Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Monday, September 7, 2015

Notes about working on Spider-Man Games



Spider-Man Demo Reels:
video 1 video 2 video 3

My time with Activision gave me the privilege to work on 2 consecutive Spider-Man properties.

Spider Man 3 and Web of Shadows.

On Spider-Man 3, QuickTime events were all the rage as a result of God of Wars critical success integrating them in pivotal moments to exhilarate the climax of a combat sequence.

Although, in comparison our implementation at times left the player feeling detached from the moment and lacked the polish of a crescendo coming together for that one two punch followed by a knockout. Yet, as a young animator it was a fantastic learning experience. Spider-Man was a character with so much expressive possibility to explore with bipedal movement.

Animating Spider-Man, felt like channeling the kid acrobat in you. If you could imagine yourself doing it then you could execute it, with little to no practice any action will be hit precisely. Swinging the edge between dangerously stupid and purposefully accurate. All while having fun saving the day. Non chalant, amateurish, raw. Talent.

Expressing a new Spidey Sense.  Is what I felt for Spidey when starting on Web of Shadows. That Project was a different team altogether and design was heavily influenced by Capcoms rapid, no I mean, instantaneous feeling for responsive combat. We DMC'ed the heck out of Spidey. This game for me was my master class in responsive player feedback and jubilant character style. Anticipation was the input of the player, impact was the feedback.

Click, pow. Click Pow, Schee-Bap!

We were obsessed with the rhythms of our combat chains. Design would offer me little beat box sessions of what there punches would sound like and I would interpret it with anything I dug up from gymnastics, capoeira, parkour, skating and ballet. Anything that wowed me to the degree of what humans could already do and then plus some.

Example Previz Reel for comparison of Pre-Alpha game footage.

Prior to the SW1313 E3 video reveal....

This Rough Animation Reel was created in  collaboration with Game Designers and Technical Riggers to concept and establish a base line character rig and move set for the then unannounced 3rd person cover shooter SW:1313. Since these were animated early in preproduction, the character designs for the game were not yet defined so the challenge was to work within expected proportions of a typical biped. These hand keyed moves helped the team explore the sense of attitude, agility and flare during visceral combat moments. As production expanded the team later incorporated motion capture and a dynamic blending systems that enabled the animators to infuse realism to our move sets in a timely manner. The game's creative and engineering leadership was always evaluating and evolving our Animation processes to strike a balance between technical limitations and hand authored dynamism in our human movement. Examples of this culmination of mocap, hand-keyed and procedural blending can be found through out the SW1313 E3 video .