It’s been a while since I posted some progress on the Podcast Animation project. I’ve been able to get a few hours of time into the project in the last few weeks, which has enabled me to restructure the code a bit, and add side facing sprites and walking animations. I’ve added improved randomization for eyes, hands, and body turning, and now have the speakers walking into the recording room at the start of the video. I decided for now to stick with fixed light positions above the speakers in the recording room, but at a reduced light level. I removed the cracks on the recording room window, and removed the mic for now.
I may want to add that back. The sprite head/body alignment is now better automated - fully auto-aligned by algorithm, which turned out to be necessary to make clean walking animation possible. I have the idea of letting the speakers randomly walk about a bit when they aren’t a time when a given speaker isn’t talking for a while, and maybe moving the speaker whose “turn” it is to talk a while to a position where the mic is… I have to experiement with that idea for a bit. This Podcast has an issue at the end because it re-plays the music, and I am not detecting that (yet, I need to see if possible), so Gary looks like he’s “singing” the music because that’s what Rhubarb lip sync thinks is going on.
Looks really good! You could perhaps write some code to have a few head bobs on every “yeah” at the start of a new speaker? In most cases they use it as an agreeable transition, so a few nods (1 to 3 max) could look natural.
And perhaps something similar for all the [laughs]
And the part near the end, where they think they’ve lost Gary should be custom-animated to have either a light going out, or them getting sunglasses and white sticks (as in that Three Blind Mice cartoon).
Wow this is great! Now I can relive my lost childhood … I mean late thirties when I first listened to this podcast.
Oh by the way, and I might have said this before but I remember listening to this podcast every week back those days before the game was done, and was loving every minute of it. And I kind of knew that chances were that I’d be more happy with the podcast about Thimbleweed Park than the game of Thimbleweed Park itself. And it turned out I honestly liked the podcast more than the game, although I also must admit that they’re two different things.
But what I liked about it was just basically listening to the whole development process, because at the time I was (well still am) also a software developer, and it was honestly so interesting listening to all of the tidbits going on when creating a game like this.
I was kind of sad that the game would eventually be finished; because that would mean no more podcast. It was kind of like when you follow a tv series that release one episode every week and you’re always looking forward to it.
Nope. Exactly the same here… and I am not a software developer.
I do wonder how many of the podcasts are available as animated version. I know I gave up the transcription process that serves as input a long time ago.
