Taffu’s Tale is a 3D adventure platformer, I was design lead on this project and it was my first big project where I was design lead. I loved managing my team, getting deeply involved with the design process and helping out where I could; Level design, Coding, Sound design. We had 7 weeks to come up with a concept and implement it. The team consisted of 7 people: 3 Artists, 2 Game Designers and 2 Developers. The scope was very big and the pressure was on. But in the end I think we managed to create a really cool game.
Rigging & Mocap
The game contained 3 non-humanoid “Monsters” that needed animations. However we didn’t have the time to animated them by hand. We knew this from the start and (somewhat foolishly) banked on using the BlackBox (Room set up OptiTrack we have at our school) to mocap animations. I was tasked with rigging the models and figuring out how to apply the mocap data onto them. After doing some asking around I found out that they can only really do humanoid motion capture in the BlackBox. I thought about it for a while and figured our models were close enough that I could apply a humanoid rig onto them and with proper direction during the mocap stage it could work. At least well enough. So I set out rigging.
After all the rigging was done it was time to suit up and get my friend (one of our devs) in to the BlackBox. We spend 1 day doing all the mocap for the game. We did roughly 30 animations with multiple takes of each. It was a long day. But once we applied our first animation on one of the rigs we were ecstatic because it actually seemed to work fairly well. We just needed to tweak our stance and behavior a bit.