DoubleHappy^beta

I’m not sure how many of you remember the previous version of the Game Maker, but for something quite old and legacy, it had some nice features. One of those features was Moving Tiles and I’m pleased to say that they have made it back into our Game Engine / Level Creator.

The following image give you an idea of what to expect / what to look out for when making a level. Its really easy to do;

1) Click on the Moving Tile icon in your tool bar

2) Select which tile you want to move

3) Select where you want the moving tile to move to

Done! It really couldnt be much easier then that – unlike the previous game editor we did not have any visual guides to show you where the tile was going to move too. This feature currently can only move one tile at a time but in the future we envisage Moving Tile Sets too. Check it out and lets us know what you think

Here are some of the sites and tools we use and like that provide us with inspiration.

Flixel

A revolution in Flash game production. An amazing new way for man to interface with machine. The beginning of a new tomorrow. Never before has the world witnessed such a collection of AS3 files.We put it all in the new flixel 2. Groups to help organize game objects, quad trees for faster, more accurate collisions, a cleaner API, plus all the old flixel classics: animated sprites, tilemaps, and particle emitters. Most importantly, flixel is still completely free for personal or commercial use. What are you waiting for? It’s time to make games!

Flixel is becoming an integral part of our long term plan. Why? Because we don’t want to recreate the wheel.

The Flixel engine will allow us to focus on creating an amazing tool for building games. It allows us to focus on our creator and the social networking website that will be built around our games. The social network powered by WordPress will tie into our games database so that you will be able to share your games with your friends where they will be able to rate your games, comment on your games, and of course play them on their Android & Symbian devices.

» http://www.flixel.org

Game Maker

These guys do some cool stuff. We’re taking the best bits and leaving the worst – nobody wants to have to make something on their desktop. This is the 21st century chaps and we’re going to be doing what they do but it’ll all be done here on this website where you get to it all under the one roof.

» http://www.yoyogames.com/

Akihabara

For me this is the future. More and more of what we see and do is going online, once upon a time you had to make word docs using Microsft work using Microsoft office. But not any more. Similarly, once upon a time you had to make games for the iPhone and iPad using only tools the big evil corporation wanted you to use to make games. But not any more.

Using Akihabara you can make games that run in any modern web browser including those that come with the iPhone and iPad without having to know difficult programming languages. In a future write up we’ll tell you how.

» http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/

FontStruct

We love these guys because their tools inspired the design for our level creator.

» http://www.fontstruct.com

There are quite a few steps involved in the character creation business, and this post will be a quick look into the creative process.

First step is figuring out what kind of character you want. The requirement here was for a boss character that you would find lurking in a dungeon environment. That opens up a wealth of possibilies such as goblins, golems, rats, skeletons, wizards, suits of armour, etc. We decided we liked the idea of a headless knight, or possessed suit of armour, so I did a bit of research to generate some ideas for the design of our new character. I came upon the idea of a suit of armour dragging around a ball and chain and sketched what I thought this could look like for our game. It would be important to keep the style of the character similar to other things in the game to prevent this new character from appearing out of context.

Then I started some rough sketchy animation, just to get the feel of how he would move around. I wanted him to be relentless and purposeful, yet bogged down by the armour and ball and chain  so his motion needed to feel as if he was straining forward.

(I discovered a nice formula for a 6 frame walk cycle where one leg is 3 frames behind the other in sequence, and the sequence is: Down, Back, Lift, Forward, Place, Contact, and then repeat. You can see it best in the brightly coloured legs).

Once I had the rough animation done and looping nicely, I went on to refine the lines  of each frame to be pixel perfect, and started to block in the outlines with colour. Then I added shadows and highlights on each part of armour to give depth to the character. This is the finished result of the walk cycle.

Now we needed an attack animation, so I researched clips of people lifting up something heavy and swinging it down – the best example of this was wood chopping. From there I isolated the important frames to give the feel of the action without having an excessive amount of frames (don’t want to spend ages shading 100′s frames).

The flashing numbers in the top corner represent what particular body part is being recycled – this way we don’t have to redraw similar looking parts, we can just find frames where they appear similar and reuse the part. As long as this technique is not overused, it will remain largely unnoticed.

And here is the finished result:

Here is yet another article designed for the non arteest looking to make a game. Has some good tips.

Every amateur game programmer has a dream that goes something like this: You post an ad on Gamedev.net, looking for artists. Within an hour, you’re swamped with fifty emails from artists. After telling you they’ve quit their job to do art for your game full-time, they point you to some of their sample JPGs, which are incredible, and in exactly the style you’re looking for. They then tell you they’ll be more than happy to work for free (or for royalties).

Ahh, what a good thing life would be if it were like this.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Most teams have a difficult time finding a talented, dedicated artist, and for many developers, the only way they’re going to get art is to put on the artist’s hat and do it themselves. Fortunately, modern technology has provided us with tools that can disguise our lack of artistic ability. Many hobbyist game art needs can be fulfilled by a non-artist and some really good use of software.

Take this article with a grain of salt: I can’t draw, nor am I versed in any form of art theory. I’m a programmer, but over the years I’ve been forced to try to draw things, and in doing so have picked up some tricks that I’d like to share. So, here’s a quick look at a few techniques that the newbie non-artist can use to create good-looking art.

» Read More

Joel Davis writes a good article on game art for non artists – his article is one worth keeping in your bookmarks.

I’ve worked building tools and engines for artists making games and visual effects for more than ten years, and I’ve always been baffled by the distinction that people make between “programmer art” and “real game art”. Also, I’ve noticed that the only people who will give you a free pass for bad programmer art are other programmers. Regardless of how fun your game is, or how technically awesome your tech demo is, the non-programmers you show it to are going to think: Is that a jetpack or a tumor?

Often, you can find a way to generate good art without having to create it from scratch. Mason McCuskey offers some excellent suggestions for sources of game art in his article “Creating Good Game Art When You’re Not An Artist”.

But sometimes, you just have to create your art from scratch. Budgetary restrictions or game contest rules, or simply a tight deadline for a prototype might require you to set down the figurative slide-rule and pick up a paintbrush.

» Read More