Archive for the ‘Future’ Category

Look at mah Armour

For a future game I really want to use a hand drawn technique. So today I’ve been experimenting with colouring in an old drawing. Here are the results:

The drawing is (heavily) based on an exoskeleton armour guy from the first series of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. To be honest I’m not too bothered about the quality of the pencil drawing itself, this experiment was to test the process of colouring and finishing the image in GIMP. The original version (including layers) can be downloaded here.

First I drew the image on paper (many years ago) before scanning and importing it into GIMP.

The idea is that the drawing handles the outlines, details and some shading; so it was applied as a hard light. I also went around the drawing deleting the outside JPEG artefacts.

Next was to add colour, so underneath I filled new layers with block colours. A dark sandy tone is used for the armour and a very dark grey for the gun. This layer was the only one which was set to normal.

The shading in the original drawing is very sketchy; lots of white and grey lines side by side. This makes the highlights look dirty so to thicken then up I copied the drawing layer, applied a large Gaussian blur and then upped the contrast to give a bigger difference between light and dark. It was set to replace the ‘value’ of the image, which is essentially the lightness of the image.

You’ll notice the shading is still far from even; the large shadows on the legs still look sketchy. But that helps to work as a mix between the pure sketchyness of the original drawing and the large blocks of colour. Plus if it’s too uniform then it won’t look like a drawing anymore.

Finally I added a gradient overlay with the centre placed approximately around the head. This is to accentuate that area of the armour as the centre of the picture. The lines around that area of the body appear more black then those further away.

Putting those layers together gives the final image. I had also thought of texturing the colours but it looked cheap. I’m really happy with the results and plan to use this technique in the future. But I really like is how I’d managed to plan all that out.

First thinking of the effects I wanted to achieve and then picking the GIMP features needed to achieve them. In many ways just like how people approach real software development. I’ve still got a very long way to go, but I’ve definitely learnt more drawing this. Here it is again!

April 12th, 2010, Posted in Art, Future |
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What am I working on? SSG!

It’s been a while since I’ve added some proper content to the site, so what have I been up to? Well mainly…

It’s a full complete remake of SpaceSnake. For a while I’ve wanted to do two things for my next project. First make a complete game, not another small 1 level title, and second base it on one of my existing games. SpaceSnake is easily the most popular game on my site. It’s also the only one of my games where someone other then me has blogged about it! Making it the obvious choice.

It’ll have multiple levels placed in a large universe map that you play across. On each level there will be achievements to complete in order to unlock the later levels for building a sense of progression and development. The levels will also get consistently harder as you go through to push your snake skills to the limit.

When finished I am planning to try and get it released onto the (still quite recent) JavaStore. It might not be Steam or the Apple Store, but having a full game finished and published will give me more credability and gain experience I can use for the next title. In many ways it’s like I’m building my first game again because it needs to meet a standard at of completeness that is far higher then any other game I have built.


There is still lots to do, so I’d better get back to work!

January 31st, 2010, Posted in Future, Projects, Space Snake |
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Java, with no Java!

A few weeks ago I saw this video on channel 9 about the new hardware acceleration features being added to IE9. In reality this is nothing new, I saw news reports of Mozilla talking about adding similar to FireFox at least a year ago. But to see it in action brought home a certain reality.

One of the key selling points for me using Java for building my games is that all of the graphics are hardware accelerated, all thanks to the OpenGL bindings. There is no worry about the number of images I’m using and if they are transparent. With hardware accelerated support in the browser this advantage is just no longer true.

The need for hardware acceleration is apparent if you look at some of the current high-end HTML 5 examples. There are some great ones over at Chrome Experiments.com, my favourites being a partial port of Another World. But some others make my PC grind to a crawl. However even with HTML 5 I’d then have to write all my games in JavaScript; a language far more combersume and limiting then Java.

Java to JavaScript

So next enters GWT, the Google Web Toolkit. A library for building GUIs in JavaScript. But what’s interesting is that it’s written and compiled from Java code.

I’ve been playing around with it over the last few weeks and if you’ve got any experience using something like Swing then you’ll find it a synch to use. They have a nice page showing all of the core widgets included here, but even nicer is their mock mail app example.

The potential here is that I could write a game in Java and not have to rely on the plugin being present. But even if the graphics are hardware accelerated it’s still not the same without the OpenGL bindings. Lots of little effects and tweaks I’d like to perform for which I need them to be able to perform. The solution? WebGL!

GFX FTW!

A new standard in development (here) and already supported by FireFox, Chrome, Opera and Safari (although it seems only via experimental nightly builds on FF). This would be perfect and is what I’d love to be using. It’s just a shame that only one of those browsers has a percentage of users in the double digits, and even then nothing compared to IE. Until that changes it’s just not practical to use. That pains me.

Any JVM bugs users experience automatically get blamed on my games (that is where the user saw them occur). It’s also not as cross-platform as I once thought (although still excellent at this). I’d ultimately love to have the same environment I have right now, writing Java code that uses OpenGL, but with no actual Java backend. That would be heaven.

December 30th, 2009, Posted in Future, Java |
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The SF Library

Today I uploaded the first technical demo for StudioFortress, Twilight. It’s a small implementation of a the Boids artificial life environment, and it’s also the first public demo that uses the latest version of my new library. The SF library.

I’ve been slowly building it over the last year and an early version is used for first 5 games on StudioFortress, but this version is built with the aim of distributing it soon. There is a big difference between building something for personal use and building it to production level. When released it’s going to be hosted as an open-source project on Project Kenai with my technical demos as examples. Others can then use and contribute to the library as they see fit.

There are however lots and lots of free game libraries for graphics and middle wear out there, so how does mine differ? First it’s aimed solely at rapid development for small 2d games. Second is that I found it quite difficult to find game libraries that did more then just graphics plus a few utility classes. There are some out there for Java, but they don’t quite do it how I want it. It’s more of a framework then a library designed to give you a structure you can use for all of your games.

More information will be released later closer to when it’s uploaded.

October 4th, 2009, Posted in Future, Projects |
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