10/10/12 - Bonus Post!

I've gradually got more and more confused as the weeks gone on to the point where today i felt like i had absolutely no idea what i was doing or how anything i'd done could possibly help me move forward. Luckily i had a meeting arranged with Robin today anyway and he's really helped me organize my thought process' and figure out where i should go next.

Before the meeting i tried to reorganize my thoughts myself and created this mind map relating to everything to do with NPC animations, I've been finding when i make notes that i keep slipping into the animations of the player instead. 

I tried to strictly stick to the animations of the NPCs only and when talking to Robin about the things i'd wrote the reactions to the players actions started to highlight itself. I began by speaking about possible tests i could do with how different personalities would react to the same action done by the main character. I used the example of in skyrim that you can put a bucket on someones head and they don't react. How would some distinct personalities react to that. This brought the conversation round to reactions to inappropriate behavior in games in general. Why aren't there animations in place for when you offer a character a carrot randomly or walk around the player while they're speaking to you. Shouldn't players react to needless violence of their property? Skyrim did do this but a lot of games don't. He suggested i could do tests on possible reactions to unconventional situations in games and then by doing this it might show up some situations that aren't so completely random but also don't have responses therefore breaking the suspension of disbelief. Practice based research should help uncover missing animations in existing games and then later down the line i could work on classifying these animations so that as well as having sets of animations relating to walks, runs and jumps there would be a whole extra class relating to responses to certain types of situation.

Skyrim bucket