New Background related Sketches + Stuff

This week I've just been doing some preperation preparation before I jump into the belly of this beast. To start off I did a similar sort of thing I did for the last background and sketched out a quick layout scheme;

Because this background is going to be a library I think it's appropriate to keep it simple seeing as most of the things in it are going to be blocky book cases and stuff. I like the simplicity because it saves time, that is also a great additional bonus.

The foreground would have some desk lamps there to create a more "Library" feel to it. I'm not sure if I want them to provide any light or not yet though. The "chandelier" will act as the main light source for the immediate background and it will be animated so that it flickers.

There's going to be a lot of bookshelves crossing over in the background and the scrolling effect is going to come from the numbers of different isles of bookshelves in the background.

Here's a concept I did for the animation of a haunted book. This is basically a key guide for me to use when I come around to making the books, because I didn't do this sort of thing for the bats in my last background I found the unfolding of their wings really annoying to animate.

Basically these are the three "Keyframes" for this animation, because I'm going to use sprite art to animate the book I really should know what I'm doing since bitmap sprites are really hard to animate as opposed to vector stuff in Flash, at least in my experience that is.

The first frame is the default state for the book, the second keyframe is when the book is up in the air after kicking itself up.
The third key is after it reaches the height of it's flight and begins to fall back down to the floor, it shuts itself and then falls back down into frame 1.

This is essentially the same thing as above, only this animation would have two frames, one where there is light and one where there isn't.

I want the light to light up the foreground while it's on and then flicker on and off to make the background a little more spooky.

And the other thing I did was make a quick mock-up of a bookshelf, I'll eventually be turning this into a proper bookshelf, sometime next week probably but this is just to help me figure out the scale of the background a bit better.

Obviously I'll make the pattern of the books different per bookshelf to avoid repetition but that's a given.

Learning Week	CGD Schedule	Project Timeline
	Induction
Week 1	Game Making Icebreaker
Week 2	Teaching Week
Week 3	Teaching Week
Week 4	Teaching Week
Week 5	Teaching Week
Week 6	Teaching Week Dissertation Proposal	Dissertation Proposal submission.
Week 7	Teaching Week	Research into Themes
Week 8	Teaching Week	Concept Art
Week 9	Teaching Week	Create a plan for the background composition & Asset List
Week 10	Teaching Week	Create Background Layers
Week 11	Teaching Week	Create Background Layers
Week 12	Teaching Week	Create Assets
	Christmas Vacation	Create Assets
		Animate Assets
Week 13	Teaching Week	Animate Assets
Week 14	Teaching Week Seminar Presentation	Seminar Presentation Research into Actionscript
Week 15	Teaching Week	Compile Assets and Background Layers and apply Actionscript
Week 16	Teaching Week	Polish 1st Background
Week 17	Teaching Week	1st Background Deliverable
Week 18	Teaching Week	Begin planning second background
Week 19	Teaching Week	Planning second background cont’d
Week 20	Teaching Week	Begin producing static assets
Week 21	Teaching Week	Create assets
Week 22	Teaching Week	Begin producing animated assets
	Easter Vacation	Create animated assets
		Create animated assets
		Begin production on background layers
Week 23	Teaching Week	Create background layers
Week 24	Teaching Week	Compile with actionscript
Week 25	Teaching Week	Final Touches
Week 26	Teaching Week	Final Touches
Week 27	Dissertation Submission

Re-re-revised Timeline

Code Part 2 + a very wordy blog entry.

This week I got some help with the animation code because I am apparently inept at actionscript after all... Well at least I can read it sort of... and... manipulate it? Well whatever, this week I got some code for my bat to play it's animation randomly.

Again, I didn't write this but this is what I was trying to get on my own but apparently couldn't. Looks easy right? Yeah, I think it looks easy too, it's just a shame I can never think of how to do this on my own.

Anyway, this point of this code is to get the bat to play it's animation randomly as long as certain conditions are met in the code, something I tried to do on my own but couldn't.

The code generates a random number between 1 and 1000 in the screenshot and the animation only plays if the number is higher than 950, so right now the odds of the animation actually playing are 5/100. I can make the animation play more frequently or less frequently by changing the highest number from 1000, and making the lower number higher to make the animation play less often or lower to make it play more often.

And this week for the actual background that's what I've been playing around with mostly.

Moving on from the depressing topic of my actionscript ineptitude...

It looks like I'm going to start my next background soon, what I'm thinking of doing is leaving the code as it is, I have enough data for now and finishing up the learning of small, niche, bits of actionscript for later and now I'm going to start looking at making another background.

I had actually planned not to make another background a week ago, and said that in my seminar presentation. But Rob and Chris thought that it was better to make two backgrounds instead of one, so I think I'm going to do that. It's that or set hard deliverables for this background, which I would find hard to do considering that I honestly don't think that a piece of art is deliverable until it's complete.

But that's just me.

Anyway, I'm thinking of going for a different style in this background and I'm thinking of going pixel art all over this one. It's an interesting monster, pixel art, and a favourite of some Indie developers. So it probably won't hurt to try and be better at making pixel backgrounds.

