Development Diary #2: First Steps

Stephen Fry had a TV-show on a while back called Planet Word, in one episode he met a computational linguist who tried to teach his son Klingon as his first language, the kid made pretty impressive progress right up to the point he realized he could, effectively, only use it to communicate with his dad, after that he completely lost interest. It makes sense, I guess, if you can’t see how what you’re learning is immediately benefiting you it makes it so much more difficult to stick with…

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Development Diary #1: Introduction

After an unexpectedly busy year of freelancing I’ve scraped together some reserves, cleared a few months in the calendar and I’m finally making a start on a project I’ve been thinking about since I finished college: a point and click adventure game. I thought it might be a good plan to record some thoughts along the way, mainly in the hope that some of the ideas I have floating around my head can be pinned down by putting them into words, but I’m also trying to cajole myself into setting and sticking to some kind of schedule and thought keeping a diary might help with that too. There’s always the outlying chance someone else might find some of it vaguely interesting as well I guess, who knows? Let the waffling commence…

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Simple page-turn setup in Softimage…

I recently had to come up with a basic system for animating the pages of a book for a commercial, it didn’t need to do anything especially fancy, just something that wouldn’t explode if I needed to scale the whole model. In the end I went with a CrvDeform with some straightforward controls, pretty basic to be sure, but this method has since come in handy for a number of other things so I thought I’d share…

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