Chapter 2

Sticking to a plan is the best plan.  I couldn't agree more with the author.  It helps in making deadlines, knowing when to cut features, and gives more structure to the project.  

The only thing worrying me this semester is being too ambitious, either with project goals of with Flash.  I think physics based gameplay (like Half Life 2, but more like Portal) would be really fun to mess with.  Thinking of something to manipulate and then designing tight and interesting levels/principles around it is fascinating.  But I only know so much code, physics, and math.  It'll be challenging to make sure things behave like they should, and not like I think they should.  Like my planet project last year, while it was cool, wasn't how things should orbit.

As for Flash, I think it's going to be tricky to not overwhelm it.  Although it should be fun (and probably frustrating) to fine tune the code and get it running smoothly.  I'll have to wait and see what I can do with it.  It held up pretty well last semester.

1B: Walking and Design

My character needs more work than I though it would. Having to draw animations made me realize how many things aren't finalized in he design, like colors, a face, consistent sizes, etc. Likewise, a convincing animation takes more than six frames a second. If anything is going to look tight/responsive, there needs to be more work in animating and making sure things move realistically and smoothly.


And I think I might be leaning towards vector graphics. I can see why they're are so nice; they immediately spruced up my scanned images and gave them some "oomph". But now it also looks too Flashy, one thing I was trying to avoid.


Below is an animation of getting up and of walking. The standing up one has a vector image on the left and the original scan on the right.

The character needs more weight. If he's super scrawny, that machine needs to be dragging him down more. An exaggerated limp in his walk, or maybe having his arm bounce around or drag more.



Below is the sprite sheet and preliminary character work, since the animations lack the full depth and detail of the character.

1A: Bitmaps and Vectors

Here are two images from the web:

A harmless looking office employee and a standard pencil.

These are the same pictures trace bitmapped:

When combined, however, all of the earlier perceptions are gone:

The once innocent employee is actually a harsh pencil master, causing the pencils to revolt with fire and zombies (for added affect).  the zombie picture is also a vector image.

Chapter 1/Flash Research

After doing some research into Flash games, playing some SNES games, and reading the article, I definitely have a clear idea of what I do and don;t want to do this semester with any of the games I make.  Granted, once we actually start developing things will probably change, but the following points are definitely guidelines/goals I want to follow.

One of them is loading times.  I've been playing Chrono Trigger (a SNES game ported to the PlayStation) and the loading times are horrendous.  Especially for a game that is running a full generation above itself!  It's so jarring to be playing and have to wait for five seconds after running into an enemy.  Just as bad is the menu screen, which also takes a good five second to load.

Which is a shame because this game does a lot right.  While nothing it does is revolutionary, the experience is so much better because of them.  Instead of having a separate screen for battles (it's an RPG), the battles are seamlessly integrated with the over world.  Run into a monster, and the menu screens pop up.

I think as long as I can exceed the expectations that go with a Flash game, there will be something special to my game.  Maybe I'm the only one with prejudices against most Flash games, but they all seem overly simple (yet throughly complex) and expected.  None of them blow you away with phenomenal graphics, interesting gameplay, or a cohesive story line.  For whatever reason they don't compete with console efforts.  Granted, consoles have huge teams compared to one or two man efforts in Flash, but I'd rather have a short and awesome experience than a longer one that's dull.  Even if the game I make isn't groundbreaking, putting it in a cohesive package helps.  But we'll see once everything actually gets started.