The nice thing of having a minimalist layout is that you can change the complete look of your site with relatively little effort. Still, this redesign took a while. I spent most of the time to come up with something I liked and then some more to throw it away and start over again.
One of my goals for this redesign was to improve readability. Since most of this Blog’s content is text – not images or videos – it didn’t really make sense to have a dark background like the old design in the first place. The result probably won’t win any awards for creativity, but it’s functional.
I learned a lot about typography and classical grid layouts in last few months, so I tried to apply some of it here (I'm still at the “I don't need InDesign; I can build my print layouts in Pages!” stage). The most obvious change is probably the font size. I'm now using a huge 16px base font that really isn’t that huge. I also switched to Helvetica/Arial which looks so much nicer on the headlines than Trebuchet-MS did.
There were also some bugs and quirks under the hood that were in desperate need of getting fixed. It should be all working now. If you still find something that looks odd, please let me know.
Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been quite busy with a huge project that I can hopefully show you in some weeks. And I can assure you Yuckfu isn’t dead either.
Another thing I finished up yesterday was my new portfolio. Not that I haven’t done any of thesebefore, but this is one new! And fancy! Did I mention its new?
This time I spent much more time on the actual layout and functionality of the portfolio itself. The main feature is that you can pan the document, just like you would pan the map on Google Maps. This is all done with a small JavaScript, based on the wonderful jQuery library. While the new portfolio makes heavy use of transparent PNGs, the site still looks okay-ish and remains perfectly usable in IE6. It also degrades gracefully for browsers that have JavaScript disabled or the iPhone, which has no notion of onmousemove events.
I also made sure that the print version from all major browsers looks good. The Hartija Css Print Framework is a great starting point for creating specialized print Style Sheets. I only had to tweak some values and remove elements, like the menu, that make no sense in print.
We finally managed to built a website for our last years semester project Klangpong. I was mainly responsible for the programming and 3d graphics. The full Processing source code of the game is available at the site, but it’s a bit complicated to get it up and running.
We will present the game at the Mediale (Darmstadt/Germany) starting tomorrow – so if you want to play it, pay us a visit!
Avatars are important. They are everywhere and there is virtually no community driven website out there, where you can’t upload an image of yourself or what you want to be associated with. These images help us to immediately recognize our friends without even having to look at their names.
We don’t care too much about what is depicted, but how it looks: the overall color and shapes. Yet, all the default avatars of our beloved Web 2.0 sites look exactly the same. And while Twitter’s default Avatar can at least be considered cute, most others are dull and unimaginative.
Why not create a unique image, based on the users name, on the fly? This avatar could be temporarily used till the user can be bothered with uploading one by himself. This would give even the laziest user a chance to be instantly recognized by his friends.
My InstantAvatar PHP class does exactly this: it generates (more or less) unique avatars on the fly. Here are some examples of what it can do:
As of today, Picturelicious – the PHP Script that drives lowbird.com (an old version) and pr0gramm.com (nsfw; an even older version) – is now for sale. This is the first time I’m really trying to sell some of my stuff as software, so let’s see how this works out.
Packaging up something for a public release always means work, lots and lots of work. Asaph was no different and I was not even selling it. This time I had to be even more thorough. $700 is a lot of money, so I made sure I’d have a proper readme, all configuration variables are documented, the code is cleaned up and the script is really worth what you’re paying for.
I implemented a Paypal button to receive payments for Picturelicious; it really made me wish for an App Store. I do have the feeling that I will complain a lot about the App Store once I try to sell Yuckfu for the iPhone, but for now, Paypal sucks. It’s unbelievably complicated for the vendor and the customer. It tries to please everyone, but ultimately only confuses with too many options. Luckily, the software I’m selling only appeals to people who probably know how to use Paypal. But let’s not blame Paypal; let’s blame the W3C or whoever was to lazy to work out how the 402 HTTP status could be put to use.
Almost seven month ago I wrote about my experiments of “compressing” a whole movie into one single picture. A screenshot of the movie is taken every second and the screenshots are then combined into one big image. 60 frames per row, one row for each minute of film.
I tried this technique with a lot of different movies, but the one that looked most interesting turned out to be Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now I’ve finally got it printed, glued onto a frame and hanging on my wall. I’m very pleased how the print turned out. Every single image is only 11mm wide, but you can still make out a lot of details.
I don’t know what the legal situation here is, but I found that “someone” already uploaded a “similar” image as a PNG file (11367x16232 pixels; 140mb): 2001-13-36-final.png on Rapidshare
Read on for a short tutorial to make your own movie poster like this.
In my last post I said I’d add some exhaust streams to my robot. I also said I’d use particles for that. Well, I didn’t. I spent several hours trying to get it right, but it always looked like my robot’s taking a bubble bath instead of riding on a powerful jet engine. I ended up using a single alpha blended sprite for each of the streams. This may sound cheap but actually looks really good.
As you will see in the following video, I did use particles for another effect: the huge explosion you’ll face every time you loose. Since there really is no way to “win” this game, I at least wanted to make the Game Over as visually appealing as possible. I also added a start animation – the robot now launches like a real rocket from a girder that is disconnected just after the engines have warmed up.
This video shows the game in its current state – it is by no means final. There’s still a lot of stuff missing: a properly designed HUD, effects when crates are collected or new ones spawn and of course: sound! I can’t really talk about sound yet, because I haven’t done anything so far. The only thing I can tell you is that Yuckfu will have sound and music. Hopefully.
Read on for some more in depth (and embarrassing) game developer geekery.
Finally something to write again! I remade the background graphics for my iPhone game, because the old ones didn’t fit too well (flying around with a spaceship in cave?), were never meant to be textured and thus looked unfinished. It was not an easy task. My motivation was at an all time low, because I had to throw away much of my previous work. After two unsuccessful attempts I was eventually happy with what I saw – and I really think it was worth it.
I’ll show you a screenshot of how the game looks like in a minute, but let’s start with something else: The main character. Yes, it’s a character now. Not a lifeless, boring spaceship anymore. Well, ok, it’s a robot – but a cute one! I blame WALL·E. I actually tried to mimic WALL·E’s eyes in my sketch, but failed. The rest, however, worked out quite nicely.
A Google search about cute robots was enough to gather my ideas for a new face. I finished the model in an hour or two, but then spent much more time on texturing, than I did on modeling. As you can see, the texture is quite saturated. I tried to really make him stand out from the background and also wasted my time with details no one will notice in the game. If you know what the number on his body stands for, get yourself a cookie (and a life)!
The background now resembles some sort of space hangar. If you look closely, you can find some influences of 2001 and Star Wars in my 3D model. Modeling and texturing this thing was a real pain. Everything had to fit. I didn’t have the freedom I had with the cave background, where it didn’t matter if the texture was off by some pixels, or one polygon was a bit larger than the next one – after all it was an organic structure. A hangar is not.
The large gate in the background actually opens during the game. Just to make it look more interesting and reward the player. It has no influence on the gameplay itself.
I also textured the crates with some photos of standard shipping containers. They come in four different colors, from red to blue, depending on how many you collected in a row. It looks really nice, when then screen gets slowly filled with these colors. It seems I’m not the firstone discovering the beauty of shipping containers.
Next up: Particle effects – flying a jet powered robot without seeing any streams is no fun.
