a crumby cameo

in a little break from my production diary, here's a pencil test of my mate Andrew's short film, Bread. The voice your hearing is a cameo appearance by the humble writer of this blog. I'm so proud. I'll chuck on a link to the final inked and coloured version when he has done it :)

Character (Day 14)

Well, with another big old chunk of coding done, here's another breakdown of my week

Wednesday

After making my last post I went home, and begun work on building in save and load functionality into the level editor, this would allow for data to be shared between the editor and the game engine proper.

Thursday

In the morning I managed to get the game engine working with the .cat files generated by the editor. Cue dynamically created world from external files.

In the afternoon I did some of the groundwork needed to get a character into the world

Friday

My sole achievement on Friday was to get the character to fall, and to land on a branch. Sadly I had to go to work, so couldn't do much to expand upon this.

Saturday

Added running to the characters abilities, he can now run down a flight of stairs. A couple of issues involved here in collision detection, but they were overcome

Sunday

Had an accidental day off, played Zelda and watched Deadwood, a good day, but no games were made

Monday

Begun work on the jumping mechanics for the game, lots of bugs, but I'm getting there

Tuesday

Lots of bug fixing, and added sticky tree sap in the morning, decided to go shopping in Cardiff in the afternoon, bought The Day Today on DVD, got home and enjoyed the fine work of Chris Morris and Armando Iannuci

Wednesday

More bug fixing, and added wind to the engine, which prevents players from falling to their doom

cheers for reading, and here are some pics of the game as it stands (please note that the game graphics are placeholder, and in no way represent the final appearance of the game, they are really simple to keep programming easy).

The level editor (Dev Day 6)

Ok, well, the first week(ish) of development is over, and I've got some neat stuff to show...

Friday and Saturday

Spent these two days (which I have less time on due to working commitments) sorting out the tile world engine on paper, drawing up the necessary plans. I find writing up this stuff before touching the computer very useful indeed, as it leads to more professional and considered work once I get there

Sunday

Spent the day in Bristol, at the Silent film festival they were running. Watched a presentation by Paul Merton. Very good, but little help to game production :)

Monday

Begun work properly. Built the tile and associated camera systems in flash. This basically resulted in a crosshatch panning, but represented a big step. I realised that coding an engine to fill the tiles with content was neccesary, so I began work on that.

Tuesday


Continued work on the level editor, built in Paralax and layering system, strengthened the code so it was far more stable.

sorry if the post seems to short, I'm in a bit of a rush today, here's a picture of the editor as it looks right now...

Reunion goes into production

Well, a rather shambolic couple of months as far as posting goes, I apologize. As I was slaving away at canvases and keyboards I suppose I never felt I really had anything useful to show off, and definitely nothing at a finished enough standard that I was prepared to put it online as a 'this is what my game will look like' piece. Well pre-production has slowed off now, and tommorow I enter full blown production on the game, for completion at the start of May (the 10th I think).

This blog will now switch into a full blown dev diary, kind of like when I was working on Entropy last year. You'll see diary entries each day (although the blog itself will only be updated every few days) detailing the process that goes into producing a four month project.

Needless to say, this dev diary isn't going to be particularly arty for a month or so, which could mean a bland-ish blog. To fix this, instead of producing a PDF artbook, I will be using all the concept artwork I produced to illustrate the dev diary, at least until there start to be interesting things to show from the actual production.

Here we go, dear readers, and I'll see you on the other side :)