Guild Chat - Episode 21

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 21st episode of Guild Chat aired on November 6, 2015.
"Host Rubi Bayer is joined by Creature Artist Ronald Kury and Animator Brian Walter to talk about the design and animation of creatures in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™. Discover the behind the scenes on Stoneheads, Gorseval and Pocket Raptors!"
Transcription[edit]

Below is the raw unformatted transcript from Youtube.
hi guys welcome back to guild chat i'm your host ruby and we have a couple of
new guests on guild chat today we have two
guys who we've not had on before so why don't we jump right in and thank you
guys for joining i really really appreciate it because i
think this is going to be a fun show today
um i'd like you both to start and just let us know who you are and what you do
for the company and you're sitting closest to me so you get
picked on okay uh my name is brian walter i'm an animator here at arenanet
i'm going to make all the creatures and stuff move thank you
uh my name is ronald curry i'm a creature artist
so i make all the monsters that you see running around
awesome and you get to kill and fight and stuff
and be smashed by yeah yeah all right so since we have all of these really cool
new creatures running around the maguma jungle in heart of thorns
i thought we would talk to these guys today and you are now
responsible for representing the entire creature team
no pressure no no this is why i clipped a mic tee so you can't run away
i wanted to talk a little bit about the process of creating these guys because
there's such a huge variety in there but they're all so distinct
that it's kind of neat to talk about so from a layman's term
where do you even begin i mean how do you begin to put
here's some new dinosaurs here in the mordrem here are these mushroom guys
where does the process start well the process actually is a big brainstorm of
a lot of members of different teams we have designers we have concept artists
we have uh creature artists and we try to come up with what the story is
gonna where it's gonna lead us what the new world and environment is going to
be and based on the environments we can we start constructing a creature and a
fauna that lives in it so whatever adapts to the environment
the best is where we go so that's where the mushroom guys come
from because if we have a big jungle and we
want to have something you know kind of related to it i guess
all right so you've got this big brainstorm with all of these teams
coming in and we know we already knew that
mordremoth was a thing we knew where we were going
we knew we were going into the muguma jungle
so do you just start i mean like you mentioned to me earlier that the concept
artists jump in and start they get to play and
they get to have some fun do you start looking and seeing what
appeals and what you think would fit yeah well the concept art is uh luckily
we have one of the best concept artists in the industry i mean they're
incredible so finding inspiration on anything that they do
is just it's just a lucky position in which we're at
they give us indirect concepts they don't necessarily give us
full concepts sometimes they do sometimes they sit around and draw
things for us and we don't take it too hard we look at
what they have and let that inspiration move us in a
specific direction sometimes they'll have elements that we're like oh look at
that that looks incredible uh and sometimes we actually like look
at something that they make and we're like oh that we're just gonna make that
like we're not even going to change it that's just
beautiful this is absolutely perfect but uh yeah it drives the feel of the
game and it drives the feel of the creatures
and that's what we are into a lot like making sure that it feels like the
universe and the world that we're trying to build
not just directly grab from nature it's like i'm going to make a
camel you know like add a little little sense of guild wars into it
camel's not confirmed before we even go there
yeah no camels no we you're not going to find a cam
wait a minute can we have a camel like rampaging through the maguma jungle
because that would amuse me endlessly
just the one and every once in a while you see him coming through
yeah no easter egg basically yes yes exactly uh well the reason i said camel
is because we were looking at uh the doliaks uh oh yeah and
at first when i was trying to figure out what a doliak
uh was because we were trying to make a desert doliak
i was looking at camel references because what is a
what what is the water but it runs in the desert it's uh
i mean camo i knew it i tried to bring some elements of it but it ended up
being much more of like a deer looking animal it's still kind of cool i mean it
looks good i like it all right so we can kind of
actually i'm going to have you check your mic box and make sure it's on
because you're super super quiet or you could
just like shout into our microphones we'll share with you
it's just being very shy maybe that's totally okay
better just talk directly into it
all right but we solved the problem and i'm happy okay great so
all right so generally creating it i i got a little bit of
