Here I go again with another last second post! Sokay Play 7 is tonight during the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk. Check some photos from a previous event on our Flickr.
SOKAY PLAY 7
THURSDAY, MAY 10, 2012
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT
During the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk
@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit #334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013
COME AND PLAY SOME GAMES!
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, check out a video from a previous show: http://vimeo.com/33895049
Peace!
[repost from our TigSource DevLog]
My recent focus was finishing up some fight scene cinematics. Last time I posted, David Rod had sketched out some storyboards to help me out, here’s what that turned out like…
I used most of the shots from this and drew them in Illustrator, and animated them in Flash. They turned out looking like this…
Now these are animated and in the game. With this major task complete, that means one less major task to think about! We’re getting super close, just a few weeks left till we’ll be wrapping up.
Also, in the last few weeks I implemented a quick ‘n dirty localization system so the game will be able to be in multiple languages.
Next on my to-dos is to finish the NPC animation in the Donut Segment.
The latest talk was covering the visual effects of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The game was developed as a joint effort between two game development studios, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games.
The first segment discussed lighting, the talk was given by Dave Blizard of Sledgehammer Games. He began his talk going over the history and significance of light.
He showed a slide of how a sun overhead can be a religious symbol and fascinates people because it is so unusual — showing pictures of tourists capturing the moments when the shadow is directly overhead.
He then uses this point to show how a directly overhead shadow in a game looks pretty terrible and bland.
For inspiration in lighting scenes, he would look to chiaroscuro in old paintings.
Hey Ya’ll!
I’ve been posting a Devlog for our current game project Donut Get! for a while over at the TigSource Forums. I just posted over there and I’m doing a re-post here.
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Last time I posted I was animating the cop and got super frustrated when I couldn’t test the animation and the game wouldn’t compile. After that, I finished animating the cop and the game was brought to new life.
The following are a couple examples of how the artwork for the car portion of the game was created.
For the past couple weeks I’ve been animating characters for the donut portion of the game and polishing gameplay.
I finally implemented new elements to the gameplay. Your objective is to eat falling donuts but you now have to dodge falling debris. Now that I started getting NPC animation in, I started filling in their different behaviors (like Mr. Sprinkles eating donuts).
The story is unfolding as gaps are filled in, I look forward to finishing the animation for the remaining NPCs.
David Rodriguez is just about done animating the fighting game segment. Tonight he sketched out some storyboards for a couple cinema scenes related to that segment. I’m very excited to have his animation in the game and playable!
Till next time…
Peace!
It’s that time of month again! The time when I announce our Downtown LA Art Walk show at the very last second! (right before I run a couple blocks and set everything up).
SOKAY PLAY 6
THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT
During the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk
@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit #334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013
COME AND PLAY SOME GAMES!
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, check out a video from a previous show: http://vimeo.com/33895049
Peace!
I found a link to et tu Gamer? in the comments to a Gamasutra article about game preservation. Right away I saw that this was without a doubt a site worth bookmarking. The homepage features galleries for a select few games but the gallery section contains a comprehensive archive.
Apparently the creator is attempting to archive as much video game art as he can get ahold of. The I’ve seen so far is incredible quality and definitely worth a gander.
Check it out!
[Check out our Away 3D 4.0 update to this post — Stars and Clouds in Away 3D 4.0]
This is a tutorial based on the simple starfield I created during the loading screen for our recently released game, Rush Hour Plus. I created it in Flash with Away 3D Lite.
This can make a good effect for flying through stars in space, cool particles for action sequences, pixies in an enchanted forest, lotta different things if you put your mind to it!
Here’s the starfield used for the loading screen for Rush Hour Plus .
View the tutorial demo here: http://blog.sokay.net/stuff/starfield/
I wanted to give a little motion to the loading screen with adding too much weight to the filesize (only like 30KB) so I opted for creating this starfield with Away 3D Lite.
