This is a weird week, in so many ways.
Christmas is behind us and New Year’s looms. Some of the staff are off on a well-deserved vacation for the interim, but some of us just cannot stay away.
I mentioned last week that we break down our usual tasks into two-week “sprints.” We called an audible this week and chose to invent a special one-week sprint, just for this weird week. Our awesome producer, Alissa, called it a “Hardening Sprint”. I love the name. I actually kind of picture it like a week for “tempering,” when the blacksmith hardens the metal by heating it and quenching it, and then heating it again.
Rather than attempt to add a bunch of new features or keep building things into the game in anticipation of the next update, we spent the week nailing down the corners, polishing off the burrs, and ironing out the wrinkles…I am sure I could keep mixing this metaphor if I tried, but I’ll spare you because I am a merciful soul.
I was invited to sit in on a great “Hardening” meeting this week. We sure hope you have been having fun with the “Peak Zombie” Rhythm Challenge that we recently added to the game. We are super proud of it and think it is a joy to play. However, there are still a few details in it that are not quite what we imagined.
One weird problem was the way Vironica, the virtual partner and dance leader for the challenge, fails to howl, at least, fails to howl the way we want. There is a great moment in the dance where the player is invited to howl at the moon like the dance monster we hope they are, and Vironica…just…kind of…stares. We all appreciate how attentive Vironica is to the player. We are glad her first instinct is to watch closely and make the player feel like they are the center of her attention, but we think this is a fine moment for her to throw her head back and let out her primal side.
It turns out the tool that translates the choreography into poses for her was so focused on what she should be doing with her hands, hips, legs, and feet that it failed to capture that joyous, primal “throw her head back and howl” moment. Fortunately, we already have a tool, developed in-house, to address this problem. Aptly and simply called the “Gaze Controller,” it is a little tool we can turn on and off at certain moments in order to fine-tune the virtual character’s head movements. We just need to get in there and use it to give Vironica her chance to howl.
This is a great example of what we are doing this week for our weird little one-week Hardening Sprint. To all those reading, I want to wish you an ever-so-slightly belated Merry Christmas, an ever-so-slightly early Happy New Year, and, as always, invite you to listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!
