Intro Animation for our 2018 Game Jam game, "Fright Knight". Brett Bravery has slain the vile Lady Antagotha, and saved the kingdom. Too bad you’re Lady Antagotha. Now, get your revenge by haunting him in his own castle. Transmit your message from beyond the grave and SCARE HIM TO DEATH.

​Full Game: https://globalgamejam.org/2018/games/fright-knight

Credits: Caitlin (writing, editing, sound)
Jason (lead programmer)
Jen (project manager, artist)
Joel (music, sound)
Jordan (artist)
Mandy (programmer)
Neko (animator, artist)

I think I'm starting to get the hang of all the work-arounds I have to do with Maya on a Mac, so that's good. Still kinda wish I had a Windows or Linux machine though.

Time for a walk cycle!

My biggest challenge has been Maya's stark refusal to believe me when I tell it I'm using a three button mouse. I go into preferences, tell it "I have a three button mouse" and it says "no". I've looked online for a cheat sheet that tells me the keyboard buttons to press to simulate the mouse clicks but all I get are people yelling at other people to buy three button mice and/ or throw out their Macs. -_-0

The time has finally come for me to tackle the beast that is Maya animation! Here are some early exercises. I know, they're nothing special but a gal's gotta start somewhere, right?

* Please excuse the field guides, etc. using Maya on a Mac has been tricky, turning the field guides on was my work around to get these to render out.

It wouldn't be a LARP for me if I didn't make a costume, and in true Neko-LARP-fashion I didn't even start on it till the night before, hah hah hah!

The hair was one of those cheap plastic "Morticia Adams" Halloween wigs. I pulled from my class prop/ costume bin and as you can imagine it was a matted mess. I used fabric softener and a lot of brushing to detangle it, then styled it up so it looked less fake and aweful.

I also made the feather capelet, sooo many feathers to glue! I'm pretty proud of how it all came out.

I fell in love with the idea of incorporating augmented reality components into a LARP because I've never seen it done before.

Doing this required my to create a wide variety of elements from a QR code based scavenger hunt to a couple simple video games. Plus a website to hold all the games and QR assets.

You'll see the website here: shadowstatelarp.weebly.com
It looks pretty basic because most of the 20+ pages in this site are hidden from navigation so as not to spoil it for the players. Those pages were accessible only by locating QR codes hidden around the convention center.

My absolute favorite thing, however, was creating two text-based adventure games which players could run through to complete various objectives. "Help Desk" is a social engineering challenge, while "Dagger Quest" is more of a traditional text-based adventure game. Not only were they a ton of fun to make, they're proving to be a good marketing tool for us because now people can get a sample of our LARP anytime they want, not just at a convention.

It took a couple weeks of nights and weekends to pull it all together but I had a lot of fun doing it. The game ran at Archon and all the players seemed to love it, so time well spent in my book!

I decided to spend my extra day doing some animation just for fun. I grabbed some audio that seemed fitting and tried to see how far I could get on 30 seconds of character animation in one day. Sadly, computer problems killed most of the work but I still have this rough animatic. It came out kinda of cute so I figured I'd post it, enjoy!

Character Design: 41 min.
Audio Edits: 1 hr., 42 min.
Storyboards: 1 hr. 14 min.
Timing: 1 hr., 10 min.
Fighting w/ Computer: 4 hrs., 20 min.