After 4 half-days of official work, one burnt weekend and one burnt holiday of working from home, we finally completed our first mini-game project! Granted, the game is buggy as hell and still has tons of polishing and cleaning up to be done, but I can safely say that we have created more both in terms of quality and quantity than the Hong Kong teams from Cyberport, even though they had more human and time resources. Our trainers seemed suitably impressed, and we felt rather proud of our hard work.
Amazingly, we managed to achieve something that even our trainer didn't know how to do - creating an animated icon on the PS3 XMB. There is a video in Andrew's blog entry.
The background was the Shibuya train station which Ron and I built. The bomb was created by Ron and the strange looking girl was made by me. The clip was rendered in 3 layers (background, bomb and girl) and composited in After Effects by me. Exporting it to a format that Sony's tools could accept needed a lot of trial and error, since their documentation wasn't helpful at all.
Production Lessons
We dubbed her "Ultragirl". She is basically a spoof of Ultraman that I came up with while toying with designs for her texture map. People thought it was funny, so I went along with it. Below are screenshots of some animations of Ultragirl which I had done for our mini-game.
Mind you I'm not an animator and this is the first time I've attempted such complex character animation, plus I was using Maya software which I'm not familiar with. I think I managed to set up a simple but decent character rig and I got a fair amount of secondary animation in even though I didn't have much time to experiment with the finer points.
Getting the animation done on Maya was only the first step. Successfully exporting the animation into a motion format on the PS3 without problem was the hard part which required extensive problem solving. That took us quite a while and problems kept arising even on the last day of development.
Overall it had been a tiring but fruitful and fun experience. I'm sure we all learned a lot about PS3 game development, the most important being that we need more time and human resource (we only have 1 programmer and 2 artists) to get more done. Still, we had achieve somewhat of a miracle given the resource limitations and our lack of experience.
Our second mini-project should be better XD
A.M. Game Design (Trainer: Murase-san)
Even though we have some outstanding material from Game Producing left over, we started off our Game Design lessons since the 社長 had business outside the company today. The first lesson was about the role of game designers and how ideas become game proposals and finally get specified into game design documents. There was also some material on how to come up with ideas, and pointers on how to create outstanding draft proposals.
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