I like doing things my own way, which is arc-typical of computer geeks. When faced with a problem, the default stance is “How can I fix this?” rather than “Is there anything out there that can fix this?”, something which leads to long hours of tedious work that could have been avoided with one clever Google search. This project is no exception and I will try to detail the amount of struggling I had to do to get this damn thing to animate properly. Read More »
The worlds most arrogant tech company
So here I am, taking a break from developing our game for iDevices to check out what we may expect from Apple’s hardware department in the time to come. I’m greeted and completly baffled by the notice above. That’s right, my workstation is not worthy of viewing the unveiling of the new platforms it’s currently developing software for. This makes no sense at all. There’s really no technological reason to exclude potential customers based on their current brands of hardware. It’s just so very silly.
Loopy loops
Just thought I’d share what I’m doing these days. The session with stuntman Bjørn resulted in a load of clips like the one above, and I’m currently treating them in Illustrator CS5 by placing frames as layers and painting them with the Blob Brush. Then I export to a layered Photoshop document, do some fixes and finally export the frames into .png files. These .png’s will in turn be ordered into sprite sheets, and Mike will use this to make the dude appear in-game.
It’s going a lot faster now, mostly thanks to having decided what the character should look like and understanding the importance of testing. In the looping clip above, A is the original footage, B one of my tests (head is pasted, another lesson) and C the clip so far. There’s a slight jerk just on the loop, because I had to cut two practically identical frames. That’s why C is not in sync with A or B.
I’ll keep painting, aiming for making one of these every evening I can get to the office, and I’m working towards finishing character animations in total (robots included) within September.
Cocos2D
Taken from Fully Illustrated
Due to our recent departure from Flash we were left with the difficult choice of what to go for next. There was always the option to build everything ourselves, utilizing nothing but the built-in OpenGL ES functions to provide the graphics, but that sounded like it would be a horrible arduous task which would bring to question my dedication or will to live, so we opted instead of finding some library or framework that Apple wouldn’t reject us for using. Eventually we settled for Cocos2D, which provides a lot of fancy features but still requires the game to be coded in the wonderful Objective-C language (saving us from Apple’s banhammer of doom). Oh, if there was only some way to code in a friendlier language, maybe coupled with a complicated and thoroughly developed graphics engine, and then export it as a native iPhone app… someone should really invent that. Read More »
Robots, ninja friends and new office
I’ve been so busy the last three weeks, I really haven’t had a minute to sit down and document anything on this blog. We’ve gotten a lot done, a lot of stuff I’ve been really anxious about. And, I’ve moved into a new office! It’s even cheaper than the last one, it came with other people so my evenings aren’t as lonely as they were, and there’s no curfew. I celebrated that fact by editing footage until 5 in the morning the other night.
I share with a number of great people, doing all sorts of things.
Change of course
During the development of the original SUM game we got stuck, and moved the ship in another direction. What happened? Well, two things happened. Read More »
Adobe CS5 FTW
Just downloaded the trial version of Adobe CS5, and wanted to make a quick note about its awesomeness. Most important for our stuff is probably the much talked about “content aware fill“, together with the skeleton-tool almost any photo can be turned into a clean, basic texture within minutes. I feed that into my newly acquired copy of ImageSynth, slap the result together in our chosen Tile Editor, and creating interesting maps couldn’t have been more intuitive.
Now it remains to be seen whether we’ll get funding to KEEP CS5, or if I’m back to CS4 in a month. In other “news”, Mike is making some great progress with the code and some hilarious place holder sprites from some Sonic game. Things are going well, some interesting updates shouldn’t be far away.
Working with tiles
Working with tiles is fast and fun. We’re testing out the open source Tiled Map Editor, and so far it’s dead simple yet really versatile. Mike will be able to marry the information from this grid-based editor and our work-in-progress game engine (Cocoa based this time around). I’m making the tiles in the incredible program Zbrush, and after a couple of tests this set up seems like a match made in heaven. Zbrush is ridiculously fast, the tiling is predictable enough in itself (with some adjustments in Photoshop), and putting it together using a tile sheet is a breeze.
Here’s a tile as it looks in the Zbrush editor, before it’s rendered out with an orthographic camera. Being able to render out multiple materials from Zbrush is a great time saver, in this test I’ve only used the gorilla material.
This is rendered out in HD, all we do is based on 1920 x 1280. Then, to fit the grid we’ve established, each square tile is resized to 20 x 20 px. This is based on the final grid being 24 x 16, on a 480 x 320 resolution.
Working in the Tiled Map Editor is simple once I’ve put all the components I want on to a Tile Sheet. The resulting object show by the arrow here. I love the way this program lets me choose which tiles to paint, and these are then placed in to grid like a stamp-tool. It’s FAST, once we have the parts.
Then, based on predetermined map designs, the screen is populated with graphics in a layer system. The old games for Super Nintendo, run on the emulator Zsnes, have given us great insight as in how the layers are composed. The emulater lets us toggle each layer on and off using the keys 1-6.
Finally, I just put something together with the test-tiles I made and stuck the running loop on it, if I squint my eyes it does give an idea about how the game will look. Kinda. Bear in mind none of this was actually designed, and I can’t wait to realize some of my drawings in the same manner.
Bjørn runs. See Bjørn run.
Some more motion capture/rotoscoping. It’s not as straight forward as I thought, turns out frame rate and carefully selecting or removing frames makes all the difference. We bought a plastic water pistol today, and will continue our tests as soon as I can make these suckers a) blend and b) behave on a grid.
3D Models
For the stuff we’ve done so far, I’ve mixed and matched a bit between photography and 3D elements before painting it together using vectors. I use Maya for the 3D-stuff, and I thought I’d show some of the backgrounds as they look in the program. The renders aren’t great, as I’ll always lose a lot of detail in the painting process anyway. Global illumination, a bit of ambient occlusion and mostly real simple ray-traced shadows. Anyway, here’s the models:
