TSL Updates!

[GrahamRocks!]

And here I was getting worried that you were taking their word as ultimate gospel.

[Numbers]

Well, if you can't trust perpetually angry people on Metacritic, what can you trust?

[Shalkar]

Hi. Haven't been here in a while? Any news on chapter 5?

[Numbers]

It's coming out this year.

Hopefully.

[GrahamRocks!]

I'm a pretty patient person, but still... *crosses fingers*

[dubird]

It's coming out this year.

Hopefully.

*knocks on wood*

I really hope so.  I really want to finish the game, bit frustrating it's been such a long delay.

[Shalkar]

They don't care

[Numbers]

Yep. That's it. You hear that, TSL fans? The reason that POStudios has put almost two decade's worth of blood, sweat and tears into this project and are delaying the final episode so that it matches their standards of quality so you're not disappointed in the end product? It's because they, in Shalkar's wise words, "don't care."

Cry me a river.

[Haseth]

bump

[Chrury]

I can get behind that bump.

We've been lucky enough to have some familiar faces back to help us out recently.

We have been meeting weekly if not twice a week. In particular, we've been going over the various puzzles. Some have been simplified, some have some new steps, some are spiders now ( ) , but overall it's feeling tighter.

Bugfixing never truly stops. >_> Minor things here and there in between some of the larger puzzle work.

We have a motion capture system; had we mentioned that before? It's pretty sweet.
We're going to use it to get through some "characters standing and talking" bits as well as our pair of LONG storyboarded sections. I'm a good animator but I'm SO glad we don't have to do everything by hand. We're planning our first proper mo-cap session within a couple weeks.

We're also looking into some Unity upgrade stuffs. We have a lot more experience with dynamic loading and such so the load times in TSL5 should be smooth as a silk scarf.

Stuff is happening guys!

[calmlunatic]

Thanks for the update! It's much appreciated. Cheers!

[Numbers]

"Some are spiders now"



On a more serious note, what I'm hearing concerns me. If you're just barely getting started on animations, it seems very unlikely that the game will be ready to come out this year like we were promised. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, I'm sure you're doing the best you can, but this seems off to me.

[GrahamRocks!]

Why use motion capture?

[Chrury]

On a more serious note, what I'm hearing concerns me. If you're just barely getting started on animations, it seems very unlikely that the game will be ready to come out this year like we were promised. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, I'm sure you're doing the best you can, but this seems off to me.

Why use motion capture?

Ah, let me clarify.
Outside of some tweaks and polish; we have animations in for all of the regular game actions. So pick up item, use item, die in a funny way, those are all in there. We also have a small library of talking and additive animations for conversations between characters.

We're using motion capture for key acting moments and action set-pieces. There's only a few of those combined BUT each is significantly more complex than the animation we've done so far. We could do it all by hand but we're talking multiple minutes of animation with multiple characters at the same time.

Mocap lets us get long or complex motions into animation really quickly. And our system is neat in that we can use a VR headset to put an actor into our virtual sets, record one character, then have them act against their previous performance as another character. This will save literal months of production time.

Hope that clears up why we're using motion capture at this point in development.

[Numbers]

All right, sounds good. I was worried for a second there, but it sounds like the quality of the character animations is going to go through the roof for this episode, which I'm all for. Thanks for clarifying.

[waltzdancing]

Woohoo. Sounds like this episode is going to be brilliant.   

[Shalkar]

Don't believe anything until I see proof. 

[Numbers]

Whoa, sh*t's getting real. The angry emoticons have come out to play.

[Rock Knight]

Spoiler (mouse over to reveal):

Please don't kill off Graham like TOG's KQ did.

[Numbers]

On that note, there's no way TSL Episode 5 can possibly be worse than TOG's shallow cash grab of a reboot. TOG's Chapter 5 was the most false and emotionally manipulative thing I've seen since The Fault in Our Stars. How do you write something that hollow and superficial and not feel embarrassed about it?