This is a small example of a background I did using pixel art for my old sprite comic that I did before I applied for University, and to be honest I'm not entirely a fan, I'd even go so far as saying that it's a bit ugly...

Anyway, this is just one of the examples of how good my sprite art was back then, I have no idea how good it is now.



This second one I was a little more proud of, and I think it's better even now, but it still isn't really good so I think there is enough reason for me to try and develop my spriting skills, wouldn't you?








Either way, I made a list of some more themes on top of the old ones that I could have recycled;

High Way

I don't know, I just have this idea stuck in my head of a car made of pixels driving down the road and out the window there is the landscape also made of pixels, or a sea made of pixels or something. Either way, I don't want to write off this idea after some due consideration. Also this could be a good opportunity to help me learn how to loop a road using actionscript or something.

Modern Cityscape

This is a very similar idea to the ruined cityscape concept I had earlier, but I think that using relatively low detail sprites to show a detailed city is more visually interesting than using low detail sprites for a post-apocalyptic ruin. I could make high detail sprites but I'm thinking that a common theme between these two backgrounds will be simplicity.

Haunted Library

Out of the list of bonus background idea's I think is my favourite one. It can make the scrolling look really good and I could make it look like an amazing, never ending and spooky ghost library. I think I'm going to end up using this sort of setting for my second background.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'm gonna stop writing before this gets too wordy.

The Rise of Mt Fuji and Return of the Lighthouse Island

So I took a break from trying to code the animation for now(seeing as how I will for sure need help with the next step) to try and make some general improvements again.

On the back-most layer I decided to add some more terrain(as well as make the sky darker because, I don't know, it just feels better this way) in the form of several Mt. Fuji's and such. Before this addition to me it felt like the background didn't really inform the player in what kind of world they are in right now, or it just felt like it was a bit flat... or I don't know, it was missing something desperately.

Anyway, I decided to add some mountains to help inform the hypothetical players in what kind of terrain they might be finding themselves in. For sure, they would assume that the world they are in is rocky because of the cave and some stones around the lighthouse, but the mountains will help emphasise that point, as well as add something to the negative space that was there before.

I decided to add little detail to the mountains furthest in the back to help add to the feeling of distance, if something is further away you see all of it, but less of it. The mountains in front are also a little bit under detailed, partly for the same purpose but also I want to stick to this sort of recurring minimalistic theme throughout the background.

Returning to rocky places, I decided to change the beach with the lighthouse on it to do the whole "it feels like a rocky world" thing I'm going for.

I scattered some pebbles around the beach, in keeping with the simple art style I avoided making them too detailed, however I made the stones different shades.

I am now deliberating over if I should keep that beach as it is or make it look more sandy, not that this is a major change... Well it could be, or not? I don't know. I'm pretty sure I can trust myself to do whatever's right in the end.




Oh yeah, the water has a gradient on it now too but it still feels a little flat. I'll probably add to it again later.

I can code by myself! Part 1

Okay, admittedly I did ask Chris for some advice before Christmas in regards to the making the background scroll and he basically showed me what the code was, but it's been a while since then and I forgot how to do it already(in hindsight I should have done it then and there). So this morning I spent some time trying to code the scrolling when the arrow keys are pressed, and I did it. I'm kind of proud of myself actually, clearly I've come a long way since the start of the course, I can now do simple action script on my own.

I know that this doesn't look like much to the experienced coder or something but to me this is like climbing Mt. Everest.

I put the action script on the timeline because linking script files to game files is still far too advanced for me, but I'm making some amazing progress with my code skills.




Now that I've got the scroll to work I have to work on how fast it scrolls and stuff, oh and also the animation for the bats needs code... Well instead of despairing about doing more code I'm just going to bask in my glory for the time being.

Making slight improvements.

Okay so this week I mostly focused on touching up the background in certain places. First of all I tried to draw more of a contrast between the cavern wall layer and the bridge. To do this I decided that I would need to create a stronger contrast between the two, so I decided to make it so the cave wall is darker and as some actual shadows on it. I played around with gradients in flash to get this effect;

Next up I played around a lot with the "Path" part of my background, generally I felt it lacking detail, never mind it contrasting with the cavewall. It's hard to make things look detailed in flash without spending an immense amount of time and effort, so I went with some big, general things to make it look better than it did already. 

I decided to put in a hard blue gradient at the "Top" part of the path so it stands out more against the cave wall, I also added some highlights to the path to make it look a little more like the path is wet. I'll probably come back to this in the future because at the moment I'm not extremely happy with this.

The other thing I did was add some animation to the stalactites and the stalagmites  I made it look like they are a little wet and water is running down the stalactites and dripping down to create the stalagmites.

The water drips down from these stalactites and there is a watery animation on the stalagmites to accompany this one.

This is the look of it so far. I'm just gonna touch up the sea today I think, and maybe change around some of the stuff on the "Path" later.

I've put off the actionscript part of this for now because unfortunately I haven't been able to come in all week because I have been sick for ages now, but I'm thinking tomorrow I'll get something done about that.