By the Numbers (OROW VI winner)

[AJA]

A short game made for the sixth One Room One Week competition:

By the Numbers

The investigation of a wave of kidnappings is going nowhere. One day someone claiming to be an eyewitness to one of the kidnappings approaches the local police department. It's time to find out what he knows...


Download from the Games Database page or directly or Mediafire.com


Features:
- Full voice acting with motion-captured performances drawn with beautiful vector graphics!
- That's pretty much it!


Screenshots:





Changes from entry version
- Modified Act 2 dialog options to make them clearer and
  also changed the occurrence points of the short exchanges,
  making the last one occur only when all the dialog options
  have been exhausted.
- Added blinking and slight eye movement
- New music, changed song placements slightly
- Credits sequence
- Option to turn off subtitles
- Option to skip act one


Download from the Games Database page or directly or Mediafire.com


Making of:
A short making of video for the game can be downloaded here (XviD encoded AVI, 16 min, 35 MB).
MIRROR: Mediafire.com



Any and all comments are much appreciated! Especially ones such as: "You suck!"


-- EDIT --
Due to my website exceeding the monthly transfer limit, I've changed all the links and added some mirrors!

[MadReizka]

Some fat gene can be spotted in the video.
I still remember how warm your aparment was when we shot that footage. Like millions of degrees.

[AJA]

At least the face paint didn't fail us! We we're afraid it might just melt off our faces with sweat.

[Vince Twelve]

Fantastic stuff.  I really appreciate the video.  That is so cool.  You packed a lot of work into those seven days!

[Buckethead]

Wow that was like super complex stuff. I thought you had just modeled these in 3d and then rendered them or something. I am now even more impressed with this game!

What programs did you use for this?

[AJA]

Fantastic stuff.  I really appreciate the video.  That is so cool.  You packed a lot of work into those seven days!

Thanks! It's always (kind of) fun to take a break from other projects and work on one that you will most likely be done with in seven or so days. That's why OROW is just my kind of a competition, short and sweet. Well, at least short and sweaty.

Wow that was like super complex stuff. I thought you had just modeled these in 3d and then rendered them or something. I am now even more impressed with this game!

I don't even want to think how long it would've taken to animate all that in 3d.

What programs did you use for this?

Just Adobe After Effects 7, with a script I wrote that exports the tracking data to a text file, and the python script I wrote that converts that data to the face point data. For prototyping purposes the python script also drew the wireframe images so I had an idea of what the hell I was doing.

At first I though I'd do the data conversion in AGS but since I'd already done the prototype with the python script, I abandoned that idea. It would've been a pain to convert the object-oriented scripts to something that AGS can process. On the other hand, it would've been faster to read the files which, as it is now, creates a somewhat annoying pause before the longer lines. Then again, I also tried to make sure the game wouldn't be too much of a power hog and would run on my crappy 1.6 GHz Celeron laptop without the animation getting out of sync.

[GarageGothic]

Awesome work! Haven't played the game beyond the first dialog, and skimmed through the video, but I'm extremely impressed with the mo-cap. I was actually considering using vector graphics for characters, Cruise for a Corpse style, but still haven't figured out the best way to go around it. So the data stored in the external files, is that purely the point data or the actual coordinates for drawing the triangles?

[Dualnames]

I knew this was rotoscoping or some other technique, nobody could get the realistic expression like that.

[AJA]

Awesome work! Haven't played the game beyond the first dialog, and skimmed through the video, but I'm extremely impressed with the mo-cap. I was actually considering using vector graphics for characters, Cruise for a Corpse style, but still haven't figured out the best way to go around it. So the data stored in the external files, is that purely the point data or the actual coordinates for drawing the triangles?

Thanks! The files are just a bunch of coordinates with an empty line marking the end of a single frame.

Code: ags

125,166
140,2
155,-16
238,-5
323,-9
.
.
.

The data is read into an array of frames. In this case a frame is a struct that contains an array of integers for each of the coordinates.

The coordinates are already scaled properly by the python script and the triangles are drawn between coordinates at a specific offset in AGS. Since the coordinates are in a specific order, the drawing goes something like this:

Code: ags

drawTriangle( drawingSurface, frameNumber, indexA, indexB, indexC );

where frameNumber indices the array of frames, and A, B & C are the indices to the coordinate array within that frame.

