Week 22
This week we started work on the game play for the combat part of Omikron. With the help of Tony, our animator, we tested and edited the basic combat animations i.e. moving about, stand/crouch, high kick/low kick, high punch/low punch. Now that we're retouching the Motion Capture animation the game play is already beginning to make the characters as easily manageable as possible. The advantage of Motion Capture is that it gives extremely realistic animation. The disadvantage is that the animation, as far as control is concerned, is often "sloppy", the animation taking a long time to respond. Along with Tony and Antoine we spent a long time studying combat games produced by the Japanese, the undisputed masters in the domain, Namco Tekken 2 and Soul Edge in particular. There seem to be important rules governing animation management, for example, the attack time/latency time ratio i.e. the relationship between the time it takes for a blow to reach the adversary and the time it takes the character to return to his initial position. We tried to combine these rules while adding a few of our own. In spite of any game play theory for combat games, the basic question relates to what we feel when we play i.e. is it amusing or not?
This week also saw the latest developments of the engine prior to its final optimization. Jean Charles, most overworked person of the week, has already added transparency and opacity and is about to take on more technical improvements. The goal is to provide Hakim with all the routines so that he can work on the water, an element which will have an important role in Omikron. Hakim will soon have finished debugging GEM, our graphic editor. It should take him until the end of the month to finish the visual effects, particularly the animated textures.
Fabien is finishing the job of converting certain parts of the engine for Playstation. And Fred's objective is to have the character moving about in an outdoor city decor for the end of the month, in order to get pre-approval from Sony.
In the graphics department, Pierre, Eric and Eddy have started work on interior settings for Section 2. And thanks to the combined efforts of Olivier and Stephane the exteriors for Neighborhood 3 should be complete by the end of the week. So we still hope to be ready to begin the game play in a week or two. All the necessary programming resources should be ready by then.
Autor: David Cage
Source: Quantic Dream
11/01/1999 Eidos Interactive ships Omikron: The Nomad Soul
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Monday, October 13, 1997