Drawing, More Drawing, More Ruddy Drawing also Theora GUI
by Steve Acaster · 02/07/2011 (4:02 pm) · 15 comments
[gravelly_American_voiceover]
Previously on Steve's rambling dev blogs:
[/ gravelly_American_voiceover]
I might have mentioned something about drawing an intro sequence for the narrative campaign part of my game. All the big games have them ... not that I've played any of those things in aeons, infact the previous weekend consisted of Penny Arcade (which I quite liked - a bit grindy though, shame the series got canned) and X-Com Enemy Unknown (which is X-Com UFO Defense ... not sure why the name change between UK/US but hey ...), a game which I actually had on floppy (no really kids, games used to come on plastic squares ... and before that it was tape!), and which I rebought from Steam ... not having a floppy drive anymore ...
Interestingly to mention or not as the case may be 'cos it's just occured to me ... these games all have animated intros, with the 1994 X-Com being closer to the static comic page style one bloke in his man-cave ended up using.
I'd had the overall idea taking up unnecessary amount of room in my brain fro a few years ... admittedly more in gazzillion dollar production values rather than one guy with a cheap and intermitantly malfunctioning A4 tablet from Win98 days who had completely forgotten how to draw ... and line drawing somewhat less simple when your tablet isn't the same aspect ratio as your widescreen monitor ... A4 does not perfectly divide by 16:9 ...
I never managed to get the speed of completion down to anything reasonable but proceeded to "bang stuff out" and the line graph of "production" rose as the variable of "give a toss" sank. I ended up having to cut a few sequences/jokes due to not being able to fit them into the constraint of the music I wanted to play over.
The art style is supposed to be fairly fast to produce and easily replicapable - at least the last bit worked :P -, as I want to include the occaisional triggered comic page event in-game - but not too many of them, and most will either be plot or joke related, with the idea that narrative should give the gameplay a background in which to exist rather than just a "Ramirez, take down that X with your Y" ... plus that's why it's called the Narritive Campaign section ...
I also wanted a more naturalistic art style, but something not entirely heading in the opposite direction of my in-game 3D art, and I wanted to avoid the whole Japanese style ... talking of which ... brace for jokes!
In fact I ended up throwing in a pun on japanese comics.
Anyhoo, job done on that, and I set the whole thing to music as originally envisioned, and then converted it to Theora ... which didn't go as well as hoped. The Theora codec had a real hard time of coping with the subtler light/dark contrasts and a lot of the backgrounds ended up looking hazy and with visible moving errors on them. Even maxing out the bitrate didn't clean it up (but it did look better) and came in at around 17mb, my actual image files are 8.5mb ... so I reckon I might as well keep the quality and have them display as a scritped GUI sequence - with a skip button obviously, so the player can get straight to the action.
Whilst venturing around the interwebz on Theora related hunts, I did come across a whole load of Theora stuff including a slideshow creator which is basically what my intro is. It wasn't any use to me in the end but there's the link incase anyone fancies a look, and there's a load more Theora stuff at that site.
With >9000 hours of drawing finally out of the way (or at least, the huge load for the intro bit done, they'll be more of it in much smaller chunks in the future), it's back to actual game deving, and scripting the action for level 1.
In other news, I seem to have fixed a fair bit of issues that I'd experienced when I released Demo2 (not updated but still available for download courtesy of Ronnie's bandwidth) and after a fair bit of testing ... things seem better ... oh wait ... when I say "I seem to have fixed" I of course mean ... other people in the forums have ... I just implement and test stuff I find lying around ...
Looks better in HD, but you knew that.
Also spot the balls up, one of the image isn't in a panel but gets a full screen stretch (fixed for in-game).
-----------------------
And in the spirit of giving and immature competitiveness with Renee ... I hearby declare that I'll make a super simple Tutorial (winces, knowing that he's bound to regret this) for creating a single player type FPS level using nothing but assets available with stock T3D and some simple custom scripts for spawning enemies, having them shoot at the player, and customizing weapons and adding new weapon scripts. All with what's there when someone downloads T3D for the first time and wants to get straight to blowing stuff up, and all as idiot-proof as I can manage.
Previously on Steve's rambling dev blogs:
[/ gravelly_American_voiceover]
I might have mentioned something about drawing an intro sequence for the narrative campaign part of my game. All the big games have them ... not that I've played any of those things in aeons, infact the previous weekend consisted of Penny Arcade (which I quite liked - a bit grindy though, shame the series got canned) and X-Com Enemy Unknown (which is X-Com UFO Defense ... not sure why the name change between UK/US but hey ...), a game which I actually had on floppy (no really kids, games used to come on plastic squares ... and before that it was tape!), and which I rebought from Steam ... not having a floppy drive anymore ...
Interestingly to mention or not as the case may be 'cos it's just occured to me ... these games all have animated intros, with the 1994 X-Com being closer to the static comic page style one bloke in his man-cave ended up using.
I'd had the overall idea taking up unnecessary amount of room in my brain fro a few years ... admittedly more in gazzillion dollar production values rather than one guy with a cheap and intermitantly malfunctioning A4 tablet from Win98 days who had completely forgotten how to draw ... and line drawing somewhat less simple when your tablet isn't the same aspect ratio as your widescreen monitor ... A4 does not perfectly divide by 16:9 ...
I never managed to get the speed of completion down to anything reasonable but proceeded to "bang stuff out" and the line graph of "production" rose as the variable of "give a toss" sank. I ended up having to cut a few sequences/jokes due to not being able to fit them into the constraint of the music I wanted to play over.
The art style is supposed to be fairly fast to produce and easily replicapable - at least the last bit worked :P -, as I want to include the occaisional triggered comic page event in-game - but not too many of them, and most will either be plot or joke related, with the idea that narrative should give the gameplay a background in which to exist rather than just a "Ramirez, take down that X with your Y" ... plus that's why it's called the Narritive Campaign section ...
I also wanted a more naturalistic art style, but something not entirely heading in the opposite direction of my in-game 3D art, and I wanted to avoid the whole Japanese style ... talking of which ... brace for jokes!
In fact I ended up throwing in a pun on japanese comics.
Anyhoo, job done on that, and I set the whole thing to music as originally envisioned, and then converted it to Theora ... which didn't go as well as hoped. The Theora codec had a real hard time of coping with the subtler light/dark contrasts and a lot of the backgrounds ended up looking hazy and with visible moving errors on them. Even maxing out the bitrate didn't clean it up (but it did look better) and came in at around 17mb, my actual image files are 8.5mb ... so I reckon I might as well keep the quality and have them display as a scritped GUI sequence - with a skip button obviously, so the player can get straight to the action.
Whilst venturing around the interwebz on Theora related hunts, I did come across a whole load of Theora stuff including a slideshow creator which is basically what my intro is. It wasn't any use to me in the end but there's the link incase anyone fancies a look, and there's a load more Theora stuff at that site.
With >9000 hours of drawing finally out of the way (or at least, the huge load for the intro bit done, they'll be more of it in much smaller chunks in the future), it's back to actual game deving, and scripting the action for level 1.
In other news, I seem to have fixed a fair bit of issues that I'd experienced when I released Demo2 (not updated but still available for download courtesy of Ronnie's bandwidth) and after a fair bit of testing ... things seem better ... oh wait ... when I say "I seem to have fixed" I of course mean ... other people in the forums have ... I just implement and test stuff I find lying around ...
Looks better in HD, but you knew that.
Also spot the balls up, one of the image isn't in a panel but gets a full screen stretch (fixed for in-game).
-----------------------
And in the spirit of giving and immature competitiveness with Renee ... I hearby declare that I'll make a super simple Tutorial (winces, knowing that he's bound to regret this) for creating a single player type FPS level using nothing but assets available with stock T3D and some simple custom scripts for spawning enemies, having them shoot at the player, and customizing weapons and adding new weapon scripts. All with what's there when someone downloads T3D for the first time and wants to get straight to blowing stuff up, and all as idiot-proof as I can manage.
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One Bloke ... In His Bedroom ... Making Indie Games ...
#2
02/07/2011 (9:14 pm)
Not going to pretend I understand, but I really enjoyed that! Good show. Having text bubbles suddenly appear halfway through was a little jarring, but certainly helped me figure out what had gone on ;P.
#3
Yeah, it probably was a little "SURPRISE TEXT!", but I really wanted the first spoken words to be my StarFox joke.
02/07/2011 (10:00 pm)
Daniel,Yeah, it probably was a little "SURPRISE TEXT!", but I really wanted the first spoken words to be my StarFox joke.
#4
02/07/2011 (11:54 pm)
Nice and good intro music also. 
#5
02/08/2011 (1:53 am)
Nice work Steve, just missing that blue Police Box ;P 
#6
02/08/2011 (2:32 am)
Awesome ! verry good made. 
#7
02/08/2011 (3:05 am)
Very nice work! 
#8
edit: (PS) you should really think about merchandising those bunny slippers you could have quite a few takers!
02/08/2011 (3:48 am)
Good work Steve. They all worked really well together.edit: (PS) you should really think about merchandising those bunny slippers you could have quite a few takers!
#9
02/08/2011 (5:17 am)
"Two thumbs up!" 
#10
Where's the music from? A couple parts within it seemed familiar... just can't place it - but liked it all the same
Oh and good luck with the super simple tutorial. I keep meaning to revisit my FPS rewrite and make it available to all but I've noticed that I tend to simplify and minimize things to such a point that it's overly complicated to newcomers :D
02/08/2011 (2:23 pm)
Love the concept and the way the artwork ties it all together. Where's the music from? A couple parts within it seemed familiar... just can't place it - but liked it all the same
Oh and good luck with the super simple tutorial. I keep meaning to revisit my FPS rewrite and make it available to all but I've noticed that I tend to simplify and minimize things to such a point that it's overly complicated to newcomers :D
#11
The music is "Time" by Daniel Stang, and I've had it on a few of my other videos.
