Week 3: Project development process

Storyboard (for current script draft)

Storyboard for VR games

Storyboards are commonly used in film, web and game design as a quick, effective way to communicate spatial position, sequence, motion and interaction to pre-visualise a scene.

Before starting the storyboard based on the draft of the script we have, I thought I could carry a research into storyboarding in VR since that storyboards are usually used to frame a scene but I am not used to storyboarding when there is no frame at all. However, is still possible to storyboard a scene, but instead of objects being defined relative to the frame (directing audience attention), objects are relative to the audience.

So instead of controlling what the audience sees in VR, probabilistic areas of user attention based on ergonomic data are used (modified the work to fit the player, not the other way around).

This video Mike Alger was very useful to comprehend better VR interactions. He mentions the field of view in a VR head-mounted-didplay (HMD)- the goggles you would wear when playing in VR- which is 94 degrees. I a seated position, a person head can rotate side 39 degrees and up 55 degrees (when standing or using a wireless HDM these numbers might be higher).

When considering distance, people tend to pay more attention when objects are closer: The minimum comfortable viewing distance in an HMD, before a user starts going cross-eyed, is 0.5-meters (Oculus now recommends a minimum distance of 0.75-meters). Beyond 10-meters the sense of 3D stereoscopic depth perception diminishes rapidly until it is almost unnoticeable beyond 20-meters. So the perfect distance would be between 0.5 meters to 10.0 meters to display the content.

when combining together these information above regarding the field of view and distance this would be the general diagram:

Adjusting it for a more realistic scale relative to the user, and project into 3D to allow for vertical annotation the diagram would look like this one (I have added our scenario where the player would be in front of the seagulls and being one seagull himself/herself). -This VR storyboard allows us to position objects relative to the audience in 3D space, while still being able to convey sequence, motion, and interaction.

This VR storyboard allows us to position objects relative to the audience in 3D space, while still being able to convey sequence, motion, and interaction.

how to storyboard transitions between environments: in VR they are going to use the teleport tool so the transition is going to be through a button.

Deformation of the screen to simulate the player view

Seaside environment storyboard

Sky storyboard

Pier storyboard

Research comedy genre in games (interactive comedy)

Comedy in video games

When using this genre in games, especially interactive ones, developers should not focus about “funny games” but they should be more interested in talking about comedy in games since humour is a very subjective topic. Comedy is a genre with form and structure and adheres to certain rules: it makes use of irony, contrast, suspense and poetic justice. The creation of comedy in games should be more objective allowing us to create more complete and diverse comedic experiences. A challenge that might be faced when creating comedy for video games is timing which is the key to successful delivery. But how can the game developers execute a well-timed joke when the player is in control of the moment by moment in progression of the game? The answer is take control away from the player. Much of the comedy takes place in cut-scenes, dialogue or context-sensitive action prompts, scripted moments. The player puts down the controller and enjoy a short comedy sketch layout for them. (developers remain in control of the timing in these way and the player still feels connected to the game). However in this way the player interaction is disrupted.

A rather innovative solution to the problem of comedic timing in an interactive medium is structuring the timing around the player and not the character – the real world and not the game world. Jokes that react to the actions and feelings of the player rather than the events taking place within the game fiction (a start button for instance).

“How do we create interactive comedy?”. How do we build comedy into the gameplay? How do we create comedy that could only be created within an interactive medium? What does interactivity fundamentally add to the tradition of storytelling?

The big gap between Films and Games is that, at least from the development phase point of view, the development team may try to predict the actions of the player and may even program responses for each possible eventuality, but it remains true that the game doesn’t “know” what you are doing. The game acts then as a “blind storyteller” in this way creating one of the essential dynamics in comedy: the straight-man.

For comedy-in-absurdity to work, there has to be an established baseline of normality that the agents of absurdity are deviating from. If absurd things are happening in an absurd world to absurd characters, they are no longer “unusual”, per the rules established by that world, and thus, the comedy is lost. A straight-man is required, a character acting as an audience surrogate, reacting to the absurd in the way that the audience would in that situation. It could also be the setting. An otherwise sane setting can play the foil to the absurdity of its inhabitants. The Straight-man is often portrayed as reasonable and serious, while the other one is portrayed as funny, less educated or less intelligent, silly, or unorthodox When the audience identifies primarily with one character, the other is often referred to as a comic foil. The blind storyteller as straight-man dynamic allows for magnificent reality-breaking. The player, the only agent in this dynamic cognizant of the rules that govern reality outside of the game, can exploit the game’s artifice to produce moments of hilarity played, by the game, entirely straight-faced.

What Makes Games Funny?

