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Here’s a little update on our development. Last 2 weeks have been all work and no play… Well, in games there’s always some play involved but still, the animation system has been troublesome in particular. Using Blender and the Unity engine there is a little sidestep to make when getting characters exported properly. The FBX format that Unity uses to import assets does not always give the results we had in mind.

The idea was to reuse the walk-cycle when handling the various weapons, but that just did not seem to work out so well. The IK used in Blender had to be baked in for the FBX format. And because proper animation starts from the hip bone this was kinda impossible. The bottom line was that all animations were redone for each weapon, giving back the control to the animator but adding a lot of unexpected work at the same time. On top of that the guy that we planned for the animation had other plans… so even more work for the three of us.

Well thank god for the weekends… and the beer that makes an animation job less tense. This week we discovered an other nice detail about our beloved FBX format. The vehicle animation came out extremely choppy in Unity, after a night off research and a proper morning artist to coder chat over coffee we found out that Blender FBX exporter uses a constant key interpolation on export. To test this we had a quick test in notepad, finding and replacing all C’s to L’s to change the interpolation to linear. The animation turns out a lot smoother but still it’s painful to see your nice smooth beziers in Blender being chopped up in frames at the given rate, producing huge animation files and still not giving perfectly smooth results.

Anyway, good things happened too last two weeks. Sander (Programmer) has done massive production setting up a very cool node based wave system that Merlijn (Technical Artist) implemented so good it seems the enemies are really taking cover and show strategies to help each other. But that’s not all Sander put his mind to, the pickups are working and drop from the sky, the enemies die properly, the animations were re-implemented, the enemies can miss instead of always hitting you point blank, they have blank spots, the HUD is working including a cool mini-map showing where the enemies are and what they are up to.. the list doesn’t really end… Merlijn has already set up a good play-test and is showing off his skills on game-play. In the mean while I, Pepijn (Artist / Animator) keeps on fiddling the assets and textures needed to make this game look like it supposed to. And last but not least there is the boss. Like Big Boss in MGS3: Elise (Managing Director). She is drawing in one contract after the other, while at the same time smiling to all those other people that do things other than developing games.

So far the four of us are still draining the reserves and are financially at the bottom of the deepest well. But who cares we are making games and enjoying the hell out of it. Earlier this evening Elise asked what I was doing. The answer was I’m doing the pieces of skull that fly of when you get a head shot… how much better can life get?

Written by Pepijn on Tuesday, May 19th 2009

By Jurrie on June 2nd 2009

Looking pretty interesting. I am looking forward to seeing more images / trailers and giving it a test drive myself. ;-)

Oh, and thumbs up to the nice web site design! I like it.

By iridge on June 19th 2009

very nice! i wish I was on the production team lol, that would seriously ROCK!!! the trailer looks awesome, and so does the website. good work! :D

By Tim on June 20th 2009

Can’t wait to play. Good luck wrapping it up!

By bigWhisky on August 1st 2009

Really would like to see one more perspective view from the in game character, behind the right shoulder and over the shoulder kind’ of suck!

If you were to have a third view; weapon sight only, straight down the barrel, too cool…

your work is awesome, game, music choice, and artwork, beautiful!

By callum on August 6th 2009

hi i brought this game on steam and downloaded it fine but when im in game my player just runs around in circles shooting do you no what i can do to stop this problem?  cheers

By Tragonan on August 8th 2009

Played your game, it’s awesome! I love it, the way the music plays when the action picks up, everything is great!