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View Profile Fooliolo
Eh? What you want?

Age 35, Male

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Olympia High School

Washington

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#2 - Decisions and Problems

Posted by Fooliolo - April 4th, 2012


I realize that making a game from scratch is no easy feat, and that there are major components that go into making games. While I won't be doing sound and music, I will become a Nazi over the art, coding, and playtesting.

I have a couple ideas of what kind of environment I want for the game, therefore I have some idea of the music and menu sounds that I want. Ultimately I'll want to pick them out for when I have some of the basic groundwork laid down to see how they complement the atmosphere when a player plays the game. I would prefer to be able to do this for free, though I'm not entirely opposed to hiring SoS to do the job :o

The coding aspect will be a bit difficult without any art assets. Sure, I could take sprites from existing games, such as Tails. But ... it doesn't quite feel the same as a bird, and it's highly doubtful that all the sprite images for what I want exist in such a nice package. I plan on a 360 degrees movement, complete with continuity on all aesthetics (mostly the wing flapping and tilt afaik) to make it smoooooth! Someone out there is probably going to show me something like this....

But in the meantime, I've written down pseudocode for the expected variables, functions, and etc. It already looks like it will be a lot of fun to test and debug! I can't write the actual code yet, because I don't know exactly what goes into programming a game that runs real-time, and I don't know AS3. As for the software, Flixel and what I hope is the IDE for AS3 have been downloaded already. It's been a while.

Now for the art... being the asshole that I am when it comes to self-criticism, I don't think I'll ever live with myself if I released a full, serious game with my current drawing skills. The evidence: rather than enjoy a good movie for what it is, I usually end up picking flaws in their art, animation, transitions, script, etc. The Bitey of Brackenwood series is more or less the only things where I have problems picking out anything wrong for improvement (there's more, but I can't remember them off the top of my head). And if I chew out others, think about what I would do to myself! Truly, you are your own worst critic.

I could have someone else do the art, but I don't know anyone personally that would be willing to undertake such a job.

In light of these facts and circumstances, I've decided to resort to pixel art for my game. It's a new medium for me, but since I'm nitpicking over stupid details anyways, I mind as well excercise myself here while having full control over my art. And since this is a process of exploration, I tried out a few techniques to see if they work for me or not.

The first approach I tried: create the concept image and try some macros. Yes, this isn't real pixel art, but it does at least give me some perspective. Not to mention when it was said and done, it turned out really ugly anyways. What looks good as a regular picture does not look good modified, especially as pixelated. It also made me appreciate chibi styles a whole lot more, since there's no way you can cram all the details you want into, say, a 32x32 size image. Proportions will also change, as well as the need for pixels to convey multiple messages at once.

Next approach: doing it the right way, by starting with the outline, and completing the picture with the major colors first, then working into the finer aspects until you have the complete picture. This proved to be problematic for me, since with the mediums I'm used to working with, you can see how your picture can turn out at the outline phase. But with pixel art, the resolution of the outline is so low and so anarchic (at least to me), I had issues being satisfied enough to continue, even knowing the limitations of pixel art. Eventually, I decided to do these outlines with three shades: the usual black and white, and gray to convey contours and some additional detail. This helped immensely. I haven't seen any tutorials advocate for doing both outline and shading in one go, which only goes to prove that there are no hard and fast rules to art.

I still haven't went beyond 1 frame of the countless frames I'll need for the phoenix. It is something I'll have to explore as I acquire experience in pixel art. Hell, even that first frame is still a WIP, since it's a lot easier to be picky about a creature than it is for something like sand. Speaking of sand, it is the first tile I drew for the world, and it will be one of many tiles for a tile set, and there will be many tile sets. That's going to be a lot of work! I may need a standard for this, as it can help to organize my work better. But I'm a messy-organized person with good memory, so that might create undue burden on myself on certain aspects. Hell, even the standard that got developed in my senior design class was really only a formality for the most part. It's invaluable for finalizing the project amongst our team members, but throughout the course of the work, we changed the standards so much because we kept on finding things that we just didn't like about it, or it couldn't adapt to some of our problems.

There are still a couple things I don't entirely have down, such as the size of the tiles. I've heard mention of tiles being in sizes of 16, 24, 32, and so on, but I don't understand why those numbers. Maybe it is arbitrary? Maybe it has to do with monitor resolution? Times sure have changed from games being run in DOS to GPU-killers such as Crysis. Ultimately, I'll let the phoenix decide what size of tiles I'll have. Another item of interest is full screen, as seen in Sarah's Rebuild 2. I haven't seen code on how to do this, or whether this is possible at all with the free tools that are out there.

For now, only time will tell how much I get done. I know from experience that the initial development will take the longest for me, and not because of the work hours. However, once I get to a certain point, it's going to become like wildfire.


Comments

It sounds like it will become a huge game. Maybe you can be the first to have more than 2000 medal points in a game?
I think the tiles being in sizes of 16 and 32 is because they're 2^4 and 2^5? I don't know about 24 though.

Also, can I be a beta tester?

You can be a beta tester, sure!

I don't think it's going to have more than 2k medal points though. This is a process of exploration for me, and by no means am I a great artist.