Latest on Project DogWalk

I mainly focused on bug fixes small improvements this week. There was also quite a bit of playtesting and overseeing the vast amount of work from the team :D

This week was all about blocking out and animating the outro. On top of that we discovered a couple of animations had weird "scaling" artifacts going on. After some investigation we realized that Godot has a hard time dealing with bones that stretch (which is normal to use for a typical IK setup). After a couple of experiments with mixed results, I ended up updating the problematic IK with a "two bone" solution that replace the stretch bone with two bones at each end that track towards each other.

I worked on detailing the set dressing in the Hub area, added path crossing textures and new sign assets.

This week I mostly focused on refined a bit more the intro animation, is a big chunk of animation so is taking a bit longer to finish

My goal for this week was to settle on the textures for the various paths around the world map. I also worked on adding detail to the goat shed in the fence area and managed to make the frozen pond more interesting.

This week was a bit split between project Dogwalk and preparing for the Playgrounds Event in Eindhoven. I took some work from Pablo, adding animation cycles for Chocomel for the introduction.

This week I finally implemented some of the things that make our little project feel more like a game. That's a user interface for menus and saving/loading. besides that, this week was the `playgrounds - the art department` event, where I gave a presentation, so I spent some time on preparing and then being there for the event.

I got to focus a bit more time on bug-fixing and refactors. Especially in preparation for play-testing the game at the Playgrounds event in Eindhoven. A couple of new features found their way into the game that will be essential for work on the following week.

This week there were some rigging tweaks and new rigs for props. Also polished the animations for Pinda attaching the tennis ball and the shovel to the snowman. Furthermore I did a rough mockup pass of the outro.

Somehow it was a productive week, despite the extra preparations that went into the Playgrounds Festival in Eindhoven! I got to do lots of menu mockups, already using our custom font (made in Fontra) and animated some emotes for further testing and implementation + some stray leftover concepting work.

This week I spend mostly my time on polishing & refactoring some old code and the animation trees. But I also got the time to work in some new features from other people, like the EmoteBubbles and the Music Manager.

I worked on storyboarding the little outro sequence for the end of the game and a graph that shows how the player's actions influence Pinda's mood - AND I made emote fx that highlight those moods in the game. Hopefully it's less missable now when you have messed too much with the kid :D! Also: Three birds! A shed! Two cardboard cookies! All very premium concepts.

I had quite a few different tasks this week! I continued working on the fence area. There was new super cute concept art of birds - secondary characters to breathe life into the world - but even through they are still a stretch goal I just had to model them! Also, I modeled and started texturing Pinda's instant camera, which will be important for the end of the game. To round things off, I set up a LUT grading comp to give the game more visual polish.

This week, I spent more time refining the Clearing environment navigation. Over the week, the amount of slight adjustments to the paths were quite high. I also spent time experimenting with the core gameplay elements like the camera distance variables between the characters and how snow patches influences the stamina and falling potential of Pinda.

This week I mostly tweaked rigs based on feedback and rigged new props but also started animating the cinematic scene where Pinda attaches the shovel to the snowman.

This week I wrapped up the last core parts of our pipeline setup, so now textures are actually stored in the right place of the game files on export, which means we don't have duplicates lingering around. Besides that I started helping out Julien with some game-/movement logic implementation.

This week my focus was on the fenced-off area to the east. There is a gate that the player has to open which will give access to another item. I also managed to finally texture the creek, thanks to help from Simon. The transition from the frozen pond to the creek should hopefully look a bit nicer, too!

Most of the week has been all about minor rigging tweaks (that are not very interesting to visualise) but also animating the first cinematic animation: Pinda attaching the tennis ball to the snowman.

This week, I worked on wrapping up most of the environment assets and created props that are on hold at the moment. Then, we discussed the 'Clearing' section of the game which is a more densely populated forest and how the player might navigate the environment.

This week we were able to add more cinematic animations, we made a few cinematics where Pinda is attaching his finds to the snowman. I took the Traffic cone and gave it a spin. Other than that, a lot of corrections, tweaks that came from feedback based upon gameplay.

This week I worked on more animations for the game, also planning some animations that involved the two characters, for that I did some really simple variations to check which one was more align with Julien's idea

My focus this week was on wrapping up the most important tasks for the pipeline. There are still some details to be implemented, which I am talking to the developers (Jacques and Julien) about, but the most important parts are all standing and in use.

This week I worked on pitching different versions of the intro sequence for the game with scribbly animatics, that I put together in Krita. I also picked up some left over asset designs and and color concepting for the overall look of the game. Oh! And I worked on a papercraft font!

More work went into polish and getting more animations in and fixing bugs. But most of my work wasn't wrapped up this week sadly, so I have to share int next time.