Case 2

Gisle:

During this case I have developed the level editor further. It now supports starting points for the character in each level, so this no longer has to be scripted manually. I have also added support for foreground editing.

Apart from that I have added a levelmanager, and support for deathevents and cutscenes. This works through a switch syntax that checks the current status and then run the corresponding procedures. I have also built in a startmenu and an in-game menu. During all these changes to the script, I have made quite a mess of the code, and regrettably I have encountered some lag after a few restarts. So my first priority now is to clean up the code and make the current build run smoothly. From there on I have to add support for NPC's and hopefully figure out a better way to do the physics.


Asbjørn:

”For this case I have continued working with the platform tiles. It’s now possible to combine walls with the ground tiles. This is effective and useful for creating cave levels. This week I have also fixed the idle animation for the main character. In this procedure I combined a lot of animation techniques. I started separating the character’s body parts and creating them into single graphic symbols and divided them into several layers. For the arms, head, backpack and feet I used classic tween. For the tie I used straight ahead frame by frame animation. This was a bit hard to accomplish, the animation runs at 30 FPS and I had to make a smooth animation for the tie to follow the chest as the character breathes. When animating the chest I found out an easier way to get a smooth movement. I went for pose to pose animation; I drew the pose for the character when the chest was at its maximum level, and another pose of the character when the chest was at the smallest level and used shape tween between these two poses. After doing this the character looked completely “!smashed” so I had to add some shape hints for the shape tween to work properly. This helped out a bit, but for some reason the outline of the chest disappears during the tween. To get control of this I converted all in-between frames to keyframes. Now I just had to apply the stroke to all keyframes and I could adjust each frame to create some more realistic spacing in the animation. I have also been working with some project management and planning our work and future goals. The plans and backlogs are available here:”

Product backlog
Release Log
Meeting plan
Sprints
Plot

”After getting this done I started drawing an NPC in flash. I had a design done by Yngvar, my work has been to vectorize and clarify the NPC for Animation. Here is a look of the NPC from the concept art to the flash version: ”

The Albino-Frog-Anteater

Sondre:


"This week has mainly consisted of further developing the songs and puzzles for the game, as well as starting to animate a NPC. The NPC turned out to be hard to animate, since the NPC is a snake-giraffe. That means a snake with giraffe-legs looking exactly like this”:

"Not only does this ¨animal¨ have four legs with spesific patterns on each of them, but it's also got a long body with a knot on the middle. It will work itself out though and be finished at the end of next week. As for the music, it has turned out to be a challenge as well. I know in my head and can play on the guitar what the songs should sound like, but to move them from there and into the computer is no easy task. I have become somewhat familiar with fruityloops and have made all my song there. The riffs are coming pretty easy to me, but the mixing with sounds and to make only digital instruments sound good is the hard part. On one of the songs if have used a real guitar for a guitar solo, and i'm planning to use as much non-digital sounds as possible, like for example clapping which appears in one of our songs. I am planning to post some of my songs here in the near future, as soon as my youtube account is good to go. The puzzles are still only sketches, but we will need a lot of them, which means we will be needing a lot of ideas. I could have posted some of them here, but I don't want to ruin it for ya.”

Yngvar:

”My assignment for case 2 was to finish up the main character’s run cycle and also create a jump animation for the character. The run animation ended up looking a lot better than the first one I did, so it’s a good thing I decided to redo it, like I mentioned in case 1. I’m also glad the character’s visual style is simpler now than it was, because it let me animate the jump a lot more easily than I would have in the previous style.

In addition to doing more animations for the character, I also tried to work out a simple technique for drawing backgrounds for the game. I have seen a technique used by some artists for doing quick digital paintings that look clean and the technique uses only the lasso selection tool, the paint bucket and the gradient tool. The resulting look of the paintings fit well into Flash’s vector-based visual style, as seen below in my attempt at the technique. The same painting tools are found in Flash, so the technique has the added advantage of creating backgrounds in either bitmap or vector, depending on which works best for the game.”

”I also made a video showing an example of how I paint these backgrounds in Photoshop so the rest of the group can take inspiration from it when they paint backgrounds if they choose to. The following video has been sped up 280%, so the actual time it took to paint the background was about 28 minutes.”

”We decided to use a series of drawings to present the game’s story to the player in small cut-scenes. This week we fleshed out the story with more details, and my last assignment for case 2 was to sketch up these drawings so they would, when accompanied by text, introduce the story in an understandable way. I managed to finish up eight of the nine drawings I had planned, but we need a couple more drawings to make it work well. I will post these drawings in the blog entry for case 3 when they’re all done.”





Hong: 

To this case I still working with background and Npc`s. When I was done with the background I found out that I cannot use this background. It looks totally different from the rest of the other drawing. It also took a lot of time to make, and that’s a little difficult if all the background will take so long time to make. However I look at what Yngvar have done and he shows me a technique we can use to make backgrounds. This technique is a lot easier to follow and it also takes less time to draw. Since it’s more than one who makes background was this a perfect solution to get the same style of the game.

This is the first background style:

And this is the second and the one that we shall use:

I also start with making lava and water tiles. At first I think this is easy and I already have the illusion of how both lava and water shall look like. But when I start to animate this it’s a lot more complicated then I think. The wave and bobbles and texture will not move as I want. I start with using frame by frame technique but it turns out to look like nothing but amoebas so I have to work more with this problem to next week.