Rocketing in the Future
By Colin Brown, Senior Animator
The idea of putting Rocket Boards in our game started long before Going Rogue even came out, the basic idea was "could we give players a travel power Rocket Board that they could fight and fly on?" Unfortunately every attack, reaction, movement has to blend into ground and flight, adding a completely new travel power would require us to blend 7 years of animations into a new travel power, which could take up to a year's worth of animation time, so the idea lay dormant until we started planning for Freedom, when the idea came up again and we started brainstorming ways we could still give it to the players as a fun method of travel.
So one day while in-between tasks, I decided to challenge myself and see if I could get a "proof of concept" Rocket Board into the game, just to see what people thought. I took the animations and movement from Prestige Power Slide, and moved the animations up in the air slightly, as well as modeling a basic rectangle Rocket Board to appear below the player. After a few hours of setting it up, texturing and animating, I had the player on a Rocket Board in the game flying around Atlas Park. After sending the video around, it went viral at the studio and interest peaked again "Could we give a Rocket Board to players?"
Finally we decided that we could give the Rocket Board to players as a travel power but, again, because putting in a new travel power would mean re-animating every single animation in the game to blend into it properly, we decided to make it similar to "Walk" in that it turned off all powers but let the player fly around the world at Level 2 if they chose to and would be faster than running or flight.
After we decided to put Rocket Board into the game, we had David Nakayama (Lead Concept Artist) create new concept art. Then Leo Braz da Cunha (VFX Artist) modeled, textured and created visual fx for the Rocket Board, while I made new animations and Adam Kay (Lead Sound Designer) created new sounds to make it even more awesome.
The biggest challenge for Rocket Boards was having it interrupt various motions and powers in our game, since we have so many different things you can do while on the Rocket Board, we didn't want you to get knocked off the Rocket Board or switch to swimming when jumping in the water or switching to regular flight powers by accident, so that took a lot of testing to make sure you stay on your Rocket Board at all times when turned on. But now that we have this system, we'll be able to use it for other projects we've got coming soon.
It was great to finally achieve the goal of a Rocket Board travel power and deliver it to the players in a fun and functional manner, we hope you love it! We hope to provide the same kind of "magic" that we did with Rocket Boards in the future.
Rocketing in the Future
By Colin Brown, Senior Animator
The idea of putting Rocket Boards in our game started long before Going Rogue even came out, the basic idea was "could we give players a travel power Rocket Board that they could fight and fly on?" Unfortunately every attack, reaction, movement has to blend into ground and flight, adding a completely new travel power would require us to blend 7 years of animations into a new travel power, which could take up to a year's worth of animation time, so the idea lay dormant until we started planning for Freedom, when the idea came up again and we started brainstorming ways we could still give it to the players as a fun method of travel.
So one day while in-between tasks, I decided to challenge myself and see if I could get a "proof of concept" Rocket Board into the game, just to see what people thought. I took the animations and movement from Prestige Power Slide, and moved the animations up in the air slightly, as well as modeling a basic rectangle Rocket Board to appear below the player. After a few hours of setting it up, texturing and animating, I had the player on a Rocket Board in the game flying around Atlas Park. After sending the video around, it went viral at the studio and interest peaked again "Could we give a Rocket Board to players?"
Finally we decided that we could give the Rocket Board to players as a travel power but, again, because putting in a new travel power would mean re-animating every single animation in the game to blend into it properly, we decided to make it similar to "Walk" in that it turned off all powers but let the player fly around the world at Level 2 if they chose to and would be faster than running or flight.
After we decided to put Rocket Board into the game, we had David Nakayama (Lead Concept Artist) create new concept art. Then Leo Braz da Cunha (VFX Artist) modeled, textured and created visual fx for the Rocket Board, while I made new animations and Adam Kay (Lead Sound Designer) created new sounds to make it even more awesome.
The biggest challenge for Rocket Boards was having it interrupt various motions and powers in our game, since we have so many different things you can do while on the Rocket Board, we didn't want you to get knocked off the Rocket Board or switch to swimming when jumping in the water or switching to regular flight powers by accident, so that took a lot of testing to make sure you stay on your Rocket Board at all times when turned on. But now that we have this system, we'll be able to use it for other projects we've got coming soon.
It was great to finally achieve the goal of a Rocket Board travel power and deliver it to the players in a fun and functional manner, we hope you love it! We hope to provide the same kind of "magic" that we did with Rocket Boards in the future.
Colin Brown
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