cheat studying beforehand in general the process can kind of be grouped under
three umbrellas of modeling animation and skills is that
best that's pretty good breaking it down as simple as possible yeah yeah
absolutely this is like trying to break anyone's
job down into yeah we'll just describe it in one word and it's totally fine
so is how linear is the process i mean how much do you have people
finishing one thing and handing it off versus you have all of these teams
working together how much do you balance those two things
well it's always different for each creature like
sometimes ronald will have something that's just
done and it's time to move on to it and sometimes we have a nice back and forth
to be like oh it'd be cool if he could maybe look
this way so that when i animate it it can do this thing
yeah and then he can go back make some adjustments so
it's always kind of a back and forth but you don't always have the time for
complete back and forth so we should have leisure time all the time in the
world nobody really wants to you know nobody's waiting to play with
them yeah yeah so you should probably finish them up at some point
it's actually the opposite we can't wait to play with them like
when we create things uh we sculpt them really quickly we get like a big rough
of the shapes and we automatically want it to be in
game so we like we do this process which is called dynamesh i don't know if you
guys know about z-rush you just kind of reduce all the amount of polygons in a
very very uh algorithmic way uh and you put
it in the game with a you know just a blue model
so you can see it moving and you apply it to a very quick rig and then the
animators can start playing with it and then you get the feeling of what the
pose is going to be and and then you get all the feedback of
like oh let's make the the arms bigger or the legs longer or
you know some stuff doesn't really line up and yeah
well seeing it in action probably makes an enormous difference yeah
um you mentioned riggs and we had talked about that beforehand as far as
and i just really love the description that you gave as far as the puppet and
strings oh yeah so so uh years ago i actually
came up with some explanation for kids that i was
teaching and the way that it's easier easiest to understand uh when it comes
to creatures and characters you have uh if you think about a puppet
the model is the puppet actual physical puppet that
you have somebody that comes and sculpts it and paints it and models and makes it
all pretty the rigger is the one that creates the
strings that connect the puppet and then the
animator is the one that becomes a puppeteer that animates and brings it to
life so that's the different distinction uh
of the three main parts of bringing a character to
life so the animator like has all the power is what i'm hearing here
you're the puppet master yeah basically i get it control what it does
can we change your title to puppet master because in light of everything
i mean it is a digital puppet i mean it is kind of just a sock puppet just in a
computer very fancy sock puppet see how it moves
um so we had talked about the rigging on some of these creatures
you were telling me about the mushroom guys because
this sounds terrible because they have murdered my face so many times
they're ridiculously cute i'm sorry they're adorable
when they are murdering me and that was one where we used a rig we already had
an existence yeah so since we do have making rigs
and all that stuff is a lot of work we try to share when we can
so the mushroom guys are actually on the scri rig
and it allows us to borrow animations and then we can make adjustments and
make them unique for certain attacks and stuff
but it allows you to have a rig already made with animations already
attached to that character and then you get to make unique ones so you have more
time to make more stuff yeah you can if
you've got something that you already have in hand
it just kind of slims down that part of the workload yeah
so what defines what helps you decide okay i already have a rig that i can use
for this thing that i'm building versus we need to create a new one
that's a very tricky it's kind of a big question
so when we started working on uh heart of thorns we had a budget of how
many creatures we wanted and then how many creatures we could do
based on creatures that we already had and
creatures that we could start from scratch meaning you have a new skeleton
and a new rig and a new model and new proportions new animations and it's
a lot of work as you can imagine so we try not to
shoot ourselves in the foot and do stuff if we can expand from that point we do
but uh we like to be much more in line with
what we can do what we know we can do when it's something that's really
different and unique that we know we're going to need something new for it to
really sell the personality of this new creature
that's when we'll usually go about and make a whole new rig and have a whole
new silhouette yeah and a whole new actually that
drives it a lot too like silhouettes in motion if you have
something that is proportionately completely different
from something that you have in the game even though something
