Post Mortem for current events

Final game submission requirement – Post Mortem

What went right?, what went wrong?

Most of the animations that I made went well. Most things worked and I don’t think much things broke or corrupted in some form. My understanding of how animations worked in-game proved to be correct with the extra help from the programmers who stated specifications for animation submitting. The only things that went wrong were re-adjusting and deleting some axis’ postions and animation after submission to give the programmer(s) control over the axis’ rather than have it animated. These things were fixed fairly quickly.

Other things that went wrong were mostly due to rigging. Some limbs just could not move in certain ways that I wanted to or some things were lacking controls completely. It wasn’t too much of a bother as I simply just worked around this. Having an IK-FK switch on certain characters that actually worked would’ve been helpful at some points but it wasn’t that much of a hinder.

Was the schedule followed?, why and why not.

Most of the tasks given to me were entirely up to me to approach in whatever way I seemed fit. A list of required animations with some optional others would be given to me and I had to just finish it all ASAP. Personal schedules for each individual tasks went fine. I would do the idle animation first and make the other animations based off the idle.

Animations that I thought would be used more in the game, I prioritised while others that happen fairly quickly I would work on it fairly quickly and any that aren’t used often, I would put it lower on the list of things to do. Scheduling my work between groups didn’t prove to be a problem either. I would do the minimum requirement for all the groups, then do the optional animations after I had time because having some animations in a game is better than having none.

What would you improve on in future projects?

I would improve my own personal animation skill as I learnt some new techniques through all of this that could’ve been helpful earlier in this project. I will also take more time to double check skinning and rigging jobs on characters before animating as I’ve run into a few incidents like this. I would also try and improve my own work efficiency as a lot of things I did, I could’ve easily done in half the time with the right motivation level.