Download Away 3D Lite from their repository. Their site has an old version which doesn’t include the Sprite3D class. Get it latest version here:
https://github.com/away3d/away3dlite-core-fp10
And here is the source for the main chunk of it, the StarField class:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 | public class StarField extends BasicTemplate { private var starCount:int = 200; private var stars:Vector.; private var starArt:BitmapData; // in this tutorial we'll create a bitmapData from scratch private var rotateSpeed:int = 1; private var rotateDirection:String = "none"; public function StarField() { mouseChildren = false; mouseEnabled = false; } override protected function onInit():void { trace("on init"); debug = false; // setting to false hides debug info in template class //create bitmapData for our material, 4x4 and white! (0xffffff) starArt = new BitmapData(4,4,false,0xFFFFFF); // create an Away3D Material with that bitmapData, this is the image used for our particles! //var starMaterial:BitmapMaterial = new BitmapMaterial(new starArt().bitmapData); // use this if you decide to import an asset var starMaterial:BitmapMaterial = new BitmapMaterial(starArt); // create a Vector array to the size of "starCount" stars = new Vector.(starCount , true); // start filling the Vector with Sprite3D objects! for (var i:int = 0; i < starCount; i++) { var star:Sprite3D = new Sprite3D(); star.material = starMaterial; star.width = 4; star.height = 4; star.alignmentType = AlignmentType.VIEWPOINT; // I forgot what this does... haha! look it up! star.x = -400 + (Math.random() * 800); star.y = -500 + (Math.random() * 800); star.z = -1000 + (Math.random() * (1000 + 800)); scene.addSprite(star); stars[i] = star; } // offset the stars a bit to make them look pretty like! //scene.rotationY = 0; // reverse direction //scene.rotationY = 180; // towards screen scene.rotationY = 160; // nice dynamic, over the shoulder angle scene.rotationX = 10; } // sets the rotation to look in a certain direction public function lookForward(): void { scene.rotationY = 180; scene.rotationX = 0; } public function lookBackward(): void { scene.rotationY = 0; scene.rotationX = 0; } public function lookLeft(): void { scene.rotationY = -90; scene.rotationX = 0; } public function lookRight(): void { scene.rotationY = 90; scene.rotationX = 0; } // set a rotation direction with the keys public function rotateLeft() : void { rotateDirection = "left"; } public function rotateRight() : void { rotateDirection = "right"; } public function rotateUp() : void { rotateDirection = "up"; } public function rotateDown() : void { rotateDirection = "down"; } public function rotateNone() : void { rotateDirection = "none"; } // this onPreRender function fires every frame, thanks to our nift Away3d template file! override protected function onPreRender():void { for (var i:int = 0; i < stars.length; i++) { var star:Sprite3D = stars[i]; star.z += 20; // stars move forward on Z-axis every frame if (star.z > 800) { star.z = -1000; // when stars move past limit of 800, set them back to -1000 so they loop forever! } } // handle rotations! if (rotateDirection == "left") { scene.rotationY += rotateSpeed; } else if (rotateDirection == "right") { scene.rotationY -= rotateSpeed; } if (rotateDirection == "up") { scene.rotationX += rotateSpeed; } else if (rotateDirection == "down") { scene.rotationX -= rotateSpeed; } } } |
The class uses the Away3D BasicTemplate class, which sets up the view and basic scene super quickly. I believe there’s also a FastTemplate class, but for some reason it doesn’t work with Sprite3Ds so watch out for that! And by default the BasicTemplate has a debug function built in, so you have to switch it off. The BasicTemplate is good for setting up something quick! But I’d rather setup something myself ideally.
It creates 200 Sprite3D objects, which use a white 4×4 square of BitmapData for its texture. Those are then scattered randomly in 3D space and on each frame it pushes them forward 20 units. I added in some keyboard controls so you can mess around with it (arrows and WASD).
Download the source here:
The source can be run from an FLA (CS4 format and AS3) or you can execute it as a Flex Actionscript Project (just make sure to include the lib folder as source, and swc folder).
I hope this helps!
Away3D is a huge improvement over Papervision. I still haven’t done any animated character demos with it but we’ll see if I ever get around to it!
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For code styling, I’m using the CodeColorer plugin. Very nifty!
We’re showing some games again this week at the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk!
This time we’re debuting Rush Hour Plus from our Chris Rock!
SOKAY PLAY 5
THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 2012
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT
During the Downtown LA Art Walk
@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit#334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013
COME AND PLAY SOME GAMES!
Check out Play Peep!
A great site popped up in my Twitter feed a couple weeks ago, Play Peep. It’s a great resource for game art reference, especially in the area of UI. The site seems to have a focus on mobile phone games, with a bit of additions from social games and the 3DS game Pushmo. While many of the games have a similar “poppy” graphic look to them, it’s interesting to see how different teams have tried to differentiate and how they go about solving layout of UI elements in their games. Compare and contrast.
Some posts that stand out to me:
PlayPeep was created by Dom2D.
Check it out!
I got a few new games in the last few months and I’ve really been trying to buckle down and finish them all! I got Super Mario 3D Land for Nintendo 3DS as an Xmas gift. I was looking forward to it as I heard it had a lot of old-school-ish Mario action. To me, it’s the best Mario game since Super Mario Galaxy — it’s even made by the Super Mario Galaxy team.
The game plays something like a mix between Mario Galaxy, Crash Bandicoot, and Super Mario Bros 3. The stages are generally short with a focus on a theme. For instance, there’s the “underwater level” and then the “spinning helicopter floating down platforming level”, and the “running on spinning gears level”. Similar to Galaxy, each level introduces slightly different gameplay mechanics and keeps things fresh. I finished the game and there aren’t many stages that even feel similar.
For the most part, the game is pretty easy for experienced gamers. My girlfriend was terrible when she started but she kept at it. She brought to my attention that the game actually blatantly helps you out when you die a number of times in a stage. It’ll give you a special white tanooki suit which appears in a floating “?” box, which makes it optional to collect if you’re too proud.
Find Mii for 3DS, I’m addicted to this game.
I’ve been in love with the 3DS since I figured out how the Play Coin system works and discovered the “Find Me” mini game installed. Find Me is a super basic RPG game where the goal is to defeat monsters in a series of stages. You draw random fighters by spending Play Coins, which is a built in 3DS currency you get by walking with the 3DS. The hired fighters can make one move, attack or magic. The type of magic they use is determined by the color shirt they have (i.e. blue shirt = water, red shirt = fire). It’s soooo ridiculously simple but I’ve been taking my 3DS with me wherever I go so I can earn Play Coins — hoping that I can spot pass with people to help me along. When you finish it twice you unlock the sequel, which was added in a 3DS system update. Not bad for being free!
Sokay is a Los Angeles native game development crew.
The say it never rains in Southern California.
At Sokay, we make it rain.
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