Games are, by nature, comedic even extremely serious dramas can become comedic by allowing the player to do things that go against their style, therefore there are different scenarios for comedy to develop in interactive games:

Finding humour where the developers did not intend it – any effect the player can have on the world can let them do or create something humorous; (unintentional, inherent comedy)
Humour through story and narrative – one way to include humour is via the story; however not make everything into a joke since that comedy is based on contrast and when everything is funny nothing stands out.
Chaos an mayhem are often hilarious – comedy from chaos is about the unforeseen: it can appear unplanned and they offer a possibility of abrupt explosive failure.(fail must be fair although, sudden death can be frustrating and no fun).
Humour through gameplay – it relies on unexpected and unique interactive gameplay elements that serve to illustrate the joke (compared to spoken lines, which are non-interactive): a vital point is that you have to actively perform something and get a reaction. Another expedition could be to re-purpose regular game actions for other actions makes it funny, and having characters remarking upon them as the wrong actions.

There are a lot of straightforward ways to make a game more comedic. These elements stated above can be used to engage the player with comedic elements, instead of just having funny things appear. Actually while we where in the meeting we thought of some interactive elements for the player to have in the meantime of the game since we considered the active role of the player essential for the overall experience.

Seagull, props models (assets)

Seagull 1 model adjustments

In our second meetings I received some feedbacks on the model of the seagull I had made: overall was good, however they suggested me to create a wing that would resemble a human hand with fingers, since that in the game there will be some actions involving the seagulls grabbing objects.

In order to use the wings as hands, the feathers should have at list a feather looking thumb but not necessarily five fingers/feathers: the bones of the wing are too specialised for flight to become a hand, but feathers feathers could be used as fingers -this would make look the wing still looking like a wing but having hand-like functions. I thought I could use the primary wing feathers to use as fingers. Moreover when grasping something or gesturing the wing would look like a humanised wing, but still looking like a bird wing when flying. I was inspired by animations where bird characters can bend their wings forward like arms, something that is physically impossible in real life.

This is the new design I have created and that I will use as a reference when modeling it.

New design:

rendered model

I was not happy with how the right paw turned out so I duplicated the left one and merged it to the other leg to have them look the same

I sew each vertex together to match the new paw with the leg

Seagull 2 model

Just like I did fro the other model I have used the model sheet to use as a starting point to model the second seagull

Once I have aligned the poly to the image both from a side and front view I have separated the two legs creating new edge loops and deleting the faces I did not need

I worked on the details of the “feathers”/skin at the root of the leg using the vertex of the model

I have created the eyes extruding and then deleting two faces at the side of its head:

From a sphere I have created a pupil and using another sphere using the top faces as the upper lids and the bottom faces as the bottom lids. I have also assigned to the pupil a white blin texture and a black one for the pupil to make them reflect light as eyes would.

I after worked on the paws creating some edge loops and moving them to make them resemble the seagull one.

Final rendered picture of the second seagull

I after created a scene using an infinite background and adding some are lights with yellow, pink and blue tints to see how the two seagulls looked together.

Props

Other than modeling the objects present in the script I thought we may use some props I previously modeled and textured.

List of props that need to be modeled according to the first part of the script: fries and single fries, ice scream, sand shovel.

Rigging

I have used this video to use as a basic process to start and rig the seagulls model which helped me to understand better how to create joints for the rig, how to combine them together, how to bind the geometry with the joints and how to create IK handles for the wings.

Seagull 1 Rig:

I have first created the joints according to the model, birds bone structure and the actions useful for the animation in the game.

For the wings joint I have created one first and after mirrored it to the other side.

the body and wings joints parented together

I after unified the geometry and the rig together to make the model move along the rig using the bind skin tool

I have used this tool to create IK movements for the In animation, **a tool for posing joint chains**. An IK handle resembles a wire running through a joint chain, and enables you to pose the entire joint chain in one action. As you pose and animate the joint chain, its IK handle automatically figures out how to rotate all the joints in the joint chain using an IK solver.

I froze the transformation for the controls to help the animation stage when moving the controls and having a clear start point.

Once I started exploring the model movement range I have noticed that the rig I had previously created for the hands/feathers was not working at all so I had to start again creating more joint this time to make the fingers curl.

Leg problem rig IK handle to bend:

Skin weight for the leg where I painted the area that I wanted to be affected by the joint movement.

I have added some controls to use for the fingers joints: since the joint transformation could not be frozen I created some nurbs circles to better identify the joint and most of all to animate them after since after I parent them to the joint I was able to froze their transformation so that when animating their position could be easily turned to zero.

I adjusted the rig by unbinding it first from the mesh and working only on the rig.

I added an IK handle for the knees and some costumed controls as well.

I separated the eyes from the main mesh so that it would be easier to control their rotation. As for the eye lids I created two joints to be attached to them and allow me to move them to animate an eye blink, one for the upper lid and one for the low lid.

I have adjusted the hierarchy of the rig by putting everything “ruled” by the joint on the hips: before the joint in the head was at the top, however the balance of a body would be the root of a character so I made sure that every joint of the rig was in the hips joint. I have downloaded a simple rig to better understand the hierarchy.