10 Days To Go!

Right, 10 days left. Where do we stand?

I have relaxed my regular blog updates a little as coursework is baring down on my free time like a very hungry lion on a nicely plump gazzelle with no legs; for this I apologise.

Since my last post I have created a 'wobble' ability for the man, coded and re-coded (many many times) and perfected (hopefully) the function. I've also created a placeholder HUD wobbleometer and it's evolved bigger brother, the finished guage:

That's all you're getting for now. I have recently discovered I have a lot more work to do than i thought the other day - I have to get on with creating classes for display objects on my game. Lots of hassle, especially considering AS3 is oretty much a new language to me - which is very annoying because coding isn't. I can do this stuff, I know how it works and enjoy solving problems and getting through it.

But these things happen - I'll have to struggle through it. Fingers crossed I get everything I want to done by next Wednesday. I still ahve to; sort out the entire collision physics engine, all the sounds and it looks like I'll have to forget about the 'pickups' I wanted to have, (which may not really add much to the game, so thats ok).

Silly Walk

Another quality seminer on 3D animation! We've done walking and walk cycles before, this time we did walking over obstacles etc. Here's my attempt of a box walking up a wall, across a ceilling and into another wall, rendering it unconscious and falling off onto the floor.



A nice attempt at slapstick.

Coursework - A bit of HUD

Well the coursework update went quite well yesturday, so I thought I'd do a bit more.
After getting the speedometer code working, I swapped in a proper visual version for my crappy little placeholder version:

Placeholder version:

1st Proper version:

I realise that I might change this again because of general theme alterations I might make later, which probably suggests I should leave all artwork to the end. So I think I will.

Coursework Update

A little update on my coursework this term...

I've neglected to share much of my plans, notes, sketches, psudocode, problem solving etc... on here, as of yet. No reason really, just havn't. So this could be quite a big post as I am in a blogging mood.

I found that during the day, (on a courseworking day), when my brain is active, I can cope with a few hours of coding. Then in the laid back evenings, the less important artwork gets done. Here are some early flash-based doodles, some of which I may use on the train platform as 'bump-into-able' objects:


And some early doodling on avatars, heros, charactersand general men from the top, I found that a hat is easier to draw than a head, no matter what haircut you decide on. Hence, my cowboy:


And a couple of floor tiles:
I'm a good few weeks into the time limit, now about 2.5 weeks from the deadline: A crucial point I think in the project. From this point I either continue at this rate and scrape through with an average mark or accelerate into a good to excellent mark (hopefully, and if I have the motivation & will power). I think from today's progress I'm very willing to do the latter. I like the sudden increase of work in courseworks - it feels a nice change to properly get your teeth stuck in and solve problems etc.

And to finish, a couple of 'W' initial/logo doodles/designs and my name in eggs:

Very Fishy Fingers

OK I came back - A lot sooner than expected, and had another little play:



I could go a lot further with this - waste of time? - making it bob in the water and swim forwards and possibly addimg some bubbles and camera blur in AfterEffects... but I wont... yet

Fish Fingers

A very nice little seminar about space warps in 3DsMax...



I like the motion on this. Very simple to do, tweak and polish. If only animating other motions was as easy. Adding a few bends to the body and maybe more waves on the other fins would make this look better still... if I had the time/will to, I would. Buy hey, I might come back to this and have a play later.

Coursework!!

O dear. It's that time again. I've just about got my head around what I've got to do over the next few weeks. It's a LOT.

We were given the brief a couple of weeks ago and things were going well in terms of idea generation. I had about 5 main concepts for my Flash game, 2 of which I felt excited about and could be very strong; one top-down viewed Flash version of British Bulldog and another, again top-down viewed game about a guy (or girl) struggling along a train platform with arms full of suitcases etc.

I had a few weaker ideas including one side-scrolling game featuring medieval, high-speed, helpless maiden-rescuing. In which the user played as a knight on a kind of stretch-stead (like the limo) and lept over dragons, jumped up to burning towers etc, collecting as many wenches on their stead as possible in a certain time limit. As much as this game amused me, I could see a few problems with the gameplay and potential repetitvness of the tasks.

Particle Generation

Playing around with generating particles, making them respond to gravity etc. I found that smashing an oncoming wave of pills around was a lot more impressive, aesthetically, than just letting them trickle down the sides of boxes...