might have some of the animations uh if you're adding a lot to it just might
as well make a new rig so what's one that warranted a new rig
am i allowed to ask um yeah i mean the waverings were the
biggest wavering wyvern they're the biggest uh i think it's i
don't know no matter what you say someone's gonna
say that you're wrong so you could just make something up if you wanted
so on the creature team we actually have somebody uh kate shout out
she is uh our encyclopedia living encyclopedia of creatures so whenever
you have any questions regarding the the precedence of
precedence uh english is breaking like the pronunciation
uh well no like where a creature comes from the mythology behind it like she
will come like she will just appear next to you and be
like actually and then she gives you the whole background
it's awesome because we're always learning stuff oh my gosh it's
really really really really really exciting basically yeah all right
so for our purposes we can say wyvern okay yeah we can say wagon go ahead tell
me i'm wrong all right so that one needed a totally
yeah i can't think of anything that's even vaguely shaped like that
yeah we never really had anything in that proportion
or that moved in that way and so it needed a whole new rig and to stand
out as a new addition to the guild wars universe
yeah i think it was totally worth it yeah
an opposite example we have the uh the little cave bats that
run around they're actually using an existing rig which is the
dogleg crawler but we actually had to add animations to it because you know
it's flying and jumping and doing things so that makes it a lot easier because
you can set proportions rather quickly and then just add animations on top too
wow thanks and we get something that looks completely different
this is something that we've been doing a lot that's really cool
so you can work with that foundation that you already have and still
and it's not just yeah it's this thing but now it's blue instead of orange yeah
exactly or like when you look at humanoid
creatures you don't necessarily need to make uh another humanoid like we already
have different scales and proportions for different
like if you grab a male and a female they're just totally different you just
add some animations to it but the proportions the bodily proportions are
just gonna give you what you want that's awesome
all right so do you want to show off what you've been
working on a little bit all right let's start with oh this guy
so this is the stonehead t-rex this is a attack animation i did for him he had a
previous attack that after testing it wasn't really reading how he wanted
so i wanted him to he does this attack and it throws like a
bunch of brush forward and knocks you over and stuff
and so i added in this flip to really sell the idea that it's propelling stuff
forward at the player um and it was just really fun oh yeah
yeah there's a lot of that in the tail that you can see
all right and his his role i we've already talked about how i have a
problem with rolling creatures that completely smashed me flat into the
ground yeah the dino uh roller guy the
arrowhead yeah arrowhead oh my gosh all right so
what's this one um this guy is a boss you'll fight up in the canopy
it's one of the um he does this attack where he gets launched
at you and does these dagger strikes so i'm assuming this is pretty early on
in the process yeah what you're looking at is because
it does look a lot cooler yeah it's the maya production like when
we animate we turn up a lot of things so it's easier for us to to work on it in
real time and so this is just a preview straight preview out of maya so when you
when you do this what are you looking for
what is this helping you with there's just one step and
here's what it looks like and now we're going to make it look prettier yeah
this was kind of yeah just selling the idea of what we were going for
getting a visual representation and seeing if it's something we wanted to go
forward with nice i'm going to look at that one a lot
differently in the future uh this guy yeah and this is another guy
in that fight yeah yeah i did the animations for this
guy where he does these big swings as he walks across the platform knocking you
around and stuff
very cool all right so that's kind of the general animation
how about some more specific guys brain brain bug brain bug yes that is a
horrible name i think i'm trying to reject it
from my mind it was actually a lot of fun to look at being animated because
once you look at the model it's like the solid big
chunk but once it starts to animate you see this
gooey like goopy thing that's just like crawling you're not selling this to me
at all oh my god it's so cool it's so cool i mean all the props to the
animators i mean brian's puppet master puppet mastery is
what brings everything to life well i'm only one of many great puppet masters on
the team so awesome so yeah we do have this we've got this
just big globby guy but the closer you look the
more is going on and i've noticed that a lot of stuff
we're going to look at today
yeah once once you see it in the game and
there's all these effects and animations and you're running around like there's
a lot of little details that you know you don't get to notice but if you stop
