matt’s

Since early 2003, an idea has evolved in my mind. It’s something I started to write down as a short story and later extended it to a game design document which is currently in an early alpha state. The story is about a young woman, Anna, who lives in the time of inquisition, witch-hunt, pestilence, and war. Anna, who does not respond to the importunate advances of a crude fellow, is suddenly subjected to the reproach of witchcraft and satansim. But I won’t go into details - yet.

The main reason why I turned this into a game design was that I wanted to go deeper into virtual storytelling. When I was at the best of DVW development, I recognized that I was missing this aspect in our efforts (and a realtime strategy game probably isn’t the best genre for storytelling). I wanted to have more personality involved. I wanted to have egos and moods and atmosphere, I wanted to have obscurity, tragedy, fear. It was clear to me that this story had to become an adventure game. I wanted to have my own virtual theatre, and I wanted to be the director.

But soon one thing became evident: a stage was not enough, I needed actors. Or, more technically, I needed animated models and a lot of knowledge about keyframe animation, joints and bones, etc. It turned out that the latter was easy to aquire while the former was something that took some time Neither I was successful in learning to model and texture, nor I found models online which met my requirements. Finally, for the time being I abandoned the idea to do the modelling myself when I found out that “The Sims” models were quite useful for my purpose. Fortunaltely there was a big community where I could borrow some characters.

This is how I found a new hobby: character animation. It’s great fun to bring a static model to life! And it’s a nice occupation when I’m not in the mood for programming, too, as it doesn’t require that much concentration, at least for the quite simple things I animate. For now, I use Milkshape, but I need to make a decision on how to continue, soon. The good thing is that I get along well with Milkshape. The bad thing is that I find Milkshapes keyframer insufficient for very detailed animations. I have ~300 frames for one simple idle animation (Anna crosses her arms in front of her chest and looks around), and the keyframe slider becomes more and more unuseable. The whole keyframer is a bit sparse and could need some rework. For example, it would be a great relief if I could create some groups for animations, like “Idle 1 = 1 to 300″ and display only one group at a time. Moreover, I’d love to copy the transformation of selected joints to apply them to another frame. Etc., etc. I think I will have a look at the Milkshape forums and ask nicely whether some improvements are planned. If so, a registration is a well worth investment.

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