To say 2010 has been a busy year would be an understatement. While we were all waiting for Apple to confirm the existence of the iPad, I was busy tweaking, improving, and porting my game Smiles to a bunch of new platforms. The most significant port by far was to Netbook PCs for Intel’s AppUp Center, a brand new App Store coming soon to Netbooks everywhere. To say Intel and AppUp have been good to me, that would be another understatement....
Here’s something I hope to start doing more often. Technically, I’ve been hoping to actually start all year. Short development video logs. Today’s video is a demonstration of the cross promotion features in Smiles Zen and Smiles Drop. Inspiration hit last night, and I added something amusing to it I’d thought I’d share. Both builds should go out tonight. I’ll be adding a pair of arrows beside the icon, just so it’s even clearer that you can click on it right here....
Yes yes, I’m awfully quiet. What else is new? Let me tell you. First things first, a brand new trailer for Smiles. Why does Smiles need a new trailer? I’ll tell you when you’re older. This ended up taking a couple weeks longer than I’d hoped it would (spontaneous summer vacation?), but it’s done. The new trailer combines the tidbits dropped in the last post (mushroom animation, new logo), some gameplay footage, and a nice audio track....
Been caught up with a number of things. Here’s one I’m rather proud of, an animated Smiles mushroom animation. Click for 400k animated gif Animated in ToonBoom Studio. Something else, an updated Sykhronics Logo animation. That one is me goofing off in Sony Vegas. Fun fun....
I’m back. This time, I’m ready for GDC! Come take an early look at the madness I’m bringing with me to the conference. As you can probably guess from the lack of Smiles PC/HD progress posts, I will not be demoing it at the conference. I am still bringing both laptops though. The big one will be doing something else instead. Enjoy! 🙂...
Yet another series, but video. Part 1 of hopefully a few videos of me showing off my IGF preparations. Sinage, computers, etc. 3 weeks left and counting. A bit roughly put together, but that’s half the point. I didn’t want it to eat up that much time, though it did take me some time to remember how to edit and encode a video (without my software crashing). It’s no Goo Road to the IGF, but hey....
At first glance you wouldn’t think a matching game like Smiles would feature physics, but it does. In several places actually. The most obvious example is the particle effects. Particles were used when ice and rocks break, and also for the tile clearing effect. The tile would be erased instantly from the board, and a particle would be created in it’s place. The particle would zoom in, slow down, then zoom out with a twist....
I kept video of some of my more interesting bugs/glitches/oddities in Smiles. Some more silly than others. The first I want to show is a bug in one of the effects for the game mode Zen. It was supposed to be a “toss a rock in to a pond” water ripple. It didn’t really work as expected. http://www.viddler.com/explore/PoVRAZOR/videos/8/ Here’s what it was supposed to look like. Cool looking, but the problem with this was the effect would make you queasy....
Final version of the Smiles video. It’s the short one again, but with me talking. Here’s your chance to hear and mock Mike. I’ve been getting a number of positive and amusing comments from the video. Such fun things as that I sound like an Infomercial host, and music sounds like “corporate training music”. Finishing this video has been an incredible hassle. Hard drives dying, frequent reboots, loss of WAV file playback in Windows, and YouTube difficulties....
One of two promotional videos I’m making. This one is the “hands on” one, requiring a silly looking “camera on tripod hugging thing” to collect all the footage. Viddler Long Version: http://www.viddler.com/…/19/ Youtube Short Version: http://www.youtube.com/E4sUK241aRA Youtube Long Version: http://www.youtube.com/nEO1-zybCU4 In this video, I’m unfortunately assuming the player will pick up on all the nice things why this isn’t a Bejeweled clone. But to be sure, I’m going to spell it out next video, and briefly mention some of things not covered here....