Robert Bailey, the producer. is holding the interview as usual. New interviews should go up roughly once a week, cycling through the different members. Next week's will be slightly delayed due to GDC, probably showing up on Monday or Tuesday.
Audio:
Transcript:
As stated above, these will pop up about once a week, as the developers are available.
[RB] My name is Robert Bailey, and I'm the head producer-slash-designer of the VRoom Project from Falling Tricycle Games, and I'm here today with one of the people from the art team, the animator. Do you want to introduce yourself?
[LH] I'm Luke Hedrick. I do all the animation and rigging for the project. Right now I'm working with the car to get the doors rigged and animated.
[LH] Uh...what technically got me into games was probably around 1999, when my sister had her little handheld Game Boy, and then my Grandmother got her one of the smaller ones - not the color!
But the one that was just smaller than the brick - so I got the brick! And then I got all of her games that she didn't play, and I was like "this is pretty great"!
[RB] So of all the games you've played, do any stand out as your favorite?
[LH] Any of the Pokemon games, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, umm... [laughs[
[RB] So bringing it back to work-type elements, what type of projects have you done in the past?
[LH] I'm currently working on a whole bunch of rigs for some side projects. I've worked on - the very first project I've worked on was a DoodleJump-type game, called SparkleGore. It's not fun, but it looks cute. I've worked on Captain of the Stars with you and...
[RB] That was a fun board game.
[LH] Yeah, best part was slowly learning how to take advantage of some of the rules.
[RB] Yeah, well analogue board game rules. They're obnoxious. What about other projects?
[LH] Uh, mostly I'm doing a whole bunch of rigging. Technically I did work on trying to make my own game engine - it's not great, and I don't like it. But it was pretty decent at letting me do animation on the fly.
[RB] That's fun, was that part of Data Structures and Algorithms?
[LH] Yeah, it was that one. I had some other stuff I worked on past of DSA.
[RB] Cool. So what do you want to do after getting your degree?
[LH] Get a job in the game industry, and you know, be able to get paid. Personally, I would really like to get a job as an animator or rigger. Obviously, I'd rather be an animator than a rigger, because I like the whole "playing with the model," and getting it to be more personable. But at the same time, a lot of people can animate. If I get a job as a rigger, that's good to. A lot of people don't really like rigging which, it's tedious, you have to do it two or three times before you have a correct rig, but I like it.
[RB] What about it do you like?
[LH] It's the idea that you're taking a random action figure and making it so that it has joints and be able to move, and take something static and turn it into something dynamic. And have it be able to become something with personality.
[RB] So a "bringing it to life" element?
[LH] I like the idea of taking something dead and bringing it back to where you can do stuff with it.
[RB] That explains the Undead team choice in the Blood Bowl League.
[LH] Hey [both laugh] that's a solid choice!
[RB] so you mentioned you're working on rigging car doors and stuff, have you done other things on the VRoom project?
[LH] I helped the code team a little bit a while back for thinking how to handle different stuff. I've been working on making small little assets, like a gas canister. I'm currently working on - outside of getting the car done, the rig for that done - I've been working on making a water cooler type thing. Kind of, if you were a scavenger and had a giant jug that you'd fill with water to bring back.
[RB] Okay, for the player character to bring that back in the game and have it in the car.
[LH] Yeah, that was something you wanted in there.
[RB] How are you creating those?
[LH] Maya, 2016.
[RB] Okay, so it's not just the rigging and animating, but also the 3D modelling that you can do.
[LH] I can model, but I wouldn't say I model well. But I do understand everything about modelling. I'ts just a talent I have not currently acquired.
[RB] Okay, what got you interested in the project?
[LH] Mostly it was just you came up to me and were like "I have this idea for a game - remember the opening part of Mad Max?" And I'm like, yeah that was pretty cool. And you were like "We're going to make that a game!" And I go, oh that sounds great, it's going to be great. And then you go "In VR!" And I was like this is going to be hard, but it'll look really good. [Both laugh] So basically, the elevator pitch got me hooked into it.
[RB] It was a solid elevator pitch.