and look like they're beautifully animated and they're
they really are it's kind of hard to be able to stop and
look but
yeah especially if it's coming at you if it's coming at you
yeah you know you have time while you're trying to recover from the kd
and just go in there so does he start when you i mean when
you're watching him dig into the ground and everything
how much are you tweaking his animations as you go are you just
okay this looks too stiff this looks like too much of just like a one-piece
blob or d do the bones of the thing allow it
to naturally move this way anyway um yeah i mean that's when we build the
rig we make sure we can move the pieces on the creature we want to move
so like those jelly sacks on his back we make sure
that i can't they have a control there so that we can actually
animate them and get the feeling we want and the grossness
that we may want i have to say you did well
you did very well let's go a little bit bigger let's see who do we have next do
we have i think with dino writer
there we go oh this guy yes
so the dino uh do you know who did this model this was done by marcus jackson oh
it's one of our cool creature artists i love this model
and this was animated by scott dickey most of the dyno writer and
he does some awesome work so this was like when you do enough
damage to him the guy gets knocked off so this is the newer revision we had one
that was in game it wasn't really reading as well it took
a little too long so this he kind of took another stab at it for
the gameplay purposes and came with this quicker just knock the guy off feel
yeah move on so previously you just had he needed to be knocked off when he lost
enough health yeah and it was just taking a bit so you had to slim that
animation down and make it a little bit quicker
so when you were talking about the creation the conception of these
creatures you were asking about how much feedback do we get and how much do we go
back and forth uh that was actually a design decision
because once you started playing um it just took too long for it to on
the first time even though it was awesome we love to have fun and we add
things left and right but some of it has to be sacrificed for
gameplay and the experience is what we're focused on the most
despite of how cool the world can be and all that stuff uh game plays first
yeah so while it might look amazing bigger animations like might look
amazing in the videos well we're just sitting here in our chairs being comfy
and watching them if you have to wait too long for it you
just yeah you don't want to wait too long for it
like two or three we didn't really talk about the
specifics of the time on other bigger animations
but two or three seconds in combat is enormous i mean that's a
big deal and if you're having to sit here and wait
two or three seconds for this guy to do his thing it's time to trim it down yeah
which is sometimes a shame so the interesting thing to me
i'm sorry oh i was just gonna kind of explain what this animation was because
it might look a little weird to people who
um seeing it all choppy so this is kind of a process animation
this is what i first get in i get in the key poses um to sell
what i need them to do and this is an animation for the
the flame variant of the dyno rider where he
uh breathes a fan of flame out to the players and so i just kind of block in
the key poses selling what it needs to do
and then from there you can get the vibe and the feel
and then that allows me to then go in and polish and make it smooth what you
see in game so the thing about the dyno riders that
were was interesting to me is that this is a single creature this
isn't like hey we built this mordrem and then we gave
them mounts this is one thing right yeah i'm sorry guys
why did you you ruined everything oh dude
i didn't catch him falling on his falling on his rider
so for animation purposes essentially this thing is just throwing off a piece
of itself yeah oh wow whose idea was it to have
him fall on the fall on his writer because that's just
insult to injury there yeah that was probably the animator scott dickey's
idea thank you scott i like it the more i
look at it just that is the absolute best oh yeah
so i don't i'm just i'm coming up with things like the more i look at these the
more i'm like you've gotten it down to there's
like this little bounce after he lands because it's a big fleshy
creature and you need to convey that and you've
done it really well if i can gush for like two seconds
and then we'll move on i like it well that's kind of where that planning i
showed comes in handy you get the gist of what you need to do
and then the finer details like that bounce and the settle
that's when you can go in and add that later and polish and really make it
stand out yeah all right can we go bigger
i want to see more bigger things i mean that's pretty it's big two for
one hi kim hey that is
terrifying all right so what is i don't even know where to start how did
you even begin the brighton yeah um so this model was actually a
combination of two character artists this is uh our
lead character artist jim did the body when he worked on vine
tooth and then this version this variant was
