So here is the next scene. It’s a mill. Yup. You can drive through it!
While making this scene I also realized that it takes me about 4 attempts at every texture until I finally get it right. I should try and save some of the more heinous attempts for a later post.
Check out the video below.
Recently, I and some friends got the idea in our heads that it would be fun to climb the tallest mountain in Japan … overnight.
Amazingly, the near 12 hour climb up and down did not kill anybody (though it was close). Here is a little photo documentary I made while not dying.
During the long trek into a place where the oxygen is thin, climber’s are rewarded by the chance to rest at many stations along with way.
Continue reading on to see more pictures.
Alright, been sitting on this for too long. Here we go! Entrance to the really scary dark forest. I’ll talk more about my style inspirations soon. Guesses? Correct answers are awarded beers.
Check a video past this break here.
In animation, they are called ‘key frames’ or sometimes ‘extremes’. They are the most important part of an action, essentially the parts that defines for the viewer what the action and emotion is; the parts of an action you remember. After creating ‘key frames’ an animator will draw the in between frames, connecting the key frames in an organic and expressive way.
In game development, I’ve heard the terms ‘vista’ or ‘set piece’ used to describe a memorable and important part of a level. A set piece is what you would remember when trying to describe the game experience to another friend, such as an amazing event or a particularly striking view.
I wanted to marry these two concepts of key frames and vistas and ended up with something I call a ‘key vista’. Clever? I chose some locations on this map that I decided would be the most visually crucial for the plot and important for gameplay.
I started with screen capturing these locals, and then took to the sketch book to develop a more comprehensive look for each place. I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t have a scanner, so the images you see are credited to my MacBook Pro’s webcam and poor lighting.
The next step will to fully realize each scene in amazing 3D with textures and everything!
Then, using these key vistas as a guide, I will continue in the same style connecting them together and filling out the entire map. However, I imagine this stage will not come until later, rather when I complete these scenes, I will use them to introduce this game concept to other developers.
Then, maybe I can get an actual game working 
The above shot is a concept for a big open field/meadow place thing.
More shots below…
So here’s what I did. I plugged my computer into my CRT television and mirrored the output.
Then I went to a website that ran a timer and attempted to take a descriptive picture with my old camera.
What you see here, is that the time it takes for the image to display on my Macbook Pro LCD is 19 milliseconds slower than a good ole’ tube TV.
Why do I care? Well, when I am playing a game, for example, and I press the button that causes my character to jump … it will take longer for that character to respond to my input on an LCD than it would a TV. (I think the correct term for this in “input lag”)
Input lag pulls the player out of immersion and could potentially make a game harder.
I noticed this recently when I used my TV to play Portal on my Mac. The experience was a much more enjoyable and immersive because my actions were having a more immediate effect on the game.
So today’s lesson is … CRTs will ALWAYS be better than LCDs. And that’s all for today from the grumpy geek.
To my millions and millions of loyal readership, I apologize for the delays in making another post. Certainly, you are all refreshing my blog on a daily basis, hoping some progress has been made on “not just a box.”
Well, my lack of posting is misleading. It might seem that I am not working on anything. Today I will prove that is totally wrong.
Before heading off into full production, or something like that, I need a place to really test and see where this project headed and what gameplay ideas I should explore.
So I made a sandbox level to test some basic elements of this racing game, such as scale and speed. One principle concept to this racer is that it is not a very fast game – this is to make room for some platforming kind of action. However, if the racer is slower, then the traditional wide open spaces of other racing games would be incredible boring to play.
Having slower racers grant the ability to create tighter turns, more difficult obstacles and a more dense environment overall. I theorize the more dense environment to be crucial in this type of game.
I created the sandbox area and programmed some simple logic within Blender’s BGE to get a very rough feeling to how the game might play and gain a concept of the scale needed to keep the game interesting.
I would like to send a congratulations to Orel of the Tigsource forums for completing his (post)entry into the Assemblee: Part 2 Contest.
I’m calling attention to this because I have a particular bias in favor of this game. It used my stuff That aside, it’s also a very fun and creative game and I recommend that everyone take a look. Orel was even cool enough to provide a tutorial on how to make your own levels.
Take a look here, and congrats on the excellent work, Orel!
A box could be anything.
That’s the starting point for this concept. A brown cardboard box. We all grew up playing in boxes; boxes that might have contained air-conditioners or Christmas presents. Inside the box was a sanctuary for our lucid imaginations to wander.
Last summer, a friend of mine let me listen to some music he had recently discovered. We were on an elevated train, riding across the Tokyo skyline. The music was a plucky combination of girlish, Japanese female vocals and techno chip-tune beats. The music perfectly complimentary to the situation. It turned Tokyo into fruit fusion bubble gum.
The cover art also struck me. The band YMCK had created an album called ‘Family Racing.’ The front of the album utilized a lo-fi aesthetic to create a very basic racing scene involving 3 characters in their 3D racing box cars.
“That’s cute,” 8-bit mashed with 3D. Cardboard boxes racing under a blue sky with a green forest on the horizon. The idealism of the scene is what grabbed me. Despite the scene’s simplicity, it communicated fun.
Cardboard boxes. Family racing. Simple fun. That’s a neato starting place for a concept.
