Lights! Camera! Action!

The name of the game this week is cinematics. Crucial in an action platformer story-driven game. I knew since the beginning I wanted to have cutscenes but would I have enough time to implement them? How else can you really get a feel for what the character is going through? It was a little different than I expected to be honest.

When I worked on The Elemental Palace months back I was in charge of making the games opening and closing cutscenes. It was a really cool experience because I got to be creative. Most of the game I worked away at the code trying to make everything as robust as possible but here I was making cutscenes. How cool! This was the first time I’d ever done anything like that. I have to say though it seems like Unity was easier to work with. I could use a mesh, and move and rotate any bones in a mesh based on keyframes. I’m not saying that Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t have extremely powerful cinematic tools. I’m simply stating that simply playing around I found Unity to be an easier interface.

That being said I am really happy with the look of these cinematics. Just like the game itself the cinematics have a professional quality to them unlike Unity and I’m doing just fine using the interface. Because of time issues there are some hacky ways I’m doing things… Like including multiple Sid’s in the scene to get the right angles, or reusing combat animations and simply orienting Sid so he looks like he is using a tool of some kind.

For example in the opening cutscene one animation I have for Sid is him holding a pistol. Well I simply used that animation to make him look like he was opening a box. I thought it was pretty clever and once the cutscenes are done I’ll remove the additional actors and objects and play-test the game a hundred times to make sure I didn’t leave a weird stray camera behind or worse… an extra Sid!

This is the exciting part. I’m only a week away from finishing the game and it’s all coming together. I just look at where I started and I’m so happy with the result. My last blog post on the series will probably be a reflection of how the project went. A post-mortem of sorts. But for now, I need to hop back into the directors chair and get these cutscenes made!