[LH] Yeah [laughs]
[RB] So...I'm trying to cut down on the word so, and half of them start with the word so. so...
[LH] You just added another one!
[RB] I know, it's awful! [Pauses]
[LH] [Laughs]
[RB] What are you looking forward to with the project, moving forward?
[LH] Moving forward...I'm looking forward to seeing how basically the entirety comes together. But I really want to see when I get a hold of the AI character's model and get all that rigged up and get that animated and everything. I really want to see how Jay gets that setup and gets that able to fight you and how it looks when moving around trying to move it's car and all that stuff.
[RB] Yeah. That would essentially be a driver model right?
[LH] I mean if you want it to not to be human, give me concept art.
[RB] That's Alia's job. Do you really want to try and rig up a quadrapod with like six arms?
[LH] You should see one of the models I'm having to do. It's half human, half spider.
[RB] That would also give Jay an aneurysm, or whatever word. "Okay, now you have to write AI that drives the car and moves it, but also looks decent while doing it. And it only has 2 hands and can only do so many things. And now it has 12." I don't really feel like doing that, so we're going to probably stick with the human if that's okay with you. [Luke laughs]. Anything standing out to you on the project, in a positive or negative light?
[LH] Positive light: definitely that we're a lot further along than I thought we would be at this point. There is a car, you can sit in the car, and you can drive around in circles and everything. The only thing I'm concerned about is Jay's light-speed abomination of an enemy.
[RB] It's moving so fast that it's teleporting around. We [Correction: Jay and John F] patched that actually this weekend. So that should be stable - it shouldn't teleport around the car faster than the framerate.
[LH] You'd end up looking and just seeing a car going in circles faster than you can believe.
[RB] I think you left, but after the big team meeting on Friday, I was sitting - I put on the VR and I was sitting in the car. And we turned on the enemy. And we rebooted it, turned on the enemy. I'm like "where is it?" "Look behind you." And it's in a 30 degree angle in my trunk.
[LH] I saw that
[RB] But yeah, that actually is just getting refined. Jay pushed that patch on Friday, so that's much more stable, the car is no longer speed racer.
[LH] Huh.
[RB] What are you anticipating to be a problem on the project? Beyond the light-speed enemy car - beyond what we have now, moving into the rest of the project.
[LH] On a personal part - if the AI enemy has a gun, and they point at your car - getting it to point at your car correctly so it looks like it's aiming will probably be a little difficult.
[RB] Oh
[LH] Considering the fact that we might have to have the shooting arm be separate from everything else and all that stuff, because it will have to dynamically find where your car is. So...
[RB] So that would be a model on it's own separate component being manipulated code to effectively animate between two states - so we'd need a Maya animation [to raise it] and then code to get the angle [to aim].
[LH] Yep.
[RB] Well there's a bridge. We'll cross it when we get to it - but that's why we have 10 more weeks of work to plan that out and make sure it behaves. Technically, we should be hitting MVP this Friday.
[LH] Yeah, but those chairs mess you up.When you hit the chairs and it rolls you immediately, and you go "help! help!"
[RB] As a form of context, we're using the basic chairs from the Unreal scene in stage for rocks or stuff right now to make sure we can test object collision, and you just go spiraling off into space.
[LH] It's like Astroneers. [Pauses] I love that game.
[RB] Just add in a skybox to make it more disorienting. So any other thoughts with the VRoom project?
[LH] It looks like we're heading down the right path, and that we should have everything to be a nice portfolio piece and a good project.
[RB] Yeah! So that wraps up the interview with Luke Hedrick, the animator on the VRoom project from Falling Tricycle Games. So yeah, there will be one of these - it'll probably be a couple days later next week, because myself and another dev member are going to GDC [Game Developers Conference]. And that delays a couple of the interviews. But there should be a post coming up over the next few days with another development post. and another one by the end of this week about the next state of the game. So with that being the state of the interview, any parting thoughts Luke?
[LH] I really like Astroneers [laughs].
[RB] I guess that's a recommendation. Okay, thanks for your time.
No comments:
Post a Comment