So, for example with the example file (see above) drawTriangle( ds, f, 0, 1, 2 ) would draw a triangle between the points (125 + offsetX, 166 + offsetY), (140 + offsetX, 2 + offsetY) and (155 + offsetX, -16 + offsetY).



I think something like this might work quite well for drawing regular characters with different animations and such. Just keep in mind that it helps a lot if all the animation data can be completely read into memory at the start of the game so there won't be any unnecessary pauses. And the animators' work would also be reduced to just moving some points around. Sounds like something a lazy person like myself would try in the future.

[Snake]

I absolutely loved this game. I just got done downloading and playing it again for like the 6th time. It's completely awesome. I'm glad this did end up winning. It had my vote.

What you explained above is infinitely over my head, but all I know is that I would love to see you make a full length game like this. Maybe in the vein of Criminal Minds, Without a Trace, Law & Order or CSI. Definitely dark.

I loved it.

You'd better start talking or you're gonna be in a world of SORRY!1

[AJA]

Really happy to hear that, Snake!

I really wish I had the patience but that 11-12 hours of almost non stop tracking for the animations really took a toll. Maybe one day when I've managed to fool some other people into doing the work.

Well, actually... This WAS sort of a test to see what this kind of animation would look like in a game, since I would really kill for some expressive close-up performances for an upcoming, much bigger project. But this is just too much work.

[Snake]

No doubt there's a load of work involved. In any case, the end result is beautiful. I'm sure you are proud of it.

Spoiler

I sure the fuck would be!

[close]

[AJA]

I am. That aspect of the game exceeded all my expectations. Some of the other stuff I'm a bit iffy about.

[MadReizka]

We need to hire some people to do all the tracking... interns maybe.
You know, when they do tracking for the expressions in games like Force Unleashed etc. I'm pretty sure they have their work cut out too.

- - -

I think the game is actually pretty interesting take on the normal conversation GUI we are used on oldskuul adventure games. It would be really interesting if people could develope tools (open source etc) that could help other ags users to create games that could use different and most of all, more dramatic conversation "views". I like the ye-olde monkey island style conversation method, but then again, I think some progression could be in order since it's not 1991 anymore.

Anywho, it's a really cool game and I really liked to be part of it. (if not a rather small part in the end, but still. Damn I really need to work on my pronunciation)

[GarageGothic]

Thanks for the clarification, AJA.

Perhaps I'll have to resort to a similar approach for performance reasons, but since it's a larger game I'd rather postpone the breakdown into triangles as far into development as possible - In case any art modifications are needed along the way, or I have to adjust timings.

For now I'm trying to treat to handle all movement as simple cutout animation where each polygon is moved, scaled and/or rotated based on the animation data. Similar to SSH's walkdesign module, only with polygons instead of sprite parts. But things start to get messy when it comes to deformations that require manipulating select vertices either individually or in groups. Then you're basically back at storing individual triangles.

If only more (any?) animation tools supported SVG animation I'd just need a plugin to read the resource files and do the drawing. But as of now I'm not familiar with any other standardized vector animation formats.

[Kweepa]

 :o
Bloody impressive work for a week!
Impressive for any length of time really. But a week? Wow!

I'm amazed that you can so accurately detect the dots on the face - I'll have to listen to the video later. [EDIT] Oh, I see. Hard work!

Thanks for sharing!

[Ryan Timothy B]

Excellent work. I've never once thought of using solid triangles to draw a face before. Excellent idea.
Looks pretty smooth too.

[blueskirt]

Dear sir, your game is the next level shit. Congrats!

Those faces. Every single time a new emotion or facial expression was shown, my mind was blown. Only thing that could have used some work is the eyes, they don't blink or look around nervously but otherwise it was perfect. I look forward to see more things like that in adventure games, and I look forward to play more of your future games to see their conversations and cutscenes if you use the same vectorized, Out Of This World looking, graphical style and if conversations are rendered just like they were in By The Numbers, with expressions and emotions.

I smell a game that will be discussed for years to come. Once again, congrats!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Impressive effort on this one, AJA.  In strict time constraints there's always got to be some trade-off between technology and depth of gameplay, and in this case the gameplay suffered while the presentation shined.  Hopefully you'll take what you've learned in such a brief time and expand upon it in another game!

[Dualnames]

Freeware Game Pick of the Week.
Indie Games Blog: By The Numbers

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/08/freeware_game_pick_by_the_numb.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IndependentGaming+%28Indie+Games%29