Went to Annecy this year with some look dev. for a short film Im planning on doing. I enetered a competition called Call for Entries and lost miserably against a lot of the (fasr) superior European entries but it was a fantastic learning experience ,especially the sessions where the producers and broadcast channel executives discussed the work.High point of the trip was meeting up with Henry Selick and the Mary and Max crew,really learnt a lot from all the people there and twice as determined to actually finish off said short film. Here is a sneak peek at some of the work Ive been doing on this..
Ive been trying for the last 6 months to setup a unique look and feel for the world we're creating in Legend Of Katha. Our animation artists use these as a base for doing the in-game animations, game guide and cinematics.Hopefully we have succeeded in giving each race a fairly distinct look with very Indian overtones.The whole team is now working on converting these designs into a 3d medium ,hopefully we wont lose that 2d look and feel.
Im designing a 2d side scroller as a minigame within Legend OF Katha and here are the concept sketches for the look and feel of the BGs.Adarsh , who is our BG painter also added some lovely forms in the background to fade out the screens and give them some depth.We aim to add lava and sparks later to show that you're in the depths where the game takes place.
Ill add some screen grabs as we go along, as the programmer is making some pretty fast progress on the game itself...
We've been working on stealth mode for the last one year on Legend Of Katha here in the Bangalore studio and are finally in beta.Its been a hard slog but worth it as we have a product that we're quite proud of and which we've shed a lot of blood,sweat and tears on.For me personally,its been a great ride as we established the Bangalore studio to build this game and we have delivered.
So,please check out www.legendofkatha.com
Its a free2play browser based game which requires no download or installation to play and has a pretty decent gameplay and feature set.It gives a RPG kind of feel within a massive multiplayer environment.We have achieved several significant breakthroughs over the last year,which include:
1>Custom Game Engine and Toolset which runs on Flash and supports AI,pathfinding ,animation,scripting and load balance (What this means is that we built our own technology from the ground up)
2>Completely Virtualized Backend which runs off Amazon's EC2 and S3 service (This is usually a killer for most companies trying to make vast multiplayer games and we have ported over the entire server and DB/Backup system which would typically require a server farm and masses of tech support over to a "cloud")
3>One year dev. time for the first beta ,which alos included hiring, building out a new office and establishing our first B2b deal(more to come later).
4>Just getting the damn thing looking good, fun and playable for half an hour and working with an awesome group of very dedicated and talented people to get to this stage.I cant thank my stars enough that Im lucky enough to work with such a great bunch of people everyday.As Im typing this our entire dev. and testing team is in on a Sunday tweaking the gameplay for our first quest "just so" , for a publisher demo.
5>We got about 4500 registrations within three weeks of our launch and no Class A bugs!Kudos to the dev. team for pulling that off and Ive heard nothing but nice things about the art from the community so far..
So, Legend of Katha is on its way and Ill post a lot of screenshots,videos and dev. work which we did over the last year to give people an idea of what we've achieved over the last year.Here's a brief one to whet your appetite:
A director is usually a jack of all trades and if you pin down their role in a production, it is mainly to conceptualize the film and then guide the team with appropriate direction so that the idea is executed in like with the original concept. In the trenches it can boil down to "change that color". "improve that arc" or whilst working with the music composer to "speed up the tempo here" etc. In animation, an animatic is the main way for the director to control the final look and feel.Usually its a moving storyboard cut together with a scratch track to guide the various animators who are working on the production.As you can see the final film sometimes comes out quite different from the animatic. Things do chnage along the way, and the difference between the animatic and the final version often shows you how the film has evolved during production.These two clips were harder to do as the final execution happened in Bombay and we were very crunched for time.Anyways, take a look and judge both of them for yourself...
Had a great weekend getaway with family at Mysore.We drove down and of course thanks to my 3 yr. old daughter spent a lot of time at the Mysore Zoo. Its a really nice zoo and we had a great time looking at all the different lions, tigers, giraffes, tapirs,rhinos... Did some random sketching there until I was called back to fatherly duties by daughter who insisted on seeing the "GEERAFFES" with me.
