Tuesday, February 2, 2010
All wrapped up...
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.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Oh particles!
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.
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.
T-minus 30 minutes
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
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
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
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! >:(
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! >:(
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