[Story] Christmas Brake

In late December 2013, the progression is good. In addition to the work in progress, the Vector Hero & Villain are about to be fully completed in mapping and shading. Moreover, the animation is completed at 40%. Holding the delivery date around February/March seems still conceivable if production speed is steady.

But here is the big news : ultimately, the game release is scheduled for the last week of January 2014. This leaves us a month less than what we thought. It was obvious that it would be impossible to meet the deadline… But we were not demoralized ! The trailer is progressing well, we have fun doing it and, anyway, we have no leverage to speed up the production. So we move forward for the better.

The next big steps are finishing the pilot (rig & shading) and making the environments. Mhamed and I were supposed to make much of them but we were late on this. Many things took us much longer than expected: remote team management, integrate all the datas we receive into the pipeline, scenes preparation for each artist… Moreover, several cg artists who were supposed to work on environments have unfortunately not been able to find spare time to do it.

This delay had to be fixed and we decided to focused on pushing an animated shot to his final stage. The goal was to have a reference in order to better plan all the steps that lead to the result we want. The rest should follow faster if the tone is set and this was also a way to keep the team motivated by being able to see the final result. At least on one shot.

Stéphane Montel.