Case 4

Because we now have a transition between each screen where the next screen slides in, and the edges on the backgrounds we’ve made so far create very visible and ugly seams, we needed to redo the backgrounds so the transitions become seamless.

We agreed on having five screens in the first level. This means we now needed a background for this level that covers five screens seamlessly. The obvious solution is to create a single background with a resolution five times the width of one screen in the level, and then cut it into five pieces once it is done. When using the five pieces in correct order, the seams become invisible.

In addition to creating seamless backgrounds for the jungle level, Yngvar also developed a better technique for painting backgrounds. The new technique is similar to the old one, in that it makes heavy use of gradients. But instead of messing up the gradients by painting onto them, the new technique revolves around painting on the layers’ masks. By painting on the masks, you can add or remove trees, grass, rocks, etc. and still maintain a smooth gradient.

The atmosphere of the levels’ backgrounds is enhanced by creating Overlay layers with gradient colors on them. We’ve experimented with using this to make it seem like the day passes into night as you progress though the area. This was done by using the gradient seen below.

Yngvar also made custom brushes for painting grass and leaves in a way that is easy for others to replicate. If you want to use these brushes, open the picture below in Photoshop. Once you’ve opened it, select the leaf or the grass with the Marquee Tool and go to “Edit -> Define Brush Preset…” Once you have the brush in your list, select it and adjust size, spacing, scattering and angle jitter to suit your need. 

This it has been a lot of focus on sound effects and music. Sondre is currently working on developing a large bank of sound to paint the enviroment. To further enhence the feeling of empathy for the character the player is playing and the situations he is in, fitting sound are a good means. They don't necessarily need to be realistic, (although that works best in most cases) but they do need to fit the enviroment. It's all about not breaking the fourth wall. Not unpurposely anyway. 
When we have enough finished edited sounds, we will use them to make audiotracks to every level. The audiotracks will consist of one atmospheric sound that will last the whole track, and several atmospheric sound that will randomly play every once in a while on each track. As an example, the first level, which is a jungle level, will be consisting of a 3-4 minutes long sound with birdsong, occasionally monkeys screaming and tarzan-shouts. 

For this case Asbjørn has been working on further developing the plans for the entire project. He has made a production plan including all our development documents. With this new plan we can easily navigate using the hyperlinks located on the contents page. This navigating is only functional using Microsoft Office Word. But still it comes in very handy to get a quick overview of the plans and its faster to make changes in different chapters of the document. Asbjørn has also made some changes to the frog animation. Now the frog stretches out his legs to prepare for the landing at an earlier stage. This was done by using pose-to-pose animating frame by frame, which is exactly the same method used when the frog was animated earlier. We have also found out another way to add details to the platforms. By using some simple textures we are able to use bitmap files with overlay blending mode to project details onto the graphics in flash. This way of adding details is less time consuming than drawing overlay details in flash. Here is a picture of the texture, and the texture added to the platforms.

The textures can either be drawn from scratch or made out of photos. To create these textures we use Adobe Photoshop. To make the textures match up with our graphical style we reduce colors and details by using simplifying effects such as cutout and replace color.

During the last week Gisle has developed two new gameplay elements; Ropes and trampolines. These will help us create more varied gameplay and levels. Coding the ropes was a big challenge and caused alot of frustration, due to limited mathskills it took some time to get the ropes to act at least semi-naturally.
After finishing with the rope, Gisle got on with the actual case, which was to create support for music and soundeffects. This was pretty much already done during case 3. All he had to figure out was how to control the volume, so he made a temporary soundmenu and read a little on the internet, twenty minutes later it was functional. It probably needs a little more work, but for now it'll have to wait until more sounds are ready to be put into the game.

Hong have been asked to animate lip sync to a character according to this case. The character is a  history teller that tells the tale of Dr. Bones. The lip sync is a complicated process and it look simple but it takes time to animate the lip to what the character is suposed to say. The mouth have to macht the face expression and body movement. At first we have to plan the dialog for the speech anh sound. Hong draw the mouth expression fist to the manusscript. She been drawn the mout after every words in the manusscript. There are some words that use the same mouth expression.


Here are the mouth dialog she used to animate lip sync in the movieclip. 

As you can see there are more than words for a mouth. When animate she have to use a mirror to se how the mouth looks like when she draw to the dialog. Since the sound are not completely done she draw these mouth and the character and background for him. 

Here is the video of lip sync. The voise used here are of  josh grafton.