done by marcus again margaret jackson and it's it went through some iterations
it was there were so many ideas of how to make
the the the creature convey the personality that we wanted
you know the the female coming at the top
yeah and yeah it was a it was a really awesome
awesome experience watching these guys work on this is pretty awesome
i notice there's it still feels like there's
musculature going on in there like when she rears up
and there's like this little quiver on the back legs before she goes down
it's not just okay here's this thing made out of some sticks that we found
no no no the anime just put a lot of thought and love into these things
and do you do you guys like hacked it out i mean
you guys pretend i'm going oh please some animators do it more than others
but yeah you'll you'll usually see animators at their
desks doing like kind of figuring out a pose or a swing or some
weird acting out i've seen a couple of those past like the corner of my eye
somebody's just like oh yeah that's really cool i am sitting
in the wrong part of the building you guys
seriously because what i initially pictured
was somebody in the hallway doing this doing exactly this
down the hallway like stomping down that'd make me happy if that could
if that could happen
so yeah i'm i'm still going back and looking this is
still a like a live creature and not just a bundle of trees
yeah yeah i mean that goes to the models as well how they really sculpt the
characters to have that muscle definition
that we as animators that need to use to make them move
so i'm reading one of these questions what if the creatures hit on the left
side would the animation be mirrored to better
reflect the impact on the steeling blow sometimes
we we actually do have uh directional impact animations but i don't think we
do that much do we no i mean the biggest ones we have
are like the push back and go forward kind of stuff yeah and
it's because you're usually being hit by every single
side yeah that's what's hard in our game is there's so many players
all attacking one guy so picking up which direction you want
to react when everyone's attacking you it's
tricky so you don't want to break the illusion too much and go into like crazy
pin ping pong ball yeah back and forth in a
tiny space yeah so all these animations are
it's are what it's called canned animations so you have them as it is and
they're presented at the moment where it needs to be played
so when they die they don't go into physics and like
you know ragdoll and they yeah die and they're dead which is cool because
it actually becomes much more personal we can convey a little bit more of the
characters to their death and then they're not just like wet
popping around yeah now okay now we're done fall down
you're finished yeah it takes a little bit more so you
know what i want bigger bigger yeah let's go bigger
stavemaster oh there we go all right tell me about
this one because we've seen it before we had leah
hoyer in here a few weeks back and we talked about the lore behind the
character but now we're seeing how how it works
so uh as i was mentioning earlier um sometimes we get support from concept
sometimes uh we take some ideas and we move with that in mind and do
something else this is the complete opposite this
is based of a drawing by a cardinaline a phenomenal concept artist
uh and this was actually handed to me and i saw the drawing and i was like you
know what there's nothing i need to change from this this is just
beautiful this is just awesome so i try to be as loyal as i could with the model
um i don't know if you can tell the arms that are wrapping around
and hold it's super scary i don't know you people see that in game
uh but like working on it was just so so cool yeah it's it's a thing that i
try to take time to anticipate and look at instead of just rushing in and
beating on things or vice versa or being beaten well sometimes like that
sense of wonder gets over overpowered by the sense of threat yes
it's coming at me a sense of death well this is a
character that ronald and i both worked on together he did the model for it
and then when i got to the animations he kind of told me the story behind the
character and what he was envisioning and there was this creepy character so i
kind of did a bunch of creepy walk cycle and run cycle
and conveyed that through the animation to
match what he had modeled out oh wow and again another one
of those examples of using an existing rig this is using
the female human i think it's a female norn since
it is a larger character yeah so we get to use the
skeleton that is already there but you don't see humans doing that walk
yeah so we get to add all these extra animations on it to convey the character
it sounds it's so much more than just a straight copy paste it's not
okay yeah this is a norn with different skin no
no no there's a lot of work that goes into it
yeah that's not a thing that you've seen from norn
what is that that's her idol animations when
right before she's about to kill you just preparing to come in and murder my
face that's fantastic all right so
i love it but i want more all right i went i went bigger well ask
him bigger yep this is a
