The muffin is dead, long lives the muffin!
May 4th
For several months there was not much going on at this project for one reason:
I had to finish my studies, get a job and right now, moving into an apartment etc. Although all that stuff kept me busy (and still does) I did some things in the background. Mainly thinking about the project and how to improve it.
A very important deficit so far was that everything relied upon me. participation was not possible or easy in every part of the project, if i wasn’t allowing, or actually doing it. A pretty bad system, since i didn’t have too much time.
The logical solution to this problem is to make participation at all levels easier. The first step I did was to set up a Wiki and transport all of the important Information to it. You can find it here:
http://wiki.openmuffin.net
You’ve got to log in with the account you created in the forum (http://forum.openmuffin.net).
This is just one step. All the other ideas I’ve got can be read in the wiki:
http://wiki.openmuffin.net/index.php/Muffin_wiki:Ideas
And here comes the benefit: If you’ve got an idea for improvements yourself, just edit the wiki and add it in there. Also a short discussion about it won’t hurt. That way bringing in Ideas at a central point (and not spread over the whole forums) is much easier.
Let me summarize other ideas of improvements here in short:
- No more decision making by polls only. Arguments, Discussion and discourse should be the base of our decisions, not voting systems.
- Let’s change the project name in long term.
- We’ll change the license to “CC-BY-SA” or “CC-BY-SA-NC”.
- Foundation of an official organization for the project(s) we’re doing.
- Realtime communication / Chat system.
- and so on…
You can see, I was not completely lazy the last months and I’ll spend more time in the future again. I’d like to be perfectly honest to you. That does not mean the project is gonna be finished any time soon, but at least we’ll have some progress again. We’ll see how it turns out.
Now let’s get back to work! We’ve got an animation to do 
greetings,
atti
We’re on hold
Jan 8th
As followers of the project already know, we’re pretty much on hold since November. This is totally my fault, since I am currently busy writing my master thesis and stuff.
Anyways, this production pause is not forever. I was thinking and considering a lot recently and made up some ideas for improvements regarding the project organisation. I’ll come back with detailed information soon, so stay tuned for the muffin coming back on track!
greetings,
atti
Muffin Game Prototype
Aug 4th
Some time ago some of us started to build a muffin game prototype. I’m happy that i can show you a first screencast:
It is all developed in Unity3D (version 2.6.1), which makes development pretty easy.
At this place I’d like to thank my colleagues PPammes, Nini and Babsl for their commitment and hard work.
As opposed to the muffin animation project, the game development was not open for anyone (since it was an university assignment). Now that the assignment is over we’re thinking of opening up the development process to anyone, who prefers to do games rather than 3D animation. As you can see on the video, there’s lots of things to do:
- build more properties, buildings, obstacles to fill up the level.
- finish the game logic
- create decent UI elements
- make a working menu
- optimize the physics/game experience
- and much much more
But most important: organize/manage the game development!
Since I’m dedicated to the animation project, i won’t spend too much time on the game in near future.
So if you are interested in the game (development), drop me a note and we’ll see if we can finish it.
thanks,
atti
P.S.: If you want to play it, make sure you got the unity3D webplayer installed and open up this link:
Character Design: Call for submission
May 27th
Recently we evaluated all our character sketches so far. Take a look at the interesting results here:
Joe facial poll
Pizza Chef poll
Robot Cop poll
Especially the designs from sfepa and LeafThief are very admired by our members. Congratulations to them!
Now that we have a good feeling of how the characters will look like, let’s finish the job! Everyone is invited to take these results and create a final character design and submit it for the challenge. We will vote once again and the winners’ design will get chosen for the animation! As always, she/he will also get announced on this blog and receive proper credits of course.
The deadline is the 6th of June, so please hurry up! See the full details about the submission rules here.
I want to thank the muffin community for the incredible work they’ve done so far and I’m looking forward for your future support!
Character names
We know that our hero’s name is Joe, but what’s his surname? Or the pizza chef’s name? We don’t know it either. Therefore we collected some possible names and started a poll. Read and rate them in these threads/polls:
Vote for your favourite character design!
May 18th
We’ve already got many many great sketches for our character designs of Joe, the Pizza Chef and the Robot Cop. Time to evaluate them and find out which ones you like best!
