Wednesday, 18 June 2014

game trailer Development log P2, M2, D1, D2

click here to see my production schedule

click here to see the characters and backgrounds I have used in my trailer

click here to see my dope sheet

Formats

The format I have chosen to export my game trailer as is FWS. This is the traditional file format that is used in flash. It is a vector format. I have chosen this format as it supports sound. This is important for the trailer because one of the main things that are required to be in our trailer is sound. The style of animation I am using is traditional 2d key framed cell animation. The reason I have chosen this style is because there are certain effects that I want to implement into my trailer that will look better if they are digitally animated. I considered using  

Audience

The target audience for my game is people aged 11 to 65. It is important to consider the age of the audience when developing my game trailer because I do not want to add anything that is inappropriate for the audience that will be viewing my website. The audience affected the final design of my web banner a lot as I had to make sure the style was enjoyable for people of those ages; I also had to make sure there was nothing that would scare the people in my target audience e.g. blood.
 
Below is a list of all the people my game is targeting
· 
  •          English speakers
  •          Students
  •          School children
  •          Potential employers
  •          Lecturers
  •      Teachers

Style

 the style of animation i have chosen is digital animation. i chose this style because it gave me more control over the effects i used. an example of this is the glowing effect i have used for the eye at the end of my animation. because i was using digital animation i could change the opacity of layers. this allowed me to make the eye appear to be glowing. another reason i used digital animation is because it allows me to use layers. this meant i could easily animate a specific object such as the eye without having to redraw a new background for every frame. i considered using cell animation for my trailer. the reason i considered cell animation is because i thought it would be the best way to show the cartoon style that i originally wanted my banner to look like. i also thought it would be very interesting to see what the banner would look like if it was hand drawn on paper. the problem with using cell animation would be that it is difficult to put it on the computer and export it as a format that would be suitable for my website. it would also be very hard to get the same effect in cell animation then i would get using digital animation 

Ideas

Video links
When I was thinking about my initial ideas I did some research into game trailers to get an idea of what they should include. Below are the links to the video trailers I watched
when watching these trailers I noticed that they were all about 40 seconds long. I think this is a good length because it is enough time to tell people about your game without them losing interest . another thing I notices is they all have a very limited amount of gameplay shown.  

Initial ideas

1. Knight walking up to the hydroclops, getting ready to attack (1 2 3)
2. People preparing to attack the hydroclops (2)
3. Camera moving up the hydroclops’ body. (Gives the player a sense of scale) (1 2 3)
4. Arial camera moves around the world showing all the evil creatures causing havoc
5. Animation of all the good creatures turning into the enemies of my game
6. Dwarf drinking ale with happy music playing in the background. There is a crashing noise and the music stops (1 3)

Developed ideas

Once I had finished thinking of all the initial ideas I asked three people which ideas they liked the most. The most popular ideas were 1, 3, and 6. After finding out which ideas were most popular I developed the three most popular ideas
1.       The animation starts off in a first person view from the perspective of the knight. The knight will slowly walk up to the hydroclops. As the person gets closer the view will slowly aim towards the hydroclops, slowly moving up his body. every few seconds the view will change to an image of evil sheep. Every time the view changes the sheep will get closer and by the time the view has reached the hydroclops the view will change to a close up of a sheep and the trailer will end with the words killer hydroclops

2.       This will be a basic animation. It will start at the hydroclops feet and will slowly move all the way up to his head. When it reaches his head the hydroclops will roar and it will change to the name of my game

3.       This will start in a tavern looking at the dwarven knight. The knight will be laughing and drinking ale. The music in the tavern will be cheerful and there will be sounds of people laughing. A few seconds into the trailer there will be a loud roar and the music will stop. The screen will go black and there will be crashing sounds. As the crashing sounds go on the name of my game will slowly fade in

    story boards

click here to see my first story board

click here to see my second story board
 
click here to see my animation layout
1, 2, 3, 4

software

i used three different pieces of software to make my animation. Photoshop, flash and sound booth. i used Photoshop to create certain effects such as the glowing effect i used on the eye at the end of my animation. the reason i used Photoshop for this is because it had a large amount of different tools that i could use to get the effect that i wanted. i considered using gimp because it was free and had a large amount of tutorials online, however i decided to use Photoshop because i had more experience with the software and found it gave me a  better effect compared to gimp. i used flash to create the over all animation. the reason i used flash is because it used vector graphics which helped to emphasize the cartoon style of my animation. i considered using visual effects instead of flash because it had a large amount of tools. however, i did not feel like i could get the same cartoon effect that i could get when using flash.





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