Bird Game

All wrapped up...

2010-02-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

Well the Global Game Jam is finished and over. We submitted our game and are pretty pleased with what we've created. We plan to continue working on the game now that the Jam is over and plan to keep this blog updated as we make more progress. Stay tuned.

Oh particles!

2010-01-31T12:43:00.001-08:00

So, I mentioned in my previous post "particles suck". Ok, so why?
A lot of my time was spent trying to make a look that as the bird was flying, that these "rain" or "ash" particles would come at the screen in the perspective of animation. Since we were "faking" 3d the whole time, this posed a lot of interesting problems.
Being that I had never worked with graphics much, and this was the first time really using AS3, I ran into a lot of time sinks of just figuring stuff out. I spent some time trying to make one particle look like it was approaching the screen then it would zoom right off the edge, depending on the side of the screen it was on. In the mean time, Jason was working on a great looking wind system that already had particles and "z" scaling.
Figuring that it would be better to use the work he had done, I had added the "move off the screen" effect to his code. The effect worked well, but the perspective was not one that matched up with the overall animation. I proceeded to spend time figuring out how to adjust the MANY parameters of the wind and environment to try to get that "look" to happen. During that time, I got a lot of neat looking effects, but none of them really fit the tone of the game. So, I ended up spending a lot my time just seeing how things looked, in the end, the version that was taken was one that I came up with very early.
Another effect we were trying to go for was turbulence during the flight scenes that the player would have to try to avoid, to give the player something to do. The idea we came up with was an invisible orb that would move the particles around it to show there was something there. Then this orb would slow down the player, hopefully giving reason to avoid it.
I created a data class that would represent this invisible orb and based on a timer, would activate it randomly around the screen. Then, using our current particle system, it would absorb the particles on the screen, revealing it's position. While again, this looked really cool, it wasn't exactly we were looking for, and again, caused perspective problems. Being that the particles grew in size the longer they were on the screen to show that movement in the z axis, they were told to leave the screen the larger they got. This raised even more problems with turbulence, where the orb would leave the particles on the screen too long and things would look weird.
This did make cool looking "dust-devils" and swarm effects, but just didn't work for the game itself. So it had to be cut. :-/
On top of that, the way the bird object itself was made, collision with this wind orb would of required changing even more already established code just to make it work, and given the time remaining, we didn't want to mess with it.
So, yeah, while I was able to make a lot of cool looking effects, none of them fit the perspective we were looking for. I was able to parameterize the levels to make them customizable so we could at least tweak the effects of each scene.

Overall, the experience was a lot of fun and very challenging. It showed me what I can do and what I need to work on, which is very important to know.

screen cap

2010-01-31T12:38:00.000-08:00

Looks even better in motion.

T-minus 30 minutes

2010-01-31T12:29:00.000-08:00

Kyle is hacking away at his code while everyone looks eagerly over his shoulder. It's zero hour and we've all got our fingers are crossed.

Source of insperation

2010-01-31T12:25:00.000-08:00

Bird is based on a 24 hour comic I did a few years back. Thought I'd show off some of the original inspiration.

Back to the drawing board

2010-01-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

Maybe we didn't need to make a full working game at all. I'm sure people would have gotten the gist of it from just our preliminary designs.

About Done

2010-01-31T12:02:00.000-08:00

Seems like everything is winding down now. Our head programmer is just rocking out actionscript like no tomorrow and the other programmer go so much work done as well.
Glad I got to see this idea come to life, inspires me to program harder and more because that's what I want to do, I better be doing more of it.
-D

P.S. Particles suck! >:(

craneage

2010-01-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

In the final leg of the game build, using bones to animate a cranes (a bird) neck is risky but hoping it turns out well.

2010-01-30T21:18:00.000-08:00

Finished programming bird flying dynamics and wind effects. Ready for last minute code additions and cleanup tomorrow. Also created some art assets of material to be blowing in the wind such as leaves, ashes, and rain drops.

Old Bird Done

2010-01-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

Finished the old bird loop and sent it in. Working from home.

Particles, Particles Particles

2010-01-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

Things seem to be making progress nicely. Probably got the particle effects to work as good as they can for now. Need to find something useful to work on! I'm also too used to twitter, where all my post will likely be short thoughts...hmm.
-D

Bird Flying Dynamics

2010-01-30T18:38:00.000-08:00

Finishing up the bird flying dynamics. Still learning ActionScript as I go. This is fun stuff.

Answer To The Riddle.

2010-01-30T18:31:00.000-08:00

15 Wings

Buffalo wings

2010-01-30T15:20:00.000-08:00

We're here trying to figure out how many buffalo wings a game developer will typically eat. Right now, it's some were between 1 and 25.

White Crane

2010-01-30T15:15:00.001-08:00

Crashing

2010-01-30T14:47:00.000-08:00

I guess my pure power of awesomeness crashes programs, but I guess thats what you'll have to deal with if you want to be me.

Audio

2010-01-30T14:35:00.001-08:00

Trying to add some audio. I need to find some quick open source or public domain.

Wind Effects

2010-01-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

Learning Actionscript! Arg! No, it's actually pretty cool. I'm creating wind effects with turbulence and eddys. Not much time left in Global Game Jam. Fun Stuff.

Oh graphics...

2010-01-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

Actionscript is all pretty new to me, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be to pick it up. I'm running into problems trying to fake a 3d environment in a 2d space. It's fun trying to get through that challenge, but I feel like I'm burning through too much time figuring out the little mathematics of the screen and particles, and not enough time actually making stuff go.
Be nice if we could just use classic Mode-9 scaling and fake 3d SNES style. :P
-D

keyframes!

2010-01-30T13:11:00.001-08:00

The Gallo

2010-01-30T12:49:00.001-08:00

Using basic models to create rich 2d animations

Bird animation

2010-01-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

I always knew that birds wings moved in a very exact way. Problem is I don't have a clue how they do it. Leonardo Da Vinci studied bird flight his whole life I guess we'll see if I can get a grasp on it here in the next hour or so.

The Bird Game

2010-01-30T12:15:00.000-08:00

In this game, it seems the end has come because a great powerful storm is lingering. A small bird must travel the path to try and stop the storm.

Old Bird

2010-01-30T12:03:00.000-08:00

Trying to put the old bird animation together in Flash. Don't need to do a flying cycle on it so I can spend some time on scraggly feathers twitching.

Programming The Engine

2010-01-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

We have burned through 50% of our time for the game jam and i am quite happy with the progress made for both the art and programming teams. Many assets, both 3d and 2d, have been created, and the game engine is running! We are hoping to have a basic version of the engine up for testing later this afternoon. Jason and Daniel are busily working on implementing particles and weather effects to be used in the flight scenes while I am putting the pieces of code into the main engine. Too much fun :P

3d Tele Poles & Cranes

2010-01-30T11:18:00.000-08:00