Menu

Opening Animatic and New Website

Wow! We've finally released something. Not much, but it's a start.

The new file is a very early version of an animatic for the opening sequence of the game (an animatic is a kind of "moving storyboard", it doesn't represent the final animation quality, but indicates what is to be done).

This represents two milestones for me -- one, I'm able to use pygame to manipulate multimedia files, and two, we have a better idea of how the intro will look, and especially the timing of it.

This is just "part 1". "Part 2" will be a set of storyboards for a blender animation that will probably follow what you see here. We're still working on a concept and sketches for that part.

This initial sequence is deliberately somewhat restricted 2D animation. It's meant to be similar to the "talk mode" interface you will encounter as you play the game. In both the opening sequence and during game play, I plan for the characters to be animated using SVG "digital cels" rather than the static images you see here.

To view the animatic, you'll need PyGame, Python Imaging Library, and (of course) Python. PyGame will need to be fairly complete, as we use the mixer and font modules.

The music (by David Tweet), is not really intended for this sequence, but just happens to be our one track so far. To play the animatic without this music track (e.g. if you wanted to come up with different music), you can edit "play.py" and set "MUSIC" to "0" instead of "1". The file is a pretty straightforward script (the animatic is hardly more than a slide-show), and you should easily be able to change the music by providing a different file to pygame.mixer.music.load().

Enjoy!

We'll start working on the next part soon.

-- Terry Hancock

Posted by Terry Hancock 2005-08-05

Log in to post a comment.