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Showing posts from August, 2011

Obsession With Menus

Iv'e always been obsessed with putting in animations for the menus. We did put something together for Adrian , a game I worked on along with some friends at college. But the animations were pretty much predefined you could either slide them in blink them that kinda of stuff. It was pretty good, but in the recent times especially after watching so many iphone apps which have such smooth transitions etc between screens, And the wonderful ui you can create with html because of the javascript speedups Iv'e started thinking its' probably time to get this done right or at least to my satisfaction :D. The weird idea i got was to create keyframe animations for the UI and then use it as the menu. This is pretty much the standard way of doing things in blender game engine. You just move the camera around in a scene or make the ui elements slide in out of the view. I wasn't sure if i could pull it off in my own game. So I kept putting it off to try later. Then i came across a vi

Almost Ready

With this, i think i've got all the characters i need to get the basic implementation started but, there are still some things i need to figure out about how to animate the expressions, eyes where the texture of the object changes. The easiest way out seems to be to just create another texture with required things changed. i.e the eye expression and the mouth. But may be there is a better way.. creating multiple textures for small changes seems a bit of an over kill. The combat is very important and should be very fluid and fun to play around with. This requires a good co-ordination between the animation and the collision detection. Im' also thinking about easy way to create menus/animations as 3danim models. Yesterday i had to work on porting the 3danim exporter to blender 2.59 and i swear it was hard.. so messed up i almost lost the whole day. I hope i dont' have to do it again. I was able to load the model of ram in python using the anim3d library. I need to setup

Another Character in Works

I've been working on making the characters from http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html so i can use them in a game if i ever am able to make something good :D any way. without further delay.. here goes.. I've added the weapons as well, i've been itching to write some action game.. so probably will help me out with that. As usual i've been using Inkscape for designing these characters. I've rigged the other character i designed  in blender i have to do it for this as well... While making this characters i got an  idea about making a grey scale so i can change the color by setting the polygon color i guess its' worth a try because it makes it easier to create different characters.. :)

Online Leader Board

This is one of those things which is kinda straightforward to do, you get a username or something and add stuff in the database. There is a difficulty in discovering cheating scenarios but if we assume fairplay, it just boils down to a very simple thing. I was kinda lazy to do all the creating a db and writing queries stuff so I started looking for easy to use javascript based leaderboard service, sure enough I found  http://www.playtomic.com/api/html5 . I was skeptical about registering but once i decided to add the online leaderboard for my latest   game , I knew this would be the easiest way out. Turns out it is really easy to use it. The documentation pretty much covers what you might want and gets working pretty soon.  http://www.playtomic.com/api/html5#Playtomic.Leaderboards  this is the page i used to get the version you see in the game running. They do rely on code obfuscation to secure the app id and key but im' not sure if that really helps. But ya..it is vulnerable,

Experimental Gameplay

This month for experimental gameplay project the theme was "Offspring" but the broader meaning could be used like growth. So I've put together a simple yet challenging game called "tgif+" short for "Thank God It's Growing" see what I did there? :). This is the first javascript project where i used jquery for handling the ui elements, I must say its' pretty cool. It is kind of an overkill for the project because i dont' use much of the library, but it makes the ui handling so much easier. You can play my entry here . I used Inkscape for creating the artwork for this game. Just love how the gradiants work. Along the way i even created a new logo for vkgamedev . New vkgamedev logo And now for the game screen shots.. i guess this is the first time where i have a "virtical" orientation of the game screen  :) Start Screen Gameplay Screen I haven't added the game music, pause button or sharing options as of now. I

Blender Rig For 2D Animation

Most people use Flash for their 2D animation needs, but apparently some people do use the 3D animation software tools for creating 2D animations as well. The advantage?.. i think it has got more to do with preference than anything else but then again.. 3D authoring tools are good with for doing camera effects and rendering effects if you want to do any. I recently discovered that south park is animated using Maya, I always thought it was stop motion animation oh well i guess they had to move to make the process faster. The advantages of using 3D animation software for 2D animation in my Opinion Ease of adding rendering effects to the scene. Camera movement can be added easily (esp the z-axis movement) The multi-bone setup makes it easy to animate snake like objects (curvy hands, fire, smoke) So as i mentioned in my previous post, i've decided to rig the character in blender and here are the results.. The image to the left is the render shot from blender and the one to the ri