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 video explaining how the UI designers used blender for Gnome3 as a prototyping. I fell in love with the Gnome3 ui right from the beginning and once i saw this, i was determined to try it out.. And so i started implementing a basic game engine in python which would be able to use the key frame animations and would be useful as menu as well.

Here are some boss demon concepts i made for the game.. have to decide on colors etc

More Enemies

And ive' finally managed to create the model for main character, there is a lot of polygons spent on the head of the character, hope i can get the animation right, still have to rig the character though.

Comments

Flash animations in GoDot Engine

If you have not heard about GoDot game engine,.. you should check it out right away.. godotengine.org Last time, i wrote a blog post about my experience making a simple physics game to GoDot Engine. Though there are a bunch of free options announced during the GDC this year, i thought ill' contribute to the engine. The one piece that is most important for game dev is the pipeline for the engine. One of the most common tools used for 2D animations is Flash. I have been using a library called Super Animation for almost all the games we've made for android at TMG. It's a free tool which lets you convert swf files to .sam files. This file can then be loaded in Cocos2Dx using the Open source loader library https://github.com/raymondlu/super-animation-samples I thought it would be a good idea to port this cpp library to GoDot so that i understand how to write custom modules for the engine. This is the video of the module in action. I have expos...

Vehicle Physics (Godot 2D)

I've always been fascinated with the vehicle physics used in games. I played so many racing games / the hill climb games and every single time i would wonder wow that must be really hard to do. Thanks to the new generation of game development tools, developing physics based games has become almost a second nature to most people. I didn't want to be left out so i gave it a shot.. I tried setting up vehicle physics in GoDot Engine for a 2D vehicle. Here is what the vehicle scene looks like.. 2D vehicle setup in GoDot As you can see the body collision shape is not right but the rest of the stuff just works. The idea is simple think of what parts move along with the body vs what doesn't. I was kinda stuck setting up the pinJoint2D in GoDot, it actually clearly takes two nodes under the properties. This makes sure that the wheels are hinged to the DampingSpring2D. The Damping Spring2D takes two physics bodies(Body and the PinJoint2D) and makes it work like shock ab...

Gif Animation in Gimp

Ever wondered how to make a gif animation using gimp?? Hmm ofcourse you did.. well even if you did not.. it would be good to know how simple gif animations can be made in this Free image editing software. Here is a sample of what can be achieved. Yes it looks crude.. but i made it in less than 20mins.. so i guess its valid :) any way.. coming to how we do it.. open gimp, create a new image, press ctrl+l this will bring up the layers dialog. In this layers dialog you are provided options to create delete, move the layers. So keep adding layers, each with the next image in the animation sequence. Want to check how your animation looks?? go to filters->animation->playback this will launch a dialog box which has playback, rewind and step buttons on it. Click on playback button and you will see how your animation looks. Satisfied?? just save the animation with an extension ".gif" ..you have to note that while saving you will be asked if you want the different layers to be mr...

My Work

Search This Blog