Posts tagged with “Graphics”
I spent the past few days to create the main graphics for my game. After lots of trail and error, I was quite happy with the flat shaded cave I had created (topmost picture). I did not look realistic in any way, but rather computer generated - which is, as I said earlier, probably not something everyone can enjoy. However, the flat shading worked really nice with the dynamic OpenGL lighting (quite a complicated topic of it's own), which gives the whole scene some more atmosphere.
When yesterday a friend saw some screenshots of the game, he told me that it looked all well and nice and then asked a very innocent question: "How will you texture the background?" My response was of course "not at all" - I mean, it's a flat shaded game, right? I turned out that he wasn't the only one who thought that this flat shading was just an intermediate step towards the final look.
I was initially opposed to using textures at all, but after some discussing, I decided to give a shot. I unwrapped the whole scene in Wings3D and used Photoshop to slap some colors and textures on it. The second and third screenshot are the results. One with a more comical approach, the other with realistic textures. To be honest - after all this I'm not very satisfied with either one. I don't even like the flat shading anymore.
Another friend asked me today, why the game is set in this cave in the first place. Wouldn't it make more sense if you'd collect these boxes in some sort of space hangar? Well, yes... yes actually it would. I'm not sure why I didn't loose a thought about the overall scenery at all. I just blindly took the very vague cave look from the original game without ever questioning it.
So, I guess I'll start anew with the background graphics. At least I'm now quite comfortable with Wings3D. It's a good thing I don't have a publisher in my neck. Wish me luck!
I haven't yet elaborated a complete concept of where I want to take Yuckfu visually, but after I did some quick sketches yesterday I decided against 2D graphics for obvious reasons. So, the background, the crates and the character will be drawn in 3D - that is with Polygons and stuff. I won't change the gameplay with this - you will still see the whole scene from a fixed side view.
Why not 2D graphics then? Simple: if I'd be the one doing them, they won't look good. I feel more comfortable with doing 3D stuff. My experience with real modeling software however is at a bare minimum. So here's another thing to learn.
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After having watched The Fountain for the 50th time, I remembered Darren Aronofsky saying how the whole movie is a journey into the light. It is very dark in the beginning and becomes brighter and brighter towards the end. Since this movie is about 90 minutes long, this is a very slow transition - one that you probably more feel than see.
Well, a few days ago I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey compressed into a single picture and instantly had to try it with The Fountain. Aronofsky didn't lie.
Each row represents 45 seconds of film. The Original is about 9000 pixels wide and 200mb heavy. Still, despite the movie being absolutely beautiful, I somehow expected more from this. Maybe I'll streamline my process a bit more and try it with other movies - suggestions welcome!
And now for something completely different. A few friends of mine and I recently joked about the low dollar course and how the Euro is now the currency. Long story short, we came up with a T-Shirt design - which I clicked together in Illustrator a few days later.
If you want it, vote for it! Update: damn.
Not exactly the kind of blog entry I had in mind when creating this site, but anyway...
I didn't really like any of the skins currently available on VLCs homepage. The miniMatrix skin looked very functional, but sadly also quite ugly - so I decided to make a skin with my own graphics based on this one.
Download Whiteout VLC skin ~ 250kb
There is also a .psd template for the buttons in the .vlt file, in case you care.
I spent the past few days to create the main graphics for my game. After lots of trail and error, I was quite happy with the flat shaded cave I had created (topmost picture). I did not look realistic in any way, but rather computer generated - which is, as I said earlier, probably not something everyone can enjoy. However, the flat shading worked really nice with the dynamic OpenGL lighting (quite a complicated topic of it's own), which gives the whole scene some more atmosphere.
