4/10/12 - Fable, Baby JellyFish and Tutorial 3

I've played the beginning part of Fable 3 to pay closer attention to the NPC's animations, i looked at the playable character, the non important NPC's and the NPC's involved in quests. Here are the observations i made:

Jasper (companion character? butler):
Walk cycle distinctive and clearly shows the characters personality, he walks with his head held high to reflect the class of the people he serves. He walks with his hands clasped lightly in front of him and seems to portray the movements of a stereotypical upper-class butler. His facial expressions seem limited to brow movements and relies heavily on their movements and from the head as a whole.


Guards(non essential characters):
To combat complex interaction animations the camera switches to a separate scene when choosing to interact with the guards or any of the other non essential characters. There were two guards available to talk to so i took the opportunity of using the positive interaction with one and the negative with the other to see if it would affect their attitude to me outside of the interaction. It didn't seem to have any affect on how they spoke or gestured towards me but that could be a choice because my character is the "princess" and it would be disrespectful but i doubt it.

Noblewomen/man(non essential):
When interacting with them they seemed to have the same interaction animations as the guards, would have been nice if they moved to reflect their social status.


Everyone outside castle including myself(non essential, playable character):
 When my character comes within a certain range of them they will turn and courtesy or bow but my character doesn't react at all to their animations. Like I'm ignoring them

Me (playable):
No change to animations when in water of a height that doesn't require swimming. The water seems to have no affect on speed or effort the character needs to put in. As if the water isn't there. The animations seem obviously female when playing the game but they switch to being more masculine during cut scenes, they probably used the same animations for both genders.

Inside castle (non essential):
The characters involved in the cut scene resumed their castle duties outside of the cut scene but didn't react to the playable character even when i was running into them and getting in their way.


Jasper, Me, Walter (companions, playable):
Just before i had to battle a cluster of bats none of the characters including myself reacted to their sudden appearance, this would make sense for the warrior Walter but for the butler and the princess seemed a little odd. Jasper did cower once the fight had begun though.

Quest characters:(main, secondary):
Main characters quests generally flip to a cut scene to show more emotion and movement but seem to not react to character movements other than the occasional bit of speech to remind the player of what they're meant to be doing. The same goes for secondary quests apart from there is no cut scene initially. To find the secondary characters again in a crowd they use a giant exclamation mark hovering above them.


Final observations:

The game requires you to gain an attachment to some of the key characters for greater effect later in the plot but some of the animations (or lack of) can make the characters seem cold in places. The voice acting is great but that's not what I'm investigating the secondary characters you don't need to gain an attachment to so i don't think that is so much of an issue and is more done to save on time and money so it's understandable. But i think the animations of the main companion characters such as Walter especially should be more in depth. However this game is two years old now and so to see if there have been any advances i feel like i should look into another game made much more recently. Generally if a player needs to become attached to an NPC the game itself is story driven and so I'll focus my investigation to a fairly recent story driven game which has companion characters.

State of my jellyfish

At the moment my Jellyfish looks like this. I've ruled out giving walk cycles personality and how to create a seamless but variable run cycle because i don't think i could cope with only focusing on run cycles for an entire project and I'd like to keep interested.
I'm currently looking into NPC's and their personalities but I'm finding that the other ones I've circled have come up as valid questions relating to the main one. 

I've made a Jellyfish for the NPC question itself as well. Keep my questions somewhere while im investigating. Trying desperately to keep my thoughts in some reasonable sense of order.


Update: Found a little developer diary talking about NPC animations and their importance which is why they are paying a bit more attention to them.
http://www.cityofsteam.com/design-dev-journal-newly-planned-npc-features
Quote
"What is it that all players of all games do most often? That you’re most likely to do every time you log into a game to play? I have no idea how you might answer this question, but in my humble opinion, interacting with the NPCs (non player characters) is definitely one of these. You talk to a shop NPC to buy equipment/potions/materials; you talk to a marketplace NPC to sell items to other players; you accept quests from Quest NPCs and complete them to get rewards; you report crimes to patrol guards; you repair your broken equipment at the repair shop; you learn abilities from them, or tell them that you want to change your abilities; some NPCs help you kill mobs (mobs are also NPCs, if in a broad sense); some NPCs get killed by you; some NPCs are your player character’s family members, and you laugh with them and weep over their sad stories. Just imagine, should all the NPCs (shopkeepers, patrol guards, mobs, bosses, all!) go on a strike, what would be left for you to do in the game…? I can’t think of nothing! To me it would be like living in a dead city!"

I agree with this...


Update Part 2:
The tutorial we just had was kind of like a mini pitch and crit. I explained what i could remember about my project to Ceren, Lorna and Judy and then they had some time to sort my strengths and weaknesses, they gave me ideas to pursue and things to look into. It was good to have an outside opinion on my research as it made clearer some of the hidden trends i wasn't aware of. For example they noticed that the two main areas i was looking into within NPC's were Enrichment and Attachment  both very different which would explain why I've being feeling a little torn when writing notes. They gave me a couple or good examples of character attachment to look at one of which is supposedly the "saddest game death ever" but the character is apparently smiling and pretty much static due to technical restrictions at the time. They said that it was good that I knew my boundaries such as I don't want to look into the technical side of things like rigging so I could focus more on the animations.