How can you say you love her if you can't even eat her poop?

Fulmination Post Mortem
A preposterous journey into preposterousness



What went wrong?

The only real hurdle for creating the characters and art assets for Fulmination was the animations for the cannibalistic Easter Island heads. The root pose was supposed to be just the characters head sitting on the ground. This was especially important for the premise of the game. The character’s walk cycle worked very well in Show Tools Pro but refused to work in the game engine. I’m not entirely sure why but I would bet the blame rests on the fact that I wanted the character to sink through the ground up to his chin whenever not moving. This animation worked well enough but the character was supposed to rise up out of the ground whenever moving and it just refused to actually play the run animation which I would think would cause the character to rise up out of the ground and run.

A minor glitch in the game, that I wouldn’t really call a problem since we probably could have figured it out eventually, was the fact that torque seemed to ignore the mountpoint on the gun. The engine recognized the mount0 point on the character but then seemed to use the bottom center of the bounding box on the gun model to align to the mount0 point.

What went right?

I was worried that the shape of the rocket propelled chainsaw would lead people to believe that it was something else. Or they wouldn’t know what it was all together. But every single person that saw it, even before it was textured or fully modeled, knew exactly what it was. Sweet.

The art of all the game assets went well with all the other assets. Nothing seemed to stand out from the rest. I wanted a silly cartoony look for the game since that was something I hadn’t attempted before.

The rocket propelled chainsaw and launcher were epic. This was a bonus.

What I learned?

I’m not sure why I didn’t grasp exporting .dts and .dsq files the first time I learned them but now I’m pretty sure I could do it in my sleep. Torque doesn’t always cooperate with you even if you’ve done everything correctly and I’ve learned some workarounds for when Torque decides it doesn’t want to play nice.

I also think I’m nearing a point where I could say I’m a decent texturer. I’ve learned about the joys of using the skylight to create a cheap but very effective shadow map that creates shadows as if the world was evenly light on all sides. I used to try and use omni lights with a LOT of tweaking but that always left weird shadows on the character that would have to be fixed in photoshop.

Also render to texture is my new friend. It’s great for slapping a base color onto a model and rendering a texture. This creates a perfectly seamless base color around the model and giving you a nice head start on creating a texture without the problem of trying to line things up.

And one more thing, pelting sucks, relaxing is awesome.