Common Art Interactive Experience Stage 4 - First Bake - 'B' Stage

This week, I was mostly focused on creating a polished experience. First, I added a menu, with some pre-selection animation for the menu items and a fade-in/fade-out effect.

I updated the blueprints in the game to work with controllers, and set up the Sneak animation for the killer.

Finally, I made an ending sequence after the killer hides the old man's body.

I also added a lot of sound effects - the menu sounds, the updated footstep sounds for the sneak animation, the impact sound during the murder, the murmurs of the old man, the maniacal laugh of the killer, the schizophrenic voices in his head, probably a few more. Overall, this week was a lot easier than prior weeks and all I really needed to do was look for areas to improve things. Oh, and I touched up the lighting a little. I will focus more attention on the lighting next week since the menu and sounds are now working. Here is a video of the current state of the game, make sure to turn sound ON to hear the new audio!

Week 11 - High Res Meshing - 'C' Stage

This week my responsibility was to level up the lighting and work on the audio some.

I completely re-did the lighting this week. I aimed for much more nuance, better contrast, and more distinct color zones. I think the work really paid off and gave Richard's awesome shaders a chance to shine. I even added a flicker effect to sell the dark, moody amosphere. With the sounds and effects Richard added, it really feels good.

In order to achieve this, I had to overhaul my lighting tool again - now it has the ability to choose the type of light, to place any number of lights along the cylinder, and to control all kinds of light settings. For example, the light intensity is now set with Candela units, and there is a way to control attenuation radius and shadow hardness.

In addition to the lighting, I updated the rigs to prevent the flipping that was happening in the head earlier. It turns out, Maya doesn't do the math the way I thought it did... and I have no idea why it defaults to doing it wrong! I just had to set the interpolation type on the Parent Constraint to "shortest" and it worked as expected. Most of my work on the rig is not visible, since I spent a bunch of time improving the code and updating the generator with the ability to color the controls. This was a lot of work, but it isn't visible in the engine.

Finally, I worked on adding some sound to the game: the rain sounds, footsteps, creepy horror sting, and heartbeat effect. Richard added the hum of the lights and the flickering noise.