Act 1 – Almost Done!

Quick entry.

Over the Christmas holidays I bought a real proper laptop! No longer using my 10.1″ Intel Atom netbook to write the opera on. Got a full size laptop to work with. It’s powerful enough to run Sony Vegas at high resolution! Before it was…tricker but with this upgrade in hardware, the later acts should be coming out a lot faster than before. A lot of time was spent working around the speed issues of the older netbook. But no longer!

So a biggish gif below to show you something new, but the first act should be ready really really soon.

Menacing 4D Cube

On Walking

The opera is taking shape and the end of the first act looks like it is within reach. The amount of work required to get this opera working is surprising.

This post is just a way of showing more the how-to side rather than the finished article.

I decided to cover an important part of the opera. Walking. As I am doing this opera almost frame by frame, it quickly became apparent that I would need a way to make them walk, sit, stand and a whole host of other things. I needed a way of taking a static picture of a character and changing it so that it looked like they was moving and walking. A walking generator was what I needed.

After searching online I found the perfect Walking Generator that is easy to use, malleable and works perfectly for 2D animation.

WCEdit Application

The way the character walks is entirely customisable within XML. After a bit of educated guessing and some trial and error, I was able to get my characters walking from entirely static images.

Sgt. Adams Walking

Jean strutting her stuff

The program is also capable of having characters walking towards the screen. I like that the program can do that but am not sure if it will be implemented in this project. It feels that a character walking towards the viewer could feel unnerving and change the opera from voyeuristic to an almost forced claustrophobic interaction. We shall see at any rate.

Hope to have another update as regular about my progress soon.

New GBA ROM Written – Splat!

Second post in the month. Nice.

I’ve written an interactive visual/music ROM for the Gameboy Advance. I’ve called it Splat! It consists of a piece of music you can directly affect by pressing the buttons and the image on screen is also directly controlled by the users decisions. It’s interactive art!

Below is a picture of what it looks like, but to truly understand what it does, you really ought to download and play it 🙂

Download and play!

Such pretty colours

Moving using UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT across the screen triggers new sounds and pressing certain buttons will also cause different sounds to play. I tried to make it as interactive as possible in that respect but still keep a central theme playing.

As ever, here are the controls:

Controls for VisualBoy Advance

As with my last post/ROM, WordPress won’t allow me to directly attach the game to my page so I’ve created a URL that will give you the ability to download and view Splat! Remember, you need the VisualBoy Advance application to open Splat! if you don’t already have it installed.

https://www.box.com/s/udtm7gxe398d7ucvc7vb

This took quite a lot of man-hours to create, I hope you like it. My second ROM for the GBA. Let me know what you think, feedback is always welcome.

I’ve Found A New Dimension To Play With!

I’ve found a way of showing my 2D images of characters in a new way. Using the 3rd dimension. It opens up a lot for the characters and makes them feel a bit more real. It fits perfectly with the “toys from the 80’s/90’s” approach nicely.

Turning 2D into 3D does lose a bit of charm however. Maybe less naivety in the character now. But opens up the possibility for a bit more complexity and maturity. It does still hold a lot of 8-bit grace and simplicity.

This is the kind of pixel art that, now that I’m getting better at using, will have to use in a few upcoming animations. A lot of games I played growing up often toyed with the illusion of the 3rd dimension in games. They just weren’t designed for real 3D gaming, but they really did try. Often portraying depth by altering the camera angle or changing the background and foreground for depth in gameplay.

I remember 3D looking characters on 2D plains, particularly platformers that employed this technique and remember seeing the future. We had arrived.