Making fish, but Flash on Hold

I've made a lot of head way on Manatee Quest over the past week, but I haven't had access to Flash to work on the shootorial game that I started a couple of weeks ago.  The fish have several behaviors implemented, as I can currently make them swim in circles and spirals, stare at the player, and chase after the player.  However, I hope to create a chase behavior much more refined than my current one, so that I can have the fish follow behind the manatee but not get too close or have them bump into each other.

Also, Ive been going through some websites for my Story, Sound, and Motion class, and I think this one is really cool: www.wefeelfine.org.  It tracks occurrences of the phrase "I feel" in recent blog posts around the world, and can really be interesting.

Manatee Quest: Latest Build

So I just got back from some awesome snowboarding and some ridiculous winter storms.  The snow was plentiful up in the glorious state of Michigan and it was great for boarding, but it was a pain to drive through.  Now that I'm home in Indiana, an ice storm's covered my entire city and the trees are all bent into weird shapes until it warms up again.

Anyways I've finally found the time to put an update out on Manatee Quest's status after concluding my first semester at MSU.

The above screen shot shows a close up to the cabbage I modeled in Maya. I've got a simple rotator script on them right now but I think I might write a script to make them bob up and down for a better effect. I also have a working counter that displays on the game HUD which is visible in the following shots.

Also in this shot is a cube that I hooked a rigid body onto and got Unity's physics engine interacting with the Manatee properly.  This is a result of fiddling with the Manatee's collider because Unity would not allow me to turn it's Character Controller collider sideways.  In the end I'm satisfied with the result, which you can see demonstrated in the final shot.

My shoes might be holier than the Pope

It has been snowing a lot at Michigan State for the past several days.  Which is great because I love snow (and snowboarding), but the first snow is also a learning experience.  The kind of learning experience where you get know which one of your shoes has more holes in it.  For me, the answer is the right one, with several small holes in the sole by the heel, the cold icy slush flows into my foot and makes it go numb when I'm walking between classes.  I think I'm going to have to invest in a new set of shoes.

The good news is that I started scripting my character controller for Manatee Quest and I've managed to get the manatee moving how I want it to except for a couple of tweaks I'm going to finish off before I go on Thanksgiving break.  Hopefully in the two weeks before Christmas break I'll be able to implement a good camera script and integrate some animation.

Manatees in the workplace!

So I have a few minutes in between work and my first class, so I decided to upload a couple of shots of the manatee model I've been working on.  It's a pretty basic model, but it's also my first.  If the game actually turns out nicely I can always go back in and redo certain assets when I'm better at Maya or know an artist willing to help out.  Furthermore, I found out that at Sea World they feed their manatees a variety of vegetation including lettuce, spinach, and cabbage.  So I guess I could have cabbage collection as a component of my game and not give false impressions of what manatees eat.  However, the jellyfish idea definitely isn't realistic because manatees have no natural predators.

If you notice in the picture above, I got the skin attached to the bones, which means that I can move my model now.  Hopefully I'll be able to post a clip of some animations next week.  Right before I posted this I was watching manatee videos so I could have a better sense of how they naturally move, which roughly equates into me loving my job.

Manatees!

As one might guess by the title I gave my blog, I am quite fond of a marine mammal known as the manatee. I currently work in Michigan State University's GEL Lab, where I help make video games. My boss is having me do an independent project so I can learn how to use Unity and Autodesk Maya. I'm a little overwhelmed with the fact that I'm diving into 3d game development in my first semester of college, but at the same time its exciting that I'm getting paid to learn tools I probably wouldn't get to learn until a lot later in college.

Anyways, my independent project is currently a game that I have currently titled "Manatee Quest." I have a simple 3d model done in Maya with a basic bone structure, although I haven't added any IKs yet. I plan to have the player swim the manatee around an aquatic environment and collect cabbages and other goodies. I'm contemplating having jellyfish as enemies, but that wouldn't be very realistic (then again neither would cabbages).

With regards to being realistic, I'm also contemplating adding some tangential learning features. I originally had a different game concept floating around in my head after James Portnow gave an awesome presentation at the 2008 Meaningful Play conference. That idea is getting saved for later and I started on my manatee project without even realizing how easy it would be to implement some efficient tangential learning about my favorite animal.

I'll try to post my game on this blog when its completed, which might be a while, and it might not be any fun (so don't hold your breath). This whole blog entry about manatees was inspired by my adventures on the internet last night when I discovered this gem in the Mongoloids online store: