Asbjørn has been chosen as the project leader for our work. So for this case he has been working a lot with project management. He has created a custom word template for all our documents in Passive Aggressive development, and he has also designed a unique style for the layout of the documents. After doing so he renovated the old plans and schedules, and put them into a more lucid and user-friendly overview. We now have improved plans for meeting schedules, milestones and sprints. He has also refined our product backlog, release backlog, project directive and the game plot with our new design. With these new plans we will achieve a better workflow and we will have a clearer view of what’s going on and what is left to be done. All the documents can be found at this blog, in the left side bar.
He has also continued working on the tiles. The tiles now have a uniform color, with low saturation and mid-balanced brightness. This makes it possible for us to easily change the color of the tiles in different scenarios with a simple color overlay. For example, for the jungle stages we apply a green overlay to recolor the entire scene in green. With this technique we save a lot of time, we don’t have to make individual platforms for every stage.
Asbjørn has also animated the frog which he vectorized last week. For this animation he used mainly straight ahead animation technique, combination of frame by frame and tweening. In the anticipation part of the animation he used tweening in the bending of the knees and joints. To achieve the right spacing in the jump, Asbjørn used frame by frame from the moment the frog shifts its weight upward on to the jump and until the landing. To get a smooth bending in the joints for the frog to get into its original position after the landing he used tweening again. Here is a preview of the animation:
In order to use tweening technique, except for the shape tween, you have to create symbols of the graphics you want to animate. He separated all the body parts into individual graphic symbols and moved their rotation point to the joints of the figure. By doing this it is much easier to keep the parts in their right position, and also moving and rotating them along the arcs of the figure. To create a consistent illusion of the frog he implemented some squash and stretch in the jumping animation.
In order to use tweening technique, except for the shape tween, you have to create symbols of the graphics you want to animate. He separated all the body parts into individual graphic symbols and moved their rotation point to the joints of the figure. By doing this it is much easier to keep the parts in their right position, and also moving and rotating them along the arcs of the figure. To create a consistent illusion of the frog he implemented some squash and stretch in the jumping animation.
At last he and Yngvar worked on implementing the story into the story slides. For this case the game has got all the back story of the character integrated in the intro sequence as a comic story.
Sondre has during this case almost finished the snake-giraffe, with just a few minor details remaining. Most of the music for the game are roughly finished, even though most of them will be sounding quite different in the finished game. We will not change the structure of the music and sound effect all that much, but we will likely change the instruments themselves. He is developing a big library of sounds to my fruityloops engine, the problem of course, being to make them work in this program. Certain gig. files are not easily read in fruity loops, as an example, so he has tried quite a few different plug-ins and programs. This is again a big challenge. As he have just started making himself known with one program, he has to go on to a new one, Halion beeing the newest. You can listen to some of the songs here accompanied with some beatiful backgrounds, also from Mr.Bones adventure:
Mountain Song
In the scary cave
The adventure starts, jungle
Funky ice
Another problem that has occured with the sounds that were default in fruity loops, is that some of them have some ¨slowness¨. Let us explain with an example: If I put a sound in excactly the start of the first bar, it doesn't neccessarily start excactly at that bar, but a few miliseconds later. This can really kill the flow in the tunes. If you listen to the scary cave song, you can clearly hear this in about 1.20 and again in 1.35-1.40 with the deep canon-like drums. We couldn't really get them to fit perfectly. We have now figured out how I with only some small adjustments can make them fit and but I will keep the old song posted here as an example.
Besides of the pure technical parts, the biggest challenge is to make music and sounds that fits the atmosphere and mood of each level. This also makes it easier somehow to create audio, since it gives us a ¨launch pad¨, we have something to work out from. He has been listening a lot to music from other games, mainly super nintendo games. A lot of them have really good soundtracks, especially Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3. The reason why he listened most to old soundtracks, is because it fits the ¨simple¨ flashstyle better. The audio needs not only to sound good, but to also work well together with the rest of the design in the game.
Gisle has focused on implementing the graphical user interface (GUI), music and items. It was a challenge to get all the pieces working fluently together. For example, we had to find a way to hitTest an item, send it to the GUI, place it in the inventory, and remove it from the map, all this happened across four different classes.
We also had to think out a clever way to "save" the items you already had picked up. So that when you died, they were still in your inventory, and also did not appear on the map. This took some brain-twisting to figure out, but we finally made it with the help of a few extra integers here and there.
We also finished a fully functional puzzle, this posed some new challenges, since we had to make strict rules about how the puzzle were to be solved. It took some time to figure out how to check if the puzzle was completed, but it finally worked and it's now both fun and challenging!
After the puzzle was finished we also had to implement the hints about how to solve it. This was fairly easy because we had already planned the GUI setup to be used this way.
In this case Hong has still working with lava tiles and animate bubble tiles. The tiles look more like lava, but it had to much waves on it and look to much like water. But since we do not need lava tils yet, we deside to let Hong work more with it. We deside to make 3 different bubbles, these can be placed anywere. The technique use in these tiles were frame by frame and shape tween in Flash.
We also decide that we have to make a puzzel during this case, and Hong was given the task to make some symbols. She designed some symbols and we choose seven of them in the puzzel game. Here are some of the symbols that were made.
Yngvar was given the task of finishing the last remaining animation for the character by creating a death animation. Now we have a set of animations for the main character that display all the main actions the character performs – running, jumping, dying, and standing idle:
Other animations may be added later on to give the character more “life”, but these four animations are the most important ones at the moment.
Other animations may be added later on to give the character more “life”, but these four animations are the most important ones at the moment.
Finding a death animation that worked well, took some time. The main problem here was finding one that works well and looks fairly natural in all scenarios, for example both while jumping, while running, and while standing still. Several death animations were experimented with, and the one we decided on was inspired by the character death animation you’ll find in, for instance, Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, or Braid. When killed, a falling animation is activated, and the character falls down in front of the platforms and out of the screen.
In addition to doing most of the protagonist’s animations, Yngvar has been in charge of doing illustrations for the presentation of the story, as was mentioned in the previous blog entry. These have now been finished, totaling at nine images. The illustrations have been done in a way that presents the story in the form of a comic book. Doing this instead of doing animated cut-scenes saves us a lot of time that we can instead spend on optimizing the visuals in the more interesting parts of the game. Below you’ll find a selection of the images used to illustrate the story of the game.
Yngvar also made another background for the jungle levels of the game using roughly the same technique shown in the video in the previous blog entry. The technique here differs slightly in that it makes use of Pen Tool paths with stroke applied to them in order to create the more smooth organic lines in vines hanging from the trees. You can see the result below.
 |
| Game background for a jungle level |
The last things Yngvar did during this third case, was creating a proper start menu for the game, in addition to creating the screen showed upon death. The start menu had been made earlier. However, this one was only a placeholder, and a new and better looking start menu with proper gameplay instructions has now been added.
 |
| The screen which explains how you control the game |
Sondre has during this case almost finished the snake-giraffe, with just a few minor details remaining. Most of the music for the game are roughly finished, even though most of them will be sounding quite different in the finished game. We will not change the structure of the music and sound effect all that much, but we will likely change the instruments themselves. He is developing a big library of sounds to my fruityloops engine, the problem of course, being to make them work in this program. Certain gig. files are not easily read in fruity loops, as an example, so he has tried quite a few different plug-ins and programs. This is again a big challenge. As he have just started making himself known with one program, he has to go on to a new one, Halion beeing the newest. You can listen to some of the songs here accompanied with some beatiful backgrounds, also from Mr.Bones adventure:
Mountain Song
In the scary cave
The adventure starts, jungle
Funky ice
Another problem that has occured with the sounds that were default in fruity loops, is that some of them have some ¨slowness¨. Let us explain with an example: If I put a sound in excactly the start of the first bar, it doesn't neccessarily start excactly at that bar, but a few miliseconds later. This can really kill the flow in the tunes. If you listen to the scary cave song, you can clearly hear this in about 1.20 and again in 1.35-1.40 with the deep canon-like drums. We couldn't really get them to fit perfectly. We have now figured out how I with only some small adjustments can make them fit and but I will keep the old song posted here as an example.
Besides of the pure technical parts, the biggest challenge is to make music and sounds that fits the atmosphere and mood of each level. This also makes it easier somehow to create audio, since it gives us a ¨launch pad¨, we have something to work out from. He has been listening a lot to music from other games, mainly super nintendo games. A lot of them have really good soundtracks, especially Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3. The reason why he listened most to old soundtracks, is because it fits the ¨simple¨ flashstyle better. The audio needs not only to sound good, but to also work well together with the rest of the design in the game.
Gisle has focused on implementing the graphical user interface (GUI), music and items. It was a challenge to get all the pieces working fluently together. For example, we had to find a way to hitTest an item, send it to the GUI, place it in the inventory, and remove it from the map, all this happened across four different classes.
We also had to think out a clever way to "save" the items you already had picked up. So that when you died, they were still in your inventory, and also did not appear on the map. This took some brain-twisting to figure out, but we finally made it with the help of a few extra integers here and there.
We also finished a fully functional puzzle, this posed some new challenges, since we had to make strict rules about how the puzzle were to be solved. It took some time to figure out how to check if the puzzle was completed, but it finally worked and it's now both fun and challenging!
After the puzzle was finished we also had to implement the hints about how to solve it. This was fairly easy because we had already planned the GUI setup to be used this way.
In this case Hong has still working with lava tiles and animate bubble tiles. The tiles look more like lava, but it had to much waves on it and look to much like water. But since we do not need lava tils yet, we deside to let Hong work more with it. We deside to make 3 different bubbles, these can be placed anywere. The technique use in these tiles were frame by frame and shape tween in Flash.
We also decide that we have to make a puzzel during this case, and Hong was given the task to make some symbols. She designed some symbols and we choose seven of them in the puzzel game. Here are some of the symbols that were made.
And at last she made a new background that is inside an ice cave. This background will be use later in the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment