Parallax Scrolling

But first, just a word or two about backgrounds,

In some cases I think that the design of the surroundings is far more important than the design of the player character, the backgrounds can give you important, visual clues as to what kind of world you are exploring and what sort of things you might encounter. Backgrounds also teach you the history of the world you are in and in some cases react to your presence in that world. I think they hold a much more significant contribution to the narrative of the game than the player character.

I'm particularly invested in 2D games and 2D graphics, so naturally I will base my dissertation off of my ability to make great backgrounds in 2D, and I've compiled a couple of references of the things I especially like;

Mario has always had great backgrounds, I'm not even sure if they use 2D sprites that give the illusion of actually being 3D, or actual 3D models on a 2D plane. Either way, I think that Mario has always been a testament to how great 2D game sprites can be.

Most recently I've really liked the backgrounds in Rayman origins, this game is very enjoyable because of the slick controls, the running and jumping mechanics but the thing that does it for me is the colourful graphics. It's been hard to find a game with such a wide pallet nowadays. Plus everything in this looks hand drawn, which really makes me appreciate it more.

BlazBlue has fantastic backgrounds too.

I could keep listing games that I like with backgrounds that I like in them, but I don't want to do that, for now I want to talk about what they have in common and what I really want to experiment with in part of my dissertation; Parallax Scrolling.

Parallax Scrolling is a technique used in 2D animation to create a sense of depth in the world you are playing. It achieves this feel just by having multiple images layered over each other and moving at different speeds, things in the back would be moving slower because they are further away, the things in the foreground would be moving with the player because the player is in the foreground, and things passing quickly would be on the upper most layer.

This is actually a technique that is not unique to video games, it's been around since the early days of animation and works on multiple levels and for a lot of different purposes web design included, but what I would like to focus on is how it affects the 2D plane, because of my dissertation.

I am very much looking forward to playing around with this technique during my dissertation.

Readings

We need 10 readings to use for our dissertation, and here are the books/journal articles/readings that I'm going to be using during the course of this academic year;

Melissinos, C (2012). The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect. New York: Welcome Books.

This book would be valuable to me because it contains a lot of examples of art in video games done well, it displays a wide range of video game art styles and talks a lot about how the examples it presents work.

I would use this book for examples to learn from, or as a source of ideas for things like colour pallets in the backgrounds that I would do, or what kind of settings I would go for, if I were to run out of inspiration.

Whittaker, H. Halas, J (2009). Timing for Animation. 2nd ed. Oxford: Elsevier.

This is an old book, first published in the 80s and then re-published in 2009. I have used this book to improve my animation skills in the past and I'd like to use it again, it talks a lot about the principles of animation and timing, as the title suggests.

It also talks in part about inanimate objects, about physics in animation and a large variety of things that I will find useful if I pursue animation for my dissertation.




Williams, R (2012). The Animator's Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion and Internet Animators. London: Faber & Faber.


I would like to use this book for the same reason as the previous,  it has a lot of information about 2D physics and a lot of general lessons on animation.








For now these are the only books I can find to help me out, as I get closer to the hand in date of my proposal I'll be updating this post as I get closer to the proposal until my quota of 10 books is filled.

Bloggertation Disserblogging

This is the first entry of my dissertation blog, I don't quite know what to write for my first entry but whatever.

I guess for now I'll make a run-down of the ideas I had for my dissertation over the Summer and what I think I'll end up doing in the end;

• Making a game.
• Making a 3D model.
• Doing some game scripts.
• Making an animated cartoon/something animated.

Making a game

First one I thought about since the end of the last academic year, and pretty much right off the bat I thought that this was going to be a bad idea(when reflecting on how well my solo game from my first year went), but still, the dissertation is supposed to challenge me and make me learn something new. I have room to experiment with what I can do and what I can't do in regards to code, or I can learn it from scratch. So this is a viable option for me, the rationale could be about me improving my coding ability.

Making a 3D model

I was pretty interested in doing some sort of huge 3D model for my dissertation for a while because I only really started to enjoy 3D modelling in the second year. The problem was, however, that I know nothing about 3D modelling beyond that what any regular novice would know, more than I know about coding, but less than what I know about animation, art, writing and design. Because of this problem I'm pretty hesitant to do 3D, I'm afraid I would under-scope or over-scope the project, under scoping it being the more likely scenario. But there is still the possibility of me doing a 3D model of some sort, I've got some time to decide still.

Doing some game scripts

Also something interesting that I would enjoy, I quite liked the script writing/storyboarding and concept arting we did in our 1st Year so I thought why not? To be fair the only reason I can think of against doing something like this is that I think, personally, it would be too easy for me and it wouldn't be very impressive in the end. I still have this up in the "To be considered" box of my brain, but I'll probably not end up doing this.

Making an animated cartoon/something animated.

The option I pretty much decided on, was to do something animated. This option evolved for me from when I first thought about doing something animated for my dissertation. First, I thought about making a cartoon of some sort, this would mean that I would get to push my animation skills and also try my hand at script writing and video editing(something I would like to learn at some point). Problem with this, is that this would have become an extremely long project that I would regret doing halfway in through the year. So I scrapped that idea, it wouldn't have had much to do with games anyway. Then I thought about doing some animated sprites for a hypothetical game, but after sitting on that idea for a week or two I also scrapped it, I had already made a series of animated sprites for my 2nd Year Anymation project. Then I started thinking about making an animated cut scene or trailer for a hypothetical game, but again, I quickly perished the thought for the same reasons I didn't want to make a cartoon.

Now I've settled on making a series of animated backgrounds for a hypothetical 2D game using different styles to create different atmospheres. I created backgrounds for my 1st Year KS1 group game, but those were of a very poor quality because of my working habits at the time, plus I want to see what I can do now that my animation and drawing skills have improved.

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So these were my idea's, if I'm allowed I'll probably end up doing a series of animated backgrounds using different styles to accomplish different goals. That's what I'd like to do anyway.