working baby oh my my personal oh yeah this is a work in
progress uh early model um the reason why we have this one
is because we wanted to show one of the details that it's not
picked up on as much as the fact that um gorsuch is made of arms it's made of
hands just making the creature so this is you can
tell that the arm has not been touched as much but as you
work your way down you can see the torso and the rib cage is just
arms hugging and so i want to interrupt you to emphasize
gerseval if you don't know gorsuval is a raid boss that we are
bringing in very very soon gorsuval is made of arms well they're recently
the reason why it's made of arms is because it's under the mythology
it's made of the souls of the people that were trapped inside
disclaimer and secrets and whatever so when the souls break free it forms
this creature made of anger and souls and so
i didn't want to make just ghosts and sheets kind of hugging
it kind of had to have that sense of different people coming together so yeah
that's where the idea came from infinitely creepier once i start
realizing there's like all of these arms and hands just
in there so where can we sit where can you see it
best in this particular where should we be looking because there's a lot going
on yeah if you look at the torso you can see all the arms just kind of
hanging around just there it's it's hard to determine that
those are actually hands but yeah they are and they were
fun to work on yeah that was actually a lot of fun i loved it but
it's a lot of work i was going to say did it take so much longer
i mean and you know i mean it's gorseval it's tongue boss guy
i didn't want to make something generic and
you know something that we've seen before another dragon so the reason why
those are you see them being spikey is because
they have physics and in maya their physics are not applied
directly that's in an engine so that animation might look
weird although at the end of physics the physicality of it's pretty
awesome um yeah i didn't want to make something
clean let's put it that way too clean i wanted to have a little bit of a
disturbing you know feel to it uh so yeah
yeah just a random whatever you know sleek and pretty is not going to cut it
for something yeah this big and terrifying so the
the tentacles that flow in the back were actually added
uh as a constraint and we didn't know whether we could do it or not so it was
just me playing around with physics and understanding how all that
stuff worked uh i don't usually play with
riggs but i was lucky enough that i was able to figure some of that stuff out oh
there we go oh now we're talking that's what you'll see
so we have the long tentacles kind of flowing we have the little tentacles i
don't know if you can see they're just little
ones that come off the side yeah they also wobble a lot
and then i was like how can i make this creepier and so
that's how the face turned out to be with gooey tongues just that mostly just
makes me like want a towel to get all of the gorse of all spit off the
top of my head one of the original concepts that i had
when he was just idling i had him with the tongs kind of like
dangling and then the player underneath just staring
up at the times this is going to be so much fun
that's disgusting all right so he's just
arms and tongues and there's almost like the spinal cord look
yeah going on the tentacles have that spinal feel to
it and you can see some of the spine going
back and those those blobs if you come close enough i don't know if we can tell
those are souls yeah we can they're sort of souls uh
swimming inside him we'll have to maybe talk about the lore
behind gorseval at some point in the near future
all right so and teeth this is just all i mean you know we've we've talked a lot
we've joked about gerseval the many tongued but there's a
lot more going on here yeah yeah yeah so how did you you've got like
the big spiny shield bone thing right behind his head
is that just because it looks cool or was there
more there uh it's mostly because it looks because it seems
see i'm going to give you an out now it seems like it could be a good
protective thing for that little it could very well be i mean
a lot of good designs come with uh the physicality and the the
anatomical accuracy of what it's there for what's the purpose of
this sometimes you most times we want to go in that direction sometimes
we just want to make things cool because you know whatever you visually
if something is right but it doesn't look right
it's just not right yeah versus if something
uh is not necessarily right but it looks right
then it just is that's the way we accept reality which is it's interesting that
we work that way um the the head the sign actually came
from jim we actually had some several different iterations of where we
were going and then he came up with that specific head the direction and
we're like oh yeah that looks awesome that
frames the face it frames the character brings attention to the top and so
we're trying to lead the viewer's eye into specific directions so you can see
that the colors kind of fade into where the head is yeah it does it does
draw the eye up that way so we think of art the art of
rather than just plainly the functional side of
