[I thought I'd posted this one yesterday, but apparently not. Sunday thoughts to brighten your Monday AMs, then. Hurray!]

Another busy one - I'm not ignoring you guys - as the days draw nearer to the next big Dreamfall milestone on March 4th. We're in the midst of a working weekend, and the team's pulling together to make this upcoming version as good as it can possibly get. All the little bits and pieces are fitting very nicely together, though time is always an issue: there's never enough of it. We always want to add another layer of spit and polish to our work. The reality of game development, however, mandates that you stop and move on to the next thing. After all, the locations and characters we spend months staring at, players will only see for an hour or two. It's important to focus on the right things.

On Thursday, we had our first motion capture session on the project, and our actor - who went to a mime school in Paris, no less - provided us with some really excellent motions (captured in our high tech in-house studio) that will serve as the foundation for cinematic sequences and other animations. I'm guessing that about half - perhaps more - of the animations in the game will be created partially or wholly using mocap (there's a new word you can throw around), while the remaining animations will be done by hand, old school. We have three animators working on the project, all of whom are quite capable of churning out top notch work, but mocap is extremely useful when creating things like realistic character behaviour, movement and idle cycles, and long animations for cinematic sequences.  ¶ 10:14