Character Design Course

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IgswlDEFUe2owv2XZbeFUJt8_pYLsAxfM2HX3T0-g8Q/edit


Ran across this character design for animation course. Seems pretty decent, exercises and links out to more info.

Martin Chang Game Projects

 It's feeling more and more like the next step for me is to level up my non animation side but learning how to work better inside a game engine to get motion more integrated with the world. Procedural animation and IK legs and control rig stuff.

Martin Chang has done a few projects in that direction.

And in a similar vein, a twitter thread I've been holding on to for setting up a quadruped on a slope.

Prophet animations

Game Design for empathy

 Just read an article that's a postmortem on Journey. Really interesting, talking about game and level design to promote more empathetic behavior.

Most games simulate competition, and are power fantasies. Give players guns and limited resources and they'll be thinking "who can I dominate, I'm going to be strongest". Journey has no possessions, so no resources to compete over, and no arms on characters so no agency to push others for the sake of being rude.

In Journey, they designed environments to make the player feel small and a sense of awe. They believed this vulnerability made the players more empathetic to others, and more aware of how you are stronger with a partner.

They also talked about having no way to communicate with another player, that people projected missing loved ones onto their partner, helping them to grieve. 

The really interesting question was implied: "What would a game where you were given a med kit instead of a gun be like".   Like Hacksaw Ridge as a game. Or some kind of RTS where you are building robots to rescue people from an earthquake.

Toby Olié - Puppet God

Found this cool guy Toby Olie doing awesome stuff