Excelsior

As some of you may have heard from talking to me or random musings in the world chat

I have been working on a videogame for mobile platforms and desktop pc's. I wanted to challenge myself in a new way.

Its a completely solo project, I did all the artwork, animation, coding, and music myself and has been a real challenge.
Its finally at the point where I can show a few bits of it without being totally embarrassed so I thought I would share a couple of those bits with you.. the shard, my secondary sometimes disfunctional family.
This is the working title screen atm, I am probably going to do something a little more refined and sequenced.
This is a shot of the actual gameplay, its a physics driven platformer of sorts. kinda a weird mesh of super mario brothers and guitar hero.. yes I just uttered those in the same breath
This is a shot of my stress test level, I have since pushed the boundaries further than this test. What is happening is I am addressing 1483 individual animated sprites, each with its own physics logic, sound effect, and animation timing onscreen. Since this test I have boosted that number to 3567 at the full frame rate. Then I got bored of painting them.

Its been a fun experience.. lastly I can show you it in motion, but please bear in mind I was trying to both hold my phone and play the game and take the video, sorta a gaming selfie, since I wasn't about to go through the hassle of an inline capture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeHlcZ9vFek

Thought Id share that with you all, so you can giggle at what silly antics your friend Yoda has been up to. its nearly done and I am looking forward to an extended period of uber uo gameplay, to clear my head.

well back to pretending to be an orchestra conductor and sequencing the orchestra score.

Good luck. I have 2 apps in the IOS app store and I can tell you that completing the app is only the first half. Gaining exposure and marketing is actually more difficult than the coding part.

yeah i see how fast it moves.. been thinking about that

cool game, if i get this i play!;]

thanks its not done yet, I want to build some more variety into the enviroment make it feel more alive

Good Luck! When you done the game, sell it kids:D

Sounds interesting, can't wait for it.

Wow, nice sounds interesting, can't wait for it dude.

been a while since I updated on this subject.. I have finally mastered 2 of the soundtrack tunes

https://soundcloud.com/dave-fitches/

for your listing pain or pleasure

also of note I suppose is the bassist on these tunes was also a former excelsior player from Long ago "Tennebrae"

Hey,

How is the game coming along?

Paulus

missed the question from paulus. well its still going.

I have taken a little aside to gather ideas for the game, and go back and improve things I wasn't happy with.. its still a project of passion and it will take however long it takes. Due to research as well I thought it was healthy for me to practise a bit with releasing/marketing on googleplay before I dump the game to the wind and watch it fall flat. Plus I have had some "math stuff" running through my head and little ideas here and there in the realm of graphics programming that weren't exactly in line with what my game was.

Being obsessive I had to find a way to test these things out and get them out of my system otherwise it would be a distraction when I was working. so I released them as live wallpapers on android. For those unfamiliar android phones can have a program as the homescreenwallpaper. it makes for a nice sandbox for graphics things.

for the curious feel free to try them out I will explain what each does without getting overly math boring.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... te.android
this one here is a ripple effect, essentially what it does is I seed the screen with color gradations and from the centre it displaces the pixels in a radial pattern making it look like water, I also use a little algorythem to simulate reflection/refraction on the ripples.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... te.android
this one is 2 sets of concentric circles being plotted and moved around, where the rings overlap it will boolean the overlap (delete) makes rather neato 1960's ish type effect.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... te.android
this is a really cool thing based on math you likely learned in grade 6... sin and cos functions return between -1 and 1.. so I am applying sin & cos to x and y pixel coordinates and normalizing the value I get back to match those screen coordinates, then using the end resulting number to calculate a color level multiplying my result by pi and doing a sin function to make the palette loop.. long winded way of saying looks like a lavalamp

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... te.android
this one is pretty neat. I won't bore with the math but its a combination of 2 functions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise - Perlin noise is a means of generating a pseudo random number (there is a pattern but its long)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractiona ... ian_motion - I am calculating fractional brownian motion OF perlin noise, and using that to displace a plotted line of pixels.. what that basically means is beams of glowing stuff moving in a random energy pulse sort of way, look very cool.

well thats some show and tell, by doing these sorts of things I can get the ideas out of my head and get back to drawing/animating. composing and coding for the game. What has been really challenging is NOT turning the game dark with heavy tunes and cartoon violence, its a daily stylistic preference I have to avoid.

I have worked alot on the main character sprite, I have a new puppet for him constructed and rigged up to do the animations, I posted a screenshot a while back on deviantart you can check out

http://aahz.deviantart.com/art/Tappyconcept-537689749

So there is your answer Paulus =)