Junior and Senior animator GET

Hey there, San-Fans!
The team of Out of Line at Nerd Monkeys is now on it's third month of remote work from home.
It took us a while to get organized but we quickly turned it around and managed to speed up and scale production while keeping everyone safe at home.

It was back in March, that Inês Pereira joined us exactly on the week that we moved out of the office and into the safety of our homes. It was an odd position to be in as for a Junior Animator. At the time, the idea was to guide her and help her as much as possible to integrate into the team and the animation pipeline alongside a Senior Animator. Of course that quickly proved to be impossible as we hastily packed our computers and moved into improvised offices at our homes.

Fortunately for us, Inês has proven to be a true professional, not only with her art but also with her commitment and that in turn allowed us to feel confident in giving her more complex tasks and animations and it shows.

Here's what she has to say about herself (we kept her words and made no corrections):

"Hello! My name is Inês and I'm your local Junior Animator! It hasn't even been a year since I left college so this is still baby's first experience when it comes to the real world. It's way more responsibility but also way more rewarding! Besides your typical school assignments, Out of Line is the first project I'm part of. I'm from Almada, but attended high school in Lisbon and college in Portalegre. I've been pretty sure I wanted to be an animator since middle school, and I've been following that path ever since. Whether it was film & TV or games wasn't a choice I was focused on making: I just really wanted to animate. I tend to think of animation as very close to acting, as we are technically acting through our animations. I think that's part of the reason why I love this area so much! I'm a big theater nerd (specially musical theater) and like with acting, I think each animator brings a new version and new life to each character they do and I just think that's really cool. Plus I really like drawing, so these two combined made me end up here. From here on out, my focus is learning and improving as much as I can. That's my main goal! I don't have much else set in stone as of yet, as I'm mostly seeing where life takes me (ugh this sounds awfully hippie, I know). Still, you're not getting rid of me that easily! I still got a lot to show and a lot of work to do, so hopefully you'll see me a bunch around here! See you soon, Inês"

Inês Pereira working on a Cutscene for Out of Line using the Spine software

Meanwhile, and considering the amount of animations that were planned to go into the game, a Senior Animator was already planned to enter the team. We just didn't expect it to be doing it all so... remotely.

An ad was placed on Nerd Monkeys Facebook on the 31st of March, seeking for a Senior Animator. Alongside other personal contacts a few dozens of emails were received from Portuguese professionals here in Portugal and abroad applying for the position. We were super happy to so many young professionals with great portfolios, which in turn made our job that much harder in picking someone that would be the right one.

After doing all the interviews for the potential candidates alongside a few tests, one final person was chosen and, fortunately for us, he accepted our offer.

João Vasco Leal started working as a Senior Animator for Nerd Monkeys, directly from his home in London on the 22nd of April. Being a seasoned professional working as an animator he immediately started working with our characters and rigs and in a few days he was turning over complete and finished animations. Awesome.
 
 Here's what he has to say about himself (we kept his words and made no corrections):

"As a kid he was a big fan of comics, video games and cartoons, nowadays... not much has changed!
With quite a few years of experience both in Portugal and in the UK, he was able to amass a wide number of diverse projects that include childrens illustration, animation for music videos, commercials, video games, VR experiences, amongst others.
He brings with him his passion for entertainment arts and pop culture and that is reflected in his work."

João Vasco Leal working remotely with the Out of Line team

Both Inês and João are using Esoteric Software's Spine animation package to create the in-game character animations and cutscenes, but this you already know since we already covered it in a previous post ;)

You can follow João's work here.

That's it for now. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
And stay safe!

Understand, rubber band?

It's the little things

Here's a secret,
Inside the world of Out of Line, there are little bugs that roam around the factory. These bugs live their own happy lives doing the things they like to do more, like eat, sleep and play.
But when San comes along, they see in him someone who they can play with, someone they can have fun and maybe even help.

Bugs in Spine, from Esoteric Software

 "And there they were, in a pack of three, strutting along the grass and moss that grew over the years on top of all the machinery. As San watched them move out of the cave in the ground they were hiding in, they stopped and watched back. Silence. Both the creatures and San stood still for a moment, like two cats trying to predict each others movements. San took the first step and they did the same, even if was not just one step as their tiny feet and legs needed to take 4 or 5 steps to match him. A few more steps and some more mimicking and, after a while, San and the little things were hoping and moving about as if they had been friends for a very long time.
For a moment, San forgot where he was and the danger he was in and happiness filled the air."

Simulating AI and cooperative gameplay

For the bugs to work properly, it was first necessary to design around them. Artificial Intelligence is still a long way to become what people think it will become, so every videogame uses just a rudimentary form of AI for basic actions, functions or sometime just even simple scripts that make it look like the character has real life.

A section of one of Out of Line's level

The little bugs following San around

In Out of Line our AI is just that, chained scripts that perform counter to what the player does. They wait for triggers, delays, changes and other small things that the player does and then react accordingly. This allows us to design some cool and interesting puzzles based around the "intelligent" bugs that help out San.

Until next time,
Snug as a bug in a rug with a mug!

Character animations

Hi there, Out of Line followers!
So much stuff to talk about!...and ...PRESS START!

Character Animation
If you are a fan (which we know you are... yes, YOU), you've noticed the way San moves has changed a lot since production started. He now moves STYLISHLY :)

San running in Unity engine

The reason for this is that we decided to completely revamp the way we animate our characters.
Our previous prototypes were made with frame-by-frame animations. This looked cool enough but presented a lot of challenges and limitations. It took a long time to animate, changing something was very painful as it meant redoing entire animations, we were limited to what type of interactions we could do, yada, yada, yada, the list is LONG!

So we decided to change to a 2D skeleton type of animation. We know a lot of games have been doing this now for some time, but it only became obvious this way was the way to go after we did it. This is a typical thing in videogame development, try things, they don't work as intended, try new things and so on. Keep doing this until you get it right.

The new animation system has a lot of advantages
- Easier to animate, create new animations, change them, etc.
- Animation is always dynamic and fluid since it is all skeleton based
- We can have IK for San's legs. This allows him to stand correctly in tilted terrain, respond to platform movements and even stand on his own spear!

Doesn't have
- A cool looking old school animation style
- More control over stretch and squash

Frame by frame

Skeleton based

Status of development
Overall work is going nicely, lot's of new things to talk about in the upcoming weeks and months.
The PlayStation 4 build is looking steady and stable and the team keeps working hard.
Expect some details on a new cool mechanic on our next blog post!

That's it!
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter!
See you later, alligator!