Conversation Mockup Animation Reveals

Welp, doing this three times a week while I’m struggling to get the new art in for PAX is just not working, so I’ll bail on the strict Monday, Wednesday, Friday commitment, and just upload these every few days between now and the show. Remember to subscribe to the SpyPartyGame channel to be notified when I upload these and other videos.  

Oh, and you can play SpyParty right now if you join the beta!

Here’s a new animation reveal video, this time with all the characters showing new talk and listen animations in simulated conversations. These conversations are done by sequencing the animations together in the editor, there’s no AI control over the conversation flow right now, so the real game conversations will be a bit different, but these should give you and idea of how they’ll feel.

I bought a new USB soundcard to get the actual analog circuitry far away from the laptop to try to get the mic noise down.  Seems like it worked out okay, the voiceover is definitely higher quality.1

  1. Well, higher audio quality, I make no claims about the voice or the content! []

19 Comments

  1. Gordon says:

    I don’t mean to offend but this look amazing.

  2. Dennis says:

    Animations look great! Seems like it could be hard to see big-guy do bbread?

  3. Bob Webb says:

    I’m loving the body language on the characters; gives you a great sense of their personality without any dialog. It’s been great watching this game evolve and improve over the years. Good luck at PAX! We’ll see you there!

  4. Iceman says:

    I love the little touches with their head motions, such as nodding when someone else is talking, or Ms. B’s head shake halfway through her first talk animation. Ms. B especially seems to have a lot of character built into her animations. I love them all, though!!!

  5. Varanas says:

    For some reason the crowd walla seems out of place in this video. I’m not sure if I just associate it with the old art and I’ll get used to it again once I’m used to the new art, or whether my brain just isn’t satisfied with this generic sound now that we don’t have generic art anymore. Either way, I don’t expect it to be as much of an issue when I’m concentrating on playing the game rather than on analysing these animations.

    Also, now that you’ve pointed out how animated people are in real life, the slow arm movements currently in the current game look really weird. I can’t wait for varied and realistic talking animations, I feel like it’ll be much easier to get away with bbs in future.

    • Varanas says:

      To expand on that last point, right now I feel like 9 times out of 10 when I white bb I’m ever so slightly behind another character’s talking animation, which can be an issue on balcony. With unique animations for each character this will suddenly take a lot more skill from the sniper to detect (I wonder, do they all last the same amount of time?). Plus, seeing as they aren’t all the same, it may make it slightly harder to tell if someone is talking in the first place (from a glance at least).

    • checker says:

      Good points!  Yeah, the crowd walla is going to be around for a while until we figure out the sound design, but I agree you really want to hear these people talk!

  6. Rune says:

    This looks amazing, I’m really looking forward to seeing it in the game!

    One question though: are you currently planning to make them look into each other’s eyes? Because that’s the one thing that looks unnatural to me – that they just stare in random directions. Would be a sublime touch to add!

    Rune

    • checker says:

      Yeah, I should have mentioned this above, but the lookat controller isn’t on in these videos, that’s part of the AI.  So initially it’ll be the same as currently, where the listens look at the speaker but the talker just does whatever. Eventually we’ll have a fancier system than that…Spore’s lookat system was really advanced, and I’ll do that at some point.

  7. Stuart Harper says:

    Where on Earth is Ms. B supposed to fit a cell phone in that outfit for the check watch animation?

    *Any opinion on the forum chosen name for her, Kathlyn Blackwell?

    • Stuart Harper says:

      Oops. Meant ‘Kathryn’, not ‘Kathlyn’.

    • checker says:

      I’m trying not to think about names right now, not exactly sure how we’ll name them yet.  But, seems like a fun thread!

  8. JRicafort says:

    Getting excited to play this game. Take my money and let’s play it.

  9. Wessel says:

    I’m really enjoying these new animations, and the fact they’re released one by one gives me something to look forward to, which I also like. Good idea, Chris!

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