If you haven’t voted already, please take a minute and vote in the forums:
Joe poll
Pizza Chef poll
Robot Cop poll
For now these poll results are not mandatory. It’s really just an orientation to find out which direction our character design should go. Soon we’ll announce the deadline for character design submissions including detailed requirements and settle down on one design. We’ll keep you informed here!
You can always find a nice overview of the character design state on the muffin website.
Thanks for your support,
atti
New viral, advanced task management and facebook page
Mar 30th
Hi crew!
First of all, let me officially announce the second viral to you:
Open Muffin – The story is finished! from Open Muffin on Vimeo.
I hope you like it and hopefully the project will gain more attention with it. You can help by, for example, posting this on your blog or share it on facebook. If you don’t know how to do that, you can read it here.
One thing that I’m very glad for is our new task management. The list of open tasks looks a lot better now and it is much easier to maintain. As you can see, there are now widgets here in the blog and at the forum that’ll remind us on our tasks. The other great benefit is that you can subscribe to a task feed that’ll tell you the 10 most urgent task:
Last but not least: We have a facebook page now. The facebook group was pretty successful and still exists, but you may consider becoming a fan of the facebook page too:
thanks,
atti
We got a title: This is Joe
Mar 27th
Hi,
We already have a finished screenplay, but it lacked a title for both the series and the episode. So we voted for them and here are the results:
Series title:
This is Joe
Episode title:
Pizza delivery school
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Now that we know the titles, let me announce the tasks for creating fancy lettering and logos. If you are a gifted 2D designer make a draft and let us know.
thanks,
atti
Muffin Game Development
Mar 22nd
Some of you might know, I’m in my last semester at grad school and this term I attend a course called “Game Art and Level Design”. Besides the theory we have to create a small game in a group of four. My colleages agreed to pick up the muffin’s story to create a casual game around it!
Now important: How does this relate to the animation project?
I do have to make this assignment anyways, so the plan is to do stuff here that i can use in the game and in the animation as well in order to save time.
I’m especially thinking about the environment, the city and assets.
For now i don’t plan on making the game a community project too, because I’m not sure if this is ok with my professor. it wouldn’t make much sense to teach someone the aspects of level design while the actual design is done by others.
However, I have to check the opportunities here if someone is interested. just drop a note.
Some details:
It’ll be a webbrowser game developed with the unity game engine.
The intro will be the same as in the animation. It’s going to be a casual racing game where you have to get to the finishing line before the pizza gets cold, but the main goal is to frighten out the chef as much as you can by hitting all kinds of obstacles and making crazy stunts.
Hope you like the idea,
atti
Screenplay done
Mar 21st
Hi.
It’s been way too long since we posted some news here. Lot’s of things are going on at the muffin project. Most important:
The screenplay is done
When we say “done”, that means there won’t be big changes anymore, just polishing. You can still suggest improvements.
We took a lot of time to do this, but i think it totally paid of. Thanks to all of you who patiently followed the screenplay brainstorm thread in the forums.
After a lot of words: please read the intro screenplay and the first episode’s screenplay yourself here:
Searching for titles
That brings us to the next thing on the list: We still haven’t decided for a title. Not for the Series nor for the first episode. Some users did post good suggestions and right now we’re voting for the best ones. You can find the polls in the forums:
Series title poll thread
Episode title poll thread
Concept phase starting
Some artists already did some sketches and scribbles for the muffin project. Now that the screenplay is done we’ll announce the concept phase officially to everyone very soon.
Call to subscribe
Guys, just do it:
What the project was missing before was the opportunity to get informed as soon as a new interesting task becomes available. For example if you’re interested in 3D modelling, right now there’s no task for you.
You can now subscribe to this blog (look at the subscription form at the right). If you also register, you can select what categories you’re interested in and get news from those topics only. More about subscriptions here.
Thanks,
atti
And the winner is…
Feb 4th
I happy to announce the winner of the story election. Congratulations to Saintograph for his story idea
Pizza Delivery School
I want to thank everyone involved in the voting, and especially those of you who wrote stories or tried to improve them. You guys rock!
Now that we have a story, lots of open tasks became available for those who want to participate. Take a look at them in the tasks section.
Besides collecting visual references and doing first sketches the most important task for now is to polish the screenplay. You can find the active thread about it in the forum.
stay tuned!
atti
