VIVA #1 - 'Pitch'

The Game Pitch is set to commence at 9:15am on Tuesday 14th December 2011. This Pitch will be 1 hour, 30 minutes long.


A short set of images showing the Power-Point presentation and the work done so far will be created during the Christmas Holiday, and posted here.

Mechanic Concepts Update

We have been making more concept images that illustrate our game mechanics for our first presentation; the 'Pitch'.

This is the on-screen map HUD that will be activated using the 'M' key on the keyboard. This is only the final scene of the short animatic.

This is the mechanic showing that you can hide in the bushes in the garden, again only showing the last frame of the short animatic.

And lastly, the stealing mechanic, whereby a timer is triggered when the player does so, displayed in the top. Also notice that the HUD displays the warning meter as orange, indicating that what you are doing is suspicious and that people will tell guards if the catch you in this act.

Further concepts are still under-way, as well as the 'Pitch' presentation itself. Thus, blog updates may be slower than usual until the Christmas Holiday starts when we begin production work on the game project.

Here is our first test at getting a usable walk-cycle using the Kinect along with IPISoft's IPIStudio.

Once in-game, it needed to be sped up a fair bit to fit with our walk speed. This may suggest that either our walk speed is too high, or the animation needs to be faster than we first thought.

Motion capture

We organised to test out the motion capture suite to see if it would be a viable method of getting animation into our game. Unfortunately, when we got there,it was out of order.

We heard that a possible way of doing it would be through the Microsoft Kinect.

After some research, we found that the best software for our needs was IPISoft's IPI Studio. This software has the possibility f using two Kinects to record front and side motion.

We did some initial tests using just one camera and had some very good results. It was also very simple to move them from the software into the UDK

We then organised to try two Kinect cameras.

Unfortunately, after setting up everything, we couldn't get the software to analyse the data from two cameras. It instead just used one, leaving half of the actors body behind...

We decided then to try to get a usable walk-cycle out of it using just one camera.

I will post the results later.