Alternalien Planning Part 14: The Animation Controller

While the sprint was being planned today, there was some confusion as to how Animator Controllers were set up, so the most major thing I did today was teach the other animators how to use it.  An Animator Controller is basically a state machine.  If a key is pressed like the move or jump key, then the Animator Controller would automatically enter into the key's corresponding animation.  These animations can be connected graphically like so:

When a character is facing right, they can choose to enter into their jump right, power right, or move right animations; and it's the same with the left.  We got all the animations for Lenny cut and into the animation controller.

Alternalien Planning Part 13: The Angry Sun

This week, I had the privilege of concepting and finishing an enemy called the Angry Sun.  The idea and most of the concept was from our stellar designer Garrett, while I did the animation for it.  Originally, it was only supposed to have 3-4 frames of animation, but I wanted to go above and beyond with the Angry Sun.  There ended up being around 50 frames, and when I realized how tedious and time consuming it would be to go through each frame, I ended up cutting in half to around 25 frames.  This is the finished product.

Alternalien Planning Part 12: Mood Board

After the refactoring, I decided to put more effort into the Art Bible, as many of the entries were rather vague.  One of the first steps in any Art Bible is to establish a Mood Board.  A Mood Board is a set of reference images that evokes the vision of the art, environmental paintings and photos to set the "mood" for a location.   The whole Alternalien Mood Board can be found here: http://www.gomoodboard.com/boards/rN2tycIi/share
Here are a few examples.

The base has very geometric shapes and bright, unnatural lighting.

The desert's rock formations have blueish-purple shadows.

Alternalien Planning Part 11: Developer Bios GUI

An extra thing that the Product Owner wanted was to put an option to look at who developed the game.  It was decided to make it an official menu, so I concepted two pieces

 Using team member Erin Fink, I pixelated a photo of her using a edit in Photoshop.  The idea of this piece was to impart the notion of secret files, like our team are secret operatives that have confidential files.

I edited Erin's picture to a more greenish hue, with the goal of this concept to fit in more with the computer look of the main menu GUI.

Alternalien Planning Part 10: The GUI

We've begun to plan for GUI used in the menus.  I picked up the task right away and got to work on the thumbnails.

My first concept is inspired by some of the earliest computers in the world.  It has the font and color of an old IBM and case of an Macintosh.  I wanted something to fit fit the 50s aesthetic.

For my second concept, I tried to do something more like what would be a military base.  It's set inside the desk with knobs to the side, which is more antiquated than the previous concept.

Alternalien Part 9: The Refactoring

After a disastrous first 8 weeks, we've refactored our whole system of doing things.  We've failed a lotthis semester, but we're learning from our mistakes.  We've adhering to Scrum ceremony, in that we've started having sprint review, sprint planning, and retrospective meetings.  Today, we cleaned up the backlog, with the PO adding new cards and cleaning up the acceptance criteria.  I hope that we won't fall into our old habits again.