Banjo-Kazooie: The Crystal Jiggy

Hey guys! As you've noticed, I haven't been able to make it here for a while. My life has become... well, put in the simplest terms, a clusterfuck. So much has been going on that I just haven't been able to make time. It all started around late decemeber when a huge change took place in my life. I'm not going to go into great detail, but this change has really put a huge damper on my life. Not only did that happen, but I was also overwhelmed with last minute submissions to colleges, registering for my own community college, finding a job, etc. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of people have become inactive since the time I've been gone. Oh well... I'd like to thank everyone who is sticking around; your support and effort means so much to me. Unfortunately, I can't say that I'm really in a position to start leading again, so for now I'm going to leave it in the hands of Forrest. I'll let you guys know when I'm ready to really work again. I can still write music in spare time and I can still help out occasionally, but other than that, I'm just too busy. I hope you all understand; feel free to message me and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible. 

Cheers,

TOC (Michael) 

To all American team members, today is Thanksgiving. Will you be having a big turkey dinner?  I personally am having a Turkey "lunch", but I don't mind. It will be delicious!

Does anyone know where we can recruit some more modelers? I already got one suggestion so I'll be getting in touch with that person soon. We need modelers who are pretty experienced and can create higher poly models for us. Being able to work with textures and animation is a plus. Let me know! Thanks!

If you take a look at the bottom of your screen, you'll see that there's a new chat bar. I installed this so that we can all communicate more efficiently. I suppose this would be the easiest way for people to have one-on-one chats/exchange thoughts & work (drag and drop sharing is available) whenever it may be needed. The chat bar is available to everyone logged into the site. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to leave a comment on this news entry or shoot me a message!

WE NEED TO WORK ALL DAY! D:< Haha only joking

What are your plans for Halloween?

I have created a Communications board for different teams to plan live chats. It's vital that everyone is communicating within their teams so that the following can be determined:

1. Who is in charge of what
2. How work will be shared (If you need a board for it [like our programmers did], let me know)
3. An easy way reach each other (wether it's Skype, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, etc.)

Email has proven to be one of the best ways to stay up to date with everything in organizations like these. I'm aware that note everyone can make it here as ofen as we'd like, so please check your email so that you're always up-to-date with the progress of TCJ. It is crucial that everyone stays up-to-date with this project. I sent out an email recently and asked for a confirmation reply, but I've only recieved 2 replies out of the 22 members. After a day or 2 of the email being out, I'll post it here.

So in short PLEASE CHECK YOUR EMAIL. I'll be sending them out frequently. Thanks guys!

Hey everyone! I'm currently in the process of organizing the forums. As the team grows larger and larger we're gonna need to keep track of things a little better. Obviously we are not ready to start production, so I've created the Pre-Production Category so that we can plan every little detail. Anyway, the pre-production forum is split up into the following categories.:

• Everything TCJ: Contains large post of everything that will be going into the game. This post will be updated as we plan more and more.
• Level Design: Will contains list of worlds, world maps, details, notes, etc. Let's try to keep all of the planning for a certain level in that topic (ie. Everything pertaining to Honey B. Mountain goes into the thread "Honey B. Mountain")
• Gameplay: Moves, Mini-games/Challeneges, Abilities, Gadget use, etc. 
• Story and Script: Here we will plan the game scenes. From the Introduction to the closing scene (obviously ending with, "Just you wait until Nuts & Bolts!" or something along that line.

I'll continue organizing. Happy posting! We are at the beginning of creating something fantastic

Also, in an effort to make the site a little less of a huge, white/plain eye-sore, I added a background of Jiggy's. Hope you like the small addition and that it's a little easier on your eyes. It certainly is for me!

We will be using Unity as our engine. Yay! As of right now, mojobojo is our only programmer and has been programming for 5 years now.

As we all know, I'm a musician. I've never had much experience in even attempting to develope a video game. Well, some friends from the RWC that have more know-how than I do are lending a helping hand and throwing us some good advice. 

From RWC User Anthrax:

Hey TOC, I recommend using Unity as a game engine. It has great support and is extremely straight forward and easy to use, I'm actually making a game in it now. Check out www.unity3d.com for more details. I'd help you but I'm super strapped for time modelling my own characters etc... Here is what Unity is capable of: www.unity3d.com/gallery

Good luck nonetheless!

From RWC User Skill :

For starters writing it in C++ is imo a big mistake you don't really have much you can gain from that other then a lot of time going into development and research and then further time going into making some kind of usability... You need to use some kind of framework like XNA or Unity, with unity being the obvious choice.

Two things come to my mind though why don't you use MW to import your levels and see if they work using the actual Banjo Kazooie engine (see Mumbo's Wand thread for information) if you could import your levels and got ok frame rate out of it your effectively seeing the levels come to life. The down side is you can't make your own characters and object scripts.

 There is a lot of information and resources that you could maybe find useful in the old Banjo Unity forum: www.rarewarecentral.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=180

The biggest thing to do is learn from other peoples mistakes that tried to do this. The big one for me was opening the project and running it through the site with updates etc, that was a big mistake because it takes away from what your wanting to make and effects the quality that you want the game to be. Remember it's not going to be perfect and you should expect it to be.

 So the big thing there is to get your team, take that away from main sites and keep all resources and videos private.

 Get your resources together and learn about what works together, do you have a programmer in Unity and a modeller in Maya? If your Programmer doesn't have maya the .mb files won't work because Unity and they will need to be exported to .fbx

 This could makes some annoying problems for you so you may want to make it so that you have a standard level across the team it might be:

 2D: Any image editing software (format saved as PNG's)

3D: Blender

Game Engine: Unity

And all team members can there for be set up and running the same system across and without having to spend any money. The advantage here is that say you have one guy that is a beast at modelling low poly banjo characters (me and unwn got pretty good at this actually) but he might be crap at texturing and even UV mapping.

So you make a production effect that goes

 Bob: makes the Model

John: takes the model and makes the UV map

Kate: takes the model with the UV Map (she doesn't know anything about modelling but can update the texture (one button more or less) in blender so she can take the uv map (tga) throw it in photoshop or her image editing program make the textures and update the texture on the model and see what they look like on the model).

For example the gnome came up quite nice

Some of my models like Lilly etc:

Grublin Knight is one of my fav's

Now by having everyone using Blender it means everyone can work, in others words kate can see what it looks like on the model without having to send them back to John who renders a picture of what it looks like sends to kate, that process of one person rendering and sending back and forth is a complete waste of time. Although that might sound simple and obvious if your working in a team you need consistency and you need to create the rules for consistency early.

The other point to factor is minimize the rework. Get a plan in place what we did was

Me:

Model

Unwn:

refine/sign off

Unwn:

Rig / animate

while this was happening i'd work on the next model and as soon as i got the model back that was rigged I would texture it.

That is so important because rework is just something you have to avoid, so for example you won't model then texture, you would most likely model -> animate -> texture. Why? because the animator might notice a problem with the model and it might need rework, this could also mean rework to the UV map and therefore also the textures wasting (using the above example) kates time.

Oh and finally make sure you stick to a style and get your main ideas set if your going for banjo like models get a poly limit make you team aim for that, if your interested I can look for our specs that unwn and I used for characters I think we aimed for a max of 1000 polys per character most including Lilly and the troll were under that by a fair amount (normally 500 odd iirc)

Honestly good luck with it all and keep an eye out on Mumbo's Wand which will be really nice when finished!

This has proved very helpful to me personally, being that I have little to no experience running a project as big as this. This also gives us more of a direction to take. Thoughts from the team?