Presentation

During another critique, I was asked how I was going to present my work at our end-of-year show. I hadn’t given this much thought past a 2D character animation reel. My tutors suggested I use something like Stencyl or Game Maker to make my character interactive. I thought this would be a great idea and relatively easy to do, so I began researching into both programs. The overall consensus seemed to suggest that, out of the two, Game Maker was the one that would be most suited to my purpose. After downloading the program, I went through and made the tutorial game (a game about a clown bouncing off of the walls – intricate stuff, right?) to get a feel for the program and started to look at how I could build my character:

It seemed that I’d have to create a sprite sheet of each of my characters animations so they could be inserted into the Game Maker engine. Luckily, I managed to find out that Flash can do this at the press of a button…:

The sprite sheet came out as well as could be expected…:

…but at this point I started to wonder if this was really the best way to represent my idea at the end-of-year show. It’s all well and good having an interactive character, but to have them interact with another, computer-controlled opponent would a) take a whole new level of coding and b) still have to be kept quite basic. Rather than perform a technical exercise, I decided I wanted to do something a little more artistic…

In a tutorial with one of my tutors, Kim, I brought up the idea of perhaps creating a trailer instead of an interactive character and she loved the idea. She agreed that it would get across the idea of the game a lot more clearly than a simple interactive character ever could. I began looking at other trailers for similar games such as ‘Rayman Jungle Run’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqCVbaklOzo) and ‘Jetpack Joyride’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzxi8nid9BQ) and came to the conclusion that I should include a decent amount of gameplay with some selling points and other animations surrounding said clips. I’ve also had an induction into the sound production facilities recently, so I can record some voice samples and create some music for my trailer where I might need to.

I started by making a very rough storyboard (as in so rough I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who would be able to tell what’s going on) and transferred it into Flash so that I could get the timing exactly where I needed it to be. Once I had the entire thing ‘blocked out’, I started to go in and create some of the extra assets for the trailer.

Here’s another time lapse video of me creating the first scene of the trailer! Head over to the ‘Misc.’ folder again and watch ‘trailerTimeLapse’!

Here’s where I had to have some of the game scenes completely ‘built’ so I could include some emulated gameplay in the trailer. Since I’d already made the environmental pieces in 3DS Max, this was an easy case of just tracing over them in Flash to make them fit in with the aesthetic of the characters. I also created and animated a crowd at this point to give the game a more ‘populated arena’ feel:

Once I had all of the scenes animated, I decided to present them all inside an iPhone device to really get the feeling that this could be an actual product across:

Using Photoshop’s 3D text tools made for some very interesting ways of displaying the phrasing and title logo, too! Luckily they are very easy to pick up, especially with any basic knowledge of 3D terminology.

With the visuals for the trailer complete, I took them into Adobe Premiere Pro to cut them all together and get the timing right. After that was done, it needed to go into Adobe After Effects so the flashy transitions could be added in to really give it a professional look. There was almost as much post-processing as there was animating the trailer in the first place!

Now it was time to move onto the sound. Get those ears ready!