DRAW!

Been having ideas for loads of things recently but also trying to do more drawing and stuff than I have been.

This guy was just a quick sketch that I realised looked like Rex who you will, of course, remember for standing in for Attack Fox early on in production, so I coloured him in:

Also I've been working on-and-off on a picture of Emma Watson, pre-hair chop, in the way I worked on similar pictures at college.

Tonight I finished drawing the outline and filled in the block colours using digital watercolours in Painter:

Going to work some more on Attack Fox 1 this week so keep your eyes peeled for updates.
BYE my lover. BYE my friend.

P.S. Don't forget to click my new Facebook Like button, because you do like this and I like seeing numbers getting higher.

LIKE

I added a Facebook Like button to the blog. Click it! NOW.
Here's link if you want your own:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
For blogger add an html gadget and paste the script into it.
Bye
Bye
BYE

5 things Call of Duty should have sorted by World at War but didn't

 Once again I have felt the need to play through a Call of Duty game on its hardest setting, Veteran, and, as usual, various sections of the game have proven to be so excruciatingly difficult that they have angered and frustrated me into thinking about the game's most significant gameplay problems, some more obvious than others, and also into feeling the need to tell you all about them.
 This time the game is World at War. I've recently bought it on PS3 but have completed it before on Veteran  on the 360.
Apparently a lot of COD fans aren't at all keen on WaW, apart from Nazi Zombies obviously, judging by internet chatter but they're wrong and can fuck off because I like it.
 Anywayz here are the five things, some of which were sorted in Modern Warfare 2, with brief descriptions:

1) Grenades - Ridiculous. The cause of the majority of my deaths on Veteran. Combined with number 2 turns any open ground into an endlessly replenishing minefield.

2) Infinitely spawning enemies - A problem that Infinity Ward explicitly addressed for MW2. Combined with numbers 3 and 4 and some bottlenecking level design makes advancing in some cases virtually impossible and only possible with a lot of luck on your side.

3) It's always down to you to push forward - Another common one for the COD games and closely tied to number 4. Without this problem most of the others would be a lot less significant and frustrating as pushing forward is a key element in a lot of the series' big battles.
Leaving pushing forward completely to your AI allies is a cop out so perhaps they could push on slowly and your input is to speed the process up if you can...

4) AI - As lovable as they are your AI team is shit when it comes to killing baddies. Of course they have to leave the fun to you but they really do seem to be there just for show.
 This is made a lot more obvious when the enemy AI enter the equation. They shoot you, and only you. Surrounded by other targets they will take you out through a 5p hole in the rubble from a mile away.
 Now World at War gets bonus points for its super-retarded enemy AI that seemingly came out of nowhere, although, amidst the frustration, it can be quite funny imagining the thoughts of the Nazi soldier who decides enough is enough and a jog over to the Russian and back would do him the world at war of good.

5) Checkpoints - Perhaps the least obvious 'thing' that becomes very obvious on a Veteran playthrough is the   frequently flawed placement of checkpoints. The game is made up of action sequences broken up with brief rest periods, often used for dialogue or plot progression.
 What becomes apparent is that the checkpoints are almost always placed at the end of an action sequence and at the start of a rest period. So what could start off as a simple walk up a hill or ten second chat turns into a complete pace breaker on your fortieth respawn. The checkpoint should be at the start of an action sequence.
 Of course they're not all like this but pfffff.

Anyway fuck it nobody cares, hopefully Black Ops will be good BYE

Update: It's just occurred to me that I think the problem I have with the Veteran playthrough of WaW is that it's hard to roleplay as a Russian soldier when your comrades are running headlong into the enemy and you're cowering behind a sandbag every five seconds waiting for your health to regenerate...

99... 100... One Hundred Posts! Ah Ah Aaaah!

Who'd have thought it? In trying extra hard to make my 100th blog post worth reading for once I've done the exact opposite and taken 5 times as long doing it.
Sooooo I've finished both floors of the house for Attack Fox 1 and here they are:

   

I've also made a mockup of a "cover" and "poster" for the game:

I quite like it and think it looks suitably retro. Going to do a proper version in Illustrator hopefully.
Still haven't got my PC.
Otherwise I've just been building on various ideas for other things. Like "Geiger Petri the Intergalactic Aftershave Salesman".
Anyway here's to another 100 posts :) Oh yeah I've added a StumbleUpon widget at the top so if you have an account pleaaase like my page if you do.
Goodbye.

Attack Fox 1 update (22nd July) VIDEO!!

Not really an update just had a go at using Fraps to record a video the game so far.

I'm not quite sure what happened when I tried to compress it but you can sort of see what's going on:

Shit isn't it? BYE BYE

Attack Fox 1 update (21st July)

Amazingly it's been five days since the last update. I don't know if I have that much to show for it but pfffff. I managed to get hold of the Pro version of Game Maker via the unofficial route.

So...

I have finished both floors now (minus furnishings). I tried some shading to make the lighting more realistic but it looked dire so I scrapped that. Both floors also have the covers for all the rooms but I still haven't worked out how to make them come back when the fox isn't around.

Here's some screens of the uncovered floors, you can probably see I've started working on the furnishings with the toilets and baths:

Rex the stand-in sprite has now been replaced by the actual Attack Fox sprite and most of my time since last week has been spent trying to sort out all the problems I was having with making him move properly.

