The story is pretty long, and it all starts about 4 years ago, when me and a friend of mine started developing together, his name is Hampus, and we both started developing a ton of different projects, some larger, some smaller.
We then started getting interested in game development, we did some of that by working with graphics engine directly (note, not game engines, graphics engines.).
It was fun in general, we learned a LOT about the limits of graphics, how graphics actually work. What works, why it works, and what to do to make something look good or feel good!
Back then we got to a point where we needed help in regards to physics in a project we worked on, so we went on IRC for the graphics engine we worked on, and contacted a nice person who called himself "Cobra", we talked to him and made a deal, where he would help us out in exchange for a small amount of money.
He did a wonderful job, we loved the result and he got his cash.
About a year passed and we then spoke again, we needed more help! He looked at the project and liked our progress, we started talking seriously about joining each others teams.
It just made sense, we joined each other, and started to work on a simple game project and soon realized we needed to change engines, so we switched to "Unity".
After a couple of hours we started working on our current title called "Last Dusk". Which we are still working on.
Motion Capture
Yes, a very interesting topic, at least for us!
We figured that we really wanted to get good animations for our game, it's hard though unless you are really good at animating and have a huge team to do animations for you for hours on end.
So we figured we would try to make our own motion capture studio.
We started out by buying 2 PS3 eye cameras, we acquired some software, and started working on it. After around 15 hour of work, we managed to produce a very simple animation, however depth wasn't very good, and we were not very happy with the results yet. We could pretty much only get pretty un-detailed 2D animations and it just wasn't what we were hoping for. (I'll upload a video here soon).
After a week or so we talked to a friend of our who is a student at the university of Westminister in London (worth mentioning, we are from Sweden, and one of us is from the US (Cobra/Josiah)).
We talked to him, and told him about the project, he immediately showed interest in helping us, apparently he was studying to become a director, and this would be fun for him to do with us. So he got to Sweden, we set up a studio, and we got two actors to help us out make the animations look good! By now we had just bought 2 more cameras, which were to allow us to get even more detail and allow the actor to move in more complex ways without having to worry about the cameras at all.
We had a full day of motion capture, incredibly exhausting and long, but we managed to get a good chunk of footage (around 60gb).
Unfortunately we later realized that the equipment malfunctioned and gave us a dropped framerate which made everything almost worthless, however we learned a lot, and this allowed us to set up a new studio at home and taught us a LOT on what could go wrong!
However let's continue!
But we still needed money! We had already put in a BIG amount of money into the project, we sunk pretty much all of our money in, but as any dev can tell you, unless you outsource some things, you are going to end up working for years on stuff you can just get done within hours if you pay someone to help you! Also we needed to pay for some equipment for our new Motion Capture studio(I'll get to that later).
Luckily just about that time we got a offer, where we would design a simple game in Irrlicht for a individual for a decent sum of money. Said and done, we did that over a couple of days and delivered! Now, so you guys know what kind of money we are talking about here, so far we have (to this day) only had about 300 euros in the budget for this project!
We got another 350~ euros for the small project we made, so we now on a +/- 0 again.
Originally Posted by Lapje