I can't even remember where I first heard it, but I eventually hunted the guy down over Facebook and we cut simple deal, I get 4 of his tunes for a single project that I might never complete, he gets a weekend's beer money. :)
The key wording in my proposed tutorial is super simple. I've just opened up the stock Full Template to check what's actually available in art assets to deal with ... and there's just enough. I can always scrounge the RamRifle from the FPS Example as a different weapon model.
02/08/2011 (2:50 pm)
Mike,The music is "Time" by Daniel Stang, and I've had it on a few of my other videos.
I can't even remember where I first heard it, but I eventually hunted the guy down over Facebook and we cut simple deal, I get 4 of his tunes for a single project that I might never complete, he gets a weekend's beer money. :)
The key wording in my proposed tutorial is super simple. I've just opened up the stock Full Template to check what's actually available in art assets to deal with ... and there's just enough. I can always scrounge the RamRifle from the FPS Example as a different weapon model.
#12
And there'd probably be a market for the slippers - people bought replica hats off of an episode of Firefly (the one Jayne gets from his mom), my daughter included.
02/09/2011 (6:16 am)
Not bunny - cat. And she's all about her excuses... lolAnd there'd probably be a market for the slippers - people bought replica hats off of an episode of Firefly (the one Jayne gets from his mom), my daughter included.
#13
Hehe.
02/09/2011 (10:33 pm)
Great stuff Steve. Not sure I quite got it but I liked the pictures :)Quote:And in the spirit of giving and immature competitiveness with Renee
Hehe.
#14
Also the tutorials (or resources whatever you wanna call them) you've done are sure to come in handy to many and probably even me at some point thanks for the time and effort you put into making them simple to understand.
02/10/2011 (12:14 am)
Awesome that whatever comes up you keep pushing foward to finish your game Steve. Idk how everyone else feels but for me it's a privelege to be a part of your journey.Also the tutorials (or resources whatever you wanna call them) you've done are sure to come in handy to many and probably even me at some point thanks for the time and effort you put into making them simple to understand.
#15
But, just to step through the plot hints:
1. Everything has gone wrong - not much of an action game if it didn't :P
2. The area is under seige - notice the furniture blocking the door @ 0:15, also see 1!
3. There's a big nuclear bomb inbound (adds tension!) @ 0:40 and 0:3:43
4. Hint that the Player starts unarmed - there's 2 signs @ 2:50 prohibiting cell phones and firearms. Catchick might have had a cell phone wedged down her cleavage - but no gun.
5. There's one guy "somewhere else" with reserve power @ 2:56 - hinting that he's in need of help and setting the scene for level 1. Also reinforced with an inoperable "resonant inductive coupling" - which is a Wifi power/rechaging system --- thanks wikipedia!
6. Everyone else is dead or ejected @ 3:05 - hinting that there's no alternative - so that the forthcoming goals of level 1 have to happen.
7. @ 3:25 is my StarFox joke!
8. There's a whole load of info the Player won't understand @ 3:30, but the hint is to reinforce 1.
9. To reinforce 1, and show a lack of ideas for a solution in the current situation @ 4;02 - hence why level 1 has to happen. Also my joke on japanese comics. :P
10. Catchick has a medical chit excusing her from military duties in general and combat @ 4:16 - but because of 1, it's all hands to pumps time.
----------------------------------
Tutorial-wise, mine is a lot simpler than what you've set yourelf!
02/10/2011 (8:50 am)
Don't worry about getting it, Rene - it's just a scene setter and the reasoning as to why in level one you'll be have to get from one side of the sprawling level to the other.But, just to step through the plot hints:
1. Everything has gone wrong - not much of an action game if it didn't :P
2. The area is under seige - notice the furniture blocking the door @ 0:15, also see 1!
3. There's a big nuclear bomb inbound (adds tension!) @ 0:40 and 0:3:43
4. Hint that the Player starts unarmed - there's 2 signs @ 2:50 prohibiting cell phones and firearms. Catchick might have had a cell phone wedged down her cleavage - but no gun.
5. There's one guy "somewhere else" with reserve power @ 2:56 - hinting that he's in need of help and setting the scene for level 1. Also reinforced with an inoperable "resonant inductive coupling" - which is a Wifi power/rechaging system --- thanks wikipedia!
6. Everyone else is dead or ejected @ 3:05 - hinting that there's no alternative - so that the forthcoming goals of level 1 have to happen.
7. @ 3:25 is my StarFox joke!
8. There's a whole load of info the Player won't understand @ 3:30, but the hint is to reinforce 1.
9. To reinforce 1, and show a lack of ideas for a solution in the current situation @ 4;02 - hence why level 1 has to happen. Also my joke on japanese comics. :P
10. Catchick has a medical chit excusing her from military duties in general and combat @ 4:16 - but because of 1, it's all hands to pumps time.
----------------------------------
Tutorial-wise, mine is a lot simpler than what you've set yourelf!
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