After many different control methods of varying success I finally cracked it earlier today and now Attack Fox has full 360 degree rotation and he follows the mouse cursor's position with a walking animation when he moves and and standing pose when he stops (at the cursor or at a wall). I'm incredibly proud of this as it took soooooo fucking long. Thanks is due to all the youtube tutorials and coding.

Here are the two sprites:

I also started a simple Harry Potter shooting game in Game Maker. This was firstly to test the 360 rotation code and aiming cursor and secondly as a response to the phenomenally retardedly spasticated gameplay of the official Deathly Hallows game where Harry has a machine gun laser wand... I call it: Harry Potter and the Orders of Marcus Fenix.

I gave my Harry 2 spells, that could be selected with the 1 and 2 keys, to start with. One is his Stupefy rifle with unlimited ammo and the other is his more powerful area affect attack, which I guess could be a Patronus grenade launcher.

I was pleased that I managed to get an area affect attack to work, although I think I did take the kind of cheaty way round, however I wanted it to have a recharge time to balance it as it was more powerful.

Anyway a lot of fucking around with live systems etc later I decided it was too hard and went for the next best thing... a reload button assigned to the most awkward key possible. P.

Harry's direction is controlled by WASD and his aiming and shooting by the mouse so unless you have a dinnerplate handspan you have to let go of one of these to reload. With swarming enemies, represented at the moment by monstrously terrifying 'static orange boxes', this will make using the Patronus a lot more risky. Anyway that's enough waffle here's some pictures for sticking with me:

STUPEFY!!

(It's hard print screening and shooting at the same time)

EXPECTO PATRONUM!!

Just for laughs here's the combat interview of the actual game http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2010-harry-potter/100898 . It's particularly funny if you listen to what he's saying then actually think about actual Harry Potter. "our Rocket Launcher"????? hahaha!

Anyway BYE

Attack Fox 1 update (16 July)

So I haven't done a great deal since last time, the ground floor background (the textures etc) took quite a long time. The basic textures are finished but there's no shading or anything yet so it looks a bit weird.

I've also put in the proper walls and added collision detection and it's all working fine.

As you can see in the screen below some of the rooms are covered in purple blocks, these so the player can't see what is happening across the map from the off.

If I can figure out how I might make it so the rooms go dark again when you leave them to make the game more difficult, maybe I'll even have two difficulty settings with the option of both...

hahaha no that won't happen.

Here's the bottom floor with no doors and not in the dark (a problem I had was making the stairs (the red strip) look like they were going up the right way, the bottom of the stairs is at the top end of the map If that makes sense (feedback on this would be much appreciated):

I've also started working on the top floor, where all the eating will happen. The green rectangles are place-holders for doors.

In terms of audio I haven't really started looking for sound effects (screams, snarling, bone crunching etc) but I have asked friend and former bandmate Rory Smith (http://www.myspace.com/rorysmithmusic) to have a go at composing a midi background track.

I'm hoping for a sort of subtle jazzy/swing beat with a bass and, as midi saxes sound shit, a clarinet, kind of alluding to the Pink Panther theme.

Don't think there's much else news, I've made a to do list which is coming in quite handy.

BYE.

Attack Fox 1

Yesterday I downloaded Game Maker 8 and started working on my Fox attack game, which I've never mentioned before.

After having a go at Game Maker in the first year I thought it was really hard and kind of ignored it. But after following a tutorial on how to make your first game it all seemed really simple so I started working on my game.

The game is half based on the recent Fox Attack story and half based on my opinions on the cunts who go fox hunting with hounds.

Basically it's a basic top-down stealth game where you play as a fox. The aim is to enter the stately home of a fox hunter, eat his children and leave without being caught.

So far I have:

• Created a place-holder character (Rex) that moves up, down, left and right with the arrow keys and has a very simple walk cycle when he moves.
• Created a basic layout of the rooms on house's two floors using a house plan from Google images and put this in game with collision.
• Added an object on the stairs that allows the player to move between floors.
• Added a brown square to represent tables etc ready to test a hiding mechanic.
• Started working on opening doors.
• Started working on the background.

I would have liked to design my own house, one that suited gameplay better, but it only started out as a practise go that I really got into. Perhaps I will for the sequel. I have a few ideas for gameplay mechanics that may partially solve this problem anyway.

Here are some screens of my work so far (not indicative of final gameplay!):

More soon hopefully. Bye

Hi..

..I'm super mario galaxy 2. I was designed during the 16 bit era but due technical limitations on the available systems at the time I wasn't able to go into development.

Luckily, thanks to the Wii, I now exist as a fully playable game, but don't worry, none of my design document has changed since the early 90's so if you're not accustomed to the functionality and accessibility of contemporary games in 2010 you can feel at ease.

Judging by my cartoony visuals and endlessly patronising, unskippable dialogue sequences you'd think my target audience was young children however this couldn't be further from the truth. As will become immediately obvious when you play me, I am aimed primarily at experienced digger drivers and the sort of people who post speed runs of my older brothers on the internet.

The character you play as in me, Jumpman, can perform about 20 different types of jump, although funnily enough you will only ever use two of them as the rest are either completely useless or are more dangerous to Jumpman than most of his enemies.

As I mentioned earlier I am developed for the Wii and, although it does run me fairly well until anything bigger than Jumpman moves on screen, I myself do present some of the console's limitations. For example, like many pre-playstation one games, dialogue is presented in speech bubbles rather than as actual audio and, given how little is said in the game, this, on an admittedly laughably current generation console, surprises even me.

Well that's all for now, I might see you again if Ollie lets me back on his blog. Bye.