JenniBee
commented
10 years ago I was just about to start an issue for this myself. I came up with a fun idea for a credits screen. As for roles, if we're going for Contributors rather than roles, probably alphabetical order would be best.
I was trying to figure out some way to incorporate my passion for 2D animation in this, and thought of the fun after-credits sequences in animated movies. I was thinking of creating a video of the credits. While the credits roll, the edges of the screen will have animated versions of the characters we already have planned (Patrick, Brad, Anna, Tim, etc) doing joke animations (or we could get really fun and have little characters that are based on ourselves instead).
I was thinking of some jokes already - one that would be fun would be an homage to Caddyshack. A gopher pops up and starts dancing Caddyshack style, and one of the golfers hits him with the ball (leading to either a screen crash, or just a drop out of frame). It would also be fun to have someone hold up the "I don't play golf to feel bad. I play bad golf but feel good" as an homage to the Leslie Neilson How To Play Bad Golf video.
I think it would be great if we could get this done before the end of the official Amnesia Fortnight so we have a proper credits screen for the AF build. I love doing hand drawn animation, and I've become pretty quick at it with practice, so a week would be an acheivable goal (I am correct that AF ends this Friday, right)?
The question I have, since I'm not familiar with Unity programming, is whether the engine supports external videos, and if so what format would be the best to use (AVI (and if so what codec), mpeg, etc). Also, in what resolution should I create the video?
If this is a viable idea, I'd love to get started on this right away once I know the resolution and codec to use. If we're going this route, I'd also love some more ideas for some sight gags (and whether we decide to use the Bad Golf golfers or ourselves for this). I personally would love to use ourselves for this, but that would also depend on whether we get enough submissions. It would also be possible to do a combination of Bad Golf golfers and ourselves if we want to go that route.
Also, if we do decide to go this route, since this is an ongoing project, switching to a regular scrolling credits screen for additional credits after the AF build would be good. Or allow multiple videos to be played (maybe with extra credits music). Preferably a combination of both.
We could set up the credits in alphabetical order with something like "Community Amnesia Fortnight Contributors" moniker, and then list the additional contributors in alphabetical order after the first video for the credits after Amnesia Fortnight is over.
EDIT: Never mind about the technical questions. I now see that the only way to play videos in the free version of Unity is to play them frame by frame as images. I still think this credits idea would be fun, but it requires a re-think on the implementation. Perhaps, to save memory resources, the best thing to do would be to display the credits directly via the source code as a classing scrolling sequence, and then display just the animations of characters as a sequence of images as image textures on the sides of the screen. Actually, this idea would work best, since it would allow us to add contributors and change the order if need be without having to worry about having to redo a whole video.
Cheeseness
Right now, how we're going to do credits in the game hasn't been fleshed out. Some discussion in IRC highlighted that this probably needs some focus.
Sourcing contributor lists from the contributor roster page, issue comments and commit logs is going to be a bit of a task. I'd like to try to find some way to automate collection of github handles from commit messages as some kind of post-commit hook to make that aspect easier moving forward.
In the meantime (and maybe this is the best option longer term too), I'd like to replace the credits placeholder text with a link back here to GitHub so that anybody looking for info can find it.