I haven’t made a post in a few weeks. Why? Because I had exams. I am a student after all. Thankfully, that’s over, and I can focus my time on important things for the next few months.
But I’ve done a lot in the last few months, too. None of it is really important or “complete,” but some of it is actually pretty darn impressive given the short amount of time it was completed in.
(A open letter of personal conflictions.)
If you religiously scan everything about me on the Internet, you would be a little creepy. And, while there isn’t too much out there to go on, you’ll know I am a university student. I am finishing soon, expecting to graduate within months with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. As my classes come to a close, I have some important decisions to make.
Most people are asked throughout their student lives the same question: “What will you do when you graduate?”
How do we answer? Often, we don’t know yet. Some people, even after college or university, don’t know exactly what they want to do.
At least, that’s what they say. I think, deep down, everyone knows exactly what they would like to do. The problem is that it may or may not be viable or realistic, or are just too strange for people to be willing to admit. If you have a passion for becoming a Fortune Cookie Writer or Professional Whistler, then great, but that might be a difficult job to obtain, let alone the fear of what your family or friends would think.
All-righty. Let’s continue our monthly tradition of talking about some awesome games being crowdfunded!
No MMORPGs. Or table-top games. I should probably take RPGs off the list too, there are so many of them