this one:
the subject walks to a door, stops and opens the door, the camera frame moves to the new room doing an overview of what is inside, then as if by magic when the camera returns to frame our protagonist you can admire him in the intent of picking his nose.
Here are all the cutscenes that I created in the game, are done in this way, you will understand that with this technique, there are no limits to what you can show, it’s all in the imagination and also in the skill of being able to create animations that can faithfully reproduce the action performed(…in this I know I’m not a great expert, but I leave the final judgment to you).
I leave you below a movie in which you can observe the work done on Blender3D, and the final result obtained on Unity Engine.
Be warned, in this movie you can see the end of the first act of the game, so watch it only if you are interested in the technique or if you have already played the demo.
