Page 50. Two and a half months later. Sure it’s not front page news (except maybe for here), but it’s a small achievement I like to indulge myself in. Being a coder, I code a lot. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been doing professionally these past 6 years. So, I’m on a mission to improve my art and music skillzorz whilst on my adventures in independent game development. This little burning through a sketchbook challenge has been a constructive one for me....
Low fat disposable hats present, part 7: A Sunset in Stone Which is probably quite warm, despite the cold imagery of anything in stone…… Why are you looking at me like that? Okay, I wanted an epic name to finish my cheesy little series of updates. Then it’s actual updates when they happen!!! Wow! That actually makes this a blog, instead of story time! But I like story time … So back to the technical....
Cream soda kung fu presents, part 6: The Epic Tales of Hypocrisyism Viewer discretion is advised. So, right now, the current evolution of the character is this said goo blob thing. It shoots these tentacles/appendages out and swings, like any good monkey should. However, for as long as I’ve been thinking about going with a gooey character, I’d been concerned about the Gishness factor. This “factor” is what I’m calling all the references to Gish....
Dude! There’s like, this site. And it has something to do with tunnels, or tunneling. Boy, I could tell you stories of tunneling. But they’re so amazing, they’d blow the minds of my 5 readers. The problem is I’d then have to acquire a new reader base. I can’t have that. Right, so the more temporally correct but logically wrong February Round Up is online. Can you believe it? People mistakening the round up’s as horribly late or something....
Hey there sports fans. Our epic saga continues with part 5: The Character (or I’m a little tea pot why are you reading this sub heading like I have something insightful to say e-i-e-i-o) Last we left our hero, he was an eight legged insect. Now he’s an eight legged insect looking for a job!!! Now, don’t get me wrong, he’s not a bad guy. You see, it’s not you, it’s me....
So we have a character, and certain way the physics work. Cool. I want this game out reasonably soon, so that meant I needed to keep things simple. So minimal amounts of non functional stuff and no heavy animation. I don’t have an art team, just me. So the thought was to make the legs dangle and have shots of webbing shoot out. And sure, this’ll make some nice still shots, but the character was going to be very nonfunctional looking....
And the legend continues. Now, a spider would make a rather cool game character. Especially in a game about swinging. So I toyed with some designs, keeping in mind a sphere’ish geometric character, as shown in the collision diagram above. The following are some results of that early concept work. And a new one for good measure. But despite the abundance of designs, I was running into a sort of dilemma coming up with some easy ways to make the character functional....
And now, part 2. This part I’ll call… Spiderphobia (versus the more correct Arachnophobia. Correctness is wrong) Spiders, spiders, and more spiders. So the game concept I decided to toy with is one I like to call “The Spider”. The concept itself is most similar to the rope platformer Umihara Kawase, a slick game a former employee introduced me to (thanks Gary). In indie land, the closest similar game to that would be Wik....
And now, what’s been going on. As mentioned previously, things started out as my long overdue PuffBOMB remake. So, a physics engine was built, based on what I’d learned from various tech demo’s (which I’ll post at a later date). And it did cool stuff. Good ‘ol verlet physics action. What you can see above is “characters” composed of spheres (circles), connected by springs. Cool stuff. The 3 circle thang is a potential collision model for the PuffBOMB hamster, and the Balloon like thing is exactly that....
One way to know if you’re established on the net. I can’t even remember what it used to recommend instead of Sykhronics, but I’m glad to have finally made an impact. Woo. ...