yeah and then based on that like animators can
look at the functionality and we'll see that that head
shape and be like oh yeah maybe he could use this
as a shield or a protective thing so the more clearly defined our
creatures are it also helps us make the anime the
creatures move how they should and naturally act like
actual creatures instead of just perhaps sock puppets yeah yeah like the
uh we haven't shown them here but we have
those uh worms what do we call the those good they have the spikes yeah
the more drum breachers yeah the more dramatic like
oh the bridgers yeah so i i actually worked on one of those as well
uh but uh we have them that they have those huge spikes in the front yeah and
that actually drove the animations to have them attack you with those
things so they actually really dig their head into the ground trying to
yeah i know but so i am aware so when when it comes to the sign they
have a a list of animations that they want to do or a list of attacks
that they they want to add but those attacks are not finalized until the
creature is it's done and it's a process that just
keeps going and sometimes we change or we add or whatever it is
sometimes just the model itself will drive what the animation or the attack
itself will be yeah i always say the animators are like
the sandwich they're the middle between the art side
and the design side because you gotta have the gameplay and
the designers want one thing and the artists create this cool thing
and then i have to like look at the art make it work and look at what the design
wants and make it attack how it needs to so all right that
answer is a question i had about how do you mesh all of these things because you
have a certain amount of lore behind certain creatures you have the
way they look and you have all of these skills that
they need to have and that seems like it would you manage to
make it work but i was just looking at everything
that needed to match up and everything that needed to work going i can't
i don't i don't know i don't know yeah where do you start yeah
that's the the where you start is the hard part where do you draw the
inspiration sometimes you let the lord write
inspiration for example creature made of souls
what is that yeah and so you can just be completely literal and make like a big
you know cloud of souls or you know see where the ideas kind of lead you and
then just process yeah i want like the big floating sheet
like the mini pet that we have and actually speaking of many pets
there's one last creature that i want to talk about because everybody loves them
and loves to hate them oh yeah i love pocket wraps
yes they are awesome because this is the opposite of you have
you have like gorsuval who's enormous and you had a lot of room to work and a
lot of room to play and pocket raptors are totally the
opposite i mean there's just not a lot going on there that you can
work with how did they but gameplay design is what drives them
makes them so cool yeah they have the little pack of things
jumping at you and yeah i'm aware again i know so in terms
of like the animation side to pocket raptors
the the design is to have a lot of them and
they're small so the animation details aren't
as important since they are so small and since there's so many of them
there's less animation detail we can add into them yeah so they're a more simpler
creature to allow for the design to work and play so there's a good there
too yeah yeah they almost feel because there's
not a lot of room to work there i was thinking
that it almost feels like their darts being thrown at you
because they just lunge through the air um
and something that i was telling these guys i did yesterday just to kind of get
a good feel for some of these creatures i i did like the
chidi dev hack thing i was on our dev client
and i made myself invisible and then i like
went up to a pocket raptor and zoomed way in and i was just circling getting a
really good look at him and marveling that this is the only time
i'm ever going to get to do this but i can't help i couldn't help but
notice he's not just like a cardboard cutout sitting there i mean he had
movement and fluidity and even with this tiny little thing where there's just
like it's almost just like a mini pet yeah
and many pets not confirmed i have to keep saying this yeah
disclaimer but even even then when there's just this
tiny little thing you were able to do a lot with it
which was kind of cool so if you can if you can stealth up
your character somehow and just get in there and peek at one it's
pretty neat to look at them yeah so well thank you guys
very very much i appreciate you coming on to talk to us about all of these cool
new things that you made and now we know that the mushroom guys
are script in disguise this is what they've done with their
gathered intelligence has become mushrooms
i don't think that's how animation actually works i've learned nothing
apparently no it was really informative and i
appreciate you guys taking your time so sure yeah
and thank you guys for hanging out with us thanks for joining us
yep we will see you guys next week bye
Guild Chat - Episode 21

Transcription[edit]

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