So life is treating us so-so. A couple of contracts are approaching the end and after speaking with Marco we concluded that we won’t be doing contract work for a good while. We have too many good stuff right now to work on that has caught way too much dust.

Looking back over the past few months, a lot of what we did was neglected because of contracts. They were alright in a way, some for the money, some for the knowledge, some for something else. But unlike our own games, there’s always a part that is missing, regardless of how good the project is. We feel that has to stop and that what moves us forward is our ability to pursue what we want: pride and happyness.

I also feel that both can go hand in hand with stability and stability is what we found in the past months. We need to step up and do our thing. We need to improve what we did for us.

Project wise, that means that we have to put Hajime on FGL, we have to decided what we want for M:A:D and we have to have time for our most promising game. Code wise this means that I have to reflect if we want to keep Bold Pixel public considering that the current version suits our needs more than it suits the initial user friendliness. I strive to keep things simple, to impose convention over configuration as a standard. Right now I’m not that sure that this will fit developers needs to the point that BPE is helpful.

We’ll see about that in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for reading and the therapy session.

Vlad out!

Projects

We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.

Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.

We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?

Bold Pixel Engine

A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.

With this a lot of questions appear also…

Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?

I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…

I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.

Sorting it out

Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.

By the way… thanks for reading

The unit is made up of a body, a set of legs and the weapon. Reason for this is that the weapon should rotate independently from the body and the legs are just a 10 frames animation. The body was created in 3D and animated to rotate in order to have a realistic depiction of the lighting on the unit, to make it the same as the structures. as the unit rotates the rotating body moves along the frames to match the frame to the rotation, while the legs are a movieclip being rotated.

The other element on display there is the the structure being slightly damaged and we used smoke to illustrate that. Dents will be added later. The smoke is done with on 16×16 particle being scaled rotated and having the color and transparency changed.

Hope you like the little sneak peek inside the backstages of some of the art in M:A:D.

The destroyed cities are part of the game by the way… we just won’t tell you what for, that’s how evil we are, muwahahahahah!

Images courtesy of Marco, general bla bla bla courtesy of Vlad!

See you all soon…

Sharing a simple screenshot we took some days ago showing buildings, units and the first version of the GUI.

All feedback is welcome and see you soon!

Marco

Me and Vlad decided to show you our current project. We don’t know how it will evolve (read previous post) but since we like what we see we decided to share it with you and get some feedback.

It’s the first time we are disclosing any info about a yet to release game publicly, so this is kind of a new experience for us.

Game name is Mechs and Drones: Annihilation or M:A:D for short. It’s a real time strategy game and we have been around it for sometime now but in the middle of contracts and even Atomik Kaos 2, it only got the deserved attention in the last couple of weeks.

When I posted about conceptual design, I was talking about M:A:D. Right now we have all structure and unit micro AI working along with path finding. Enemy AI is the current step.

Here’s a huge logo pic, more pics (and screenshots I heard) later on.

See you soon for more M:A:D stuff!

For a new in-house project we are working on at VGS, I had to design a series of buildings that represent different features of the game. Without revealing much of the game itself, I’m going to try and explain the reasons behind the final images that came out of this arduous yet very satisfying and motivational conceptual design process.

Originally I made some quick sprites for Vlad to work on his first tests. just placeholders. He was rather quick to let out a big fat “MEH” when he saw the two little structures.

After some discussion the structures we have are:

A central, a couple of factories, a lab, a workshop, a metalworks building, a radar and a repair building.

The only one that resides on “inspiration” is the central, which was the first to be designed and drawn out on paper, modeled and detailed.

The concept was “something that is set on its own center and has supports to keep it there”. That pushed me to a tripod concept.  And while you can certainly allow inspiration to let you come up with this, a logical approach will likely yield similar results. Write down stuff that has a center and supports. “Tripod” will quickly come up.

These were originally sketched in flash, because I can use a movieclip with its mirrored instance next to it. I draw and it updates.

All the other buildings that followed were in a way… doodled on the “paper”. I really was hoping for inspiration to help me out. But no!
The only thing I kept was the fact that I wanted them to have very distinct silhouettes for readability. I want the player to be able to look at them and automatically see what structures they are.

In some specific cases, like the radar, I gave it a bit of a satellite dish look. For the lab I had different sections and both the workshop and metal works were just mere doodles, trying to find a shape that I liked. And that’s where I failed, because I already had a shape I liked. The Central’s shape.

So I trusted my judgment and modeled it and rendered it. I also liked the original repair building so I went with it as well. They came out as good as I hoped and I stuck with them. The problem was the other buildings

So, not satisfied and at a dead end, I showed them to a couple of friends and they said “Cool! looks very alienish and very distinct from each other”. So, one of the parts was done – differentiation. Now for the second part – making them look not alien, but robotic.

And one thing I think that robots would believe is “if something works, stick to it”. And that’s what I did. I chose a couple of shapes I liked from the Central building, and used them to replicate the original layouts.

The lab was now 3 “departments” instead of 4. The workshop was no longer a smoothed building but more of a office building structure to it, with a big outer area for whatever tests that need to be done (and also to convey a square area for the  whole building). The factories have long warehouse areas to create the sense of big work areas. The metal works has a central area that creates a connection between two big furnaces.

While modeling them, I still messed around with the designs, to make them more interesting and have more readability as iconic shapes. Here they are, compared to the previous designs so you can see how much artistic liberty I took while modeling them.

So as you can see the central’s got a two color scheme to match the rest of the buildings, as I felt they needed a base color and a “team” color. The metal works was rotated 45º to create a diamond area instead of a square one and now has a big chimney for the furnace and a dome area for the metal to pour in. The workshop is very close to the previous design and has a court yard, much like the repair. The laboratory’s departments where scaled differently just for extra visual interest and the radar was put a bit more in par with the overall designs. Both factories have a big dome like area to suggest the “brain” of the building and then a smaller warehouse or storage area. They were also rotated the same amount of degrees but in opposite directions, to suggest that even though they are both factories, they generate different things.

Here are the very final desings :

The central building lost one of the elements that looked like a wrench that was put on the repair building. Looking like a wrench actually works better on the repair building.
there was also added some detail to the workshop building to suggest a garage entrance, exhausts on the roof and some pipes, for air circulation.

This is the process that was involved in creating the original central, from concept to finished.

I hope this was an interesting read. The final result pleases me and Vlad, or at least he says so, and I chose to trust him.
Stay tuned on the blog for more interesting stuff that comes out of the VGS’s incubator!