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Initial Info about the game, more to come

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Progress Update and Background Design

The game is coming along fine, the frame rate is stable and most of the base components are in.  Title screen and music are completed, level select and level complete screens are complete and obviously the actual gameplay basics are there.  Main task now is to tweak the gameplay till we are happy with it and start designing the actual level layouts.

Below is a quick screen shot of the test level we have running now.

I thought I would talk about the background graphics and how we are going about creating them.  The majority of the game takes place up in the air, so its a nice simple background of blue colour with multiple images of 3D rendered clouds (rendered in blender) scrolling past at different speeds (parallax).  Towards the end of the level we have our rendered complex background.  Each stage has a different theme and there are multiple levels per stage.

Below are 3 images of the creation of the winter level, the first image is the basic render I started out with.

First Version

The background is fairly simple but snow is difficult to render, hints and tips from Blender Guru are always helpful for any sort of blender work so I went there and found what I needed to make it look nice.  With regard to the design the foreground fir tree would be removed in the final image and rendered separately to be used as a parallax layer.

The second version of the scene.

Second Version

I added a lot more trees and sorted out the lighting a bit in this version, I also added the bright blue background so its easier to cut out in Gimp (bit like a blue screen) and make it transparent.  I thought this version was ok but once I put it into the game I realized there was an awful lot of white snow background scrolling past once you drop past the trees.

The third version of the scene.

Third Version

To fill in that space in the scene I added a snowman, what else could you add in a snow scene.  Once this background was added into the game it looked a whole lot better as it scrolls by, less white space and the snowman gives some perspective along with the parallax fir tree in front.

Hopefully we will have a video of the game to put online in the next few days. just a few more tweaks to the collision detection and we will be able to show the game up and running.

Creating an enemy bird

Just a quick post to show you the design process I went through in creating a bird for the game. Tis quite a long winded process for me as I do not think I am actually a natural artist, I have the ideas but takes a while to refine what I want within the art package.

I am currently using Inkscape (open source)to draw most of the animated characters, I find it quite easy to use and gives the lovely vector look.

Anyway you can see in the image below the top left bird is my first attempt, which I was not very happy with but I refine it and refine it to the bottom right image which is the final birdy. Then it was on to animating the bugger.

The first birds head is way to big and there is no character in his face at all, the white face just does not work.I change the proportions which helped a bit but his arms looked like popeyes.
As we move on I work quite a lot on the eyes, slowly bringing more character to his face, trying to make him more menacing rather than simple.


Then finally I work more on the wings/arms getting them to fit to the proportions of the birds face.

How do I make a coin

For the animated coins in StuntMouse I used Blender, an open source package for 3D

rendering. Although the interface is quite complex (although the new 2.5 version, still in beta, is much nicer than 2.49) there are loads of video tutorials around on the web and some good books available from the Blender site to help you get to grips with it. The trick is to start simple and give yourself a good couple of hours in one sitting.
To create the coin I created a disk shape,drew acoin texture with the GrumpyMouse GM on it and applied the texture in Blender. Rendered it with cartoon shading on (just edge shading in the interface) to make sure its all nice and neat.
Once you are happy with the basic shape youcan switch into Blenders animation mode and get the coin spinning. Its a really simple keyframe setup for the animation, set one at the start and one at the end and let Blender tween the frames inbetween.

Below is a screen shot of my Blender set up for the gold coin in the game.

Once the animation frames have been rendered out I had to spend a bit of time sorting out my work flow to get them in the right state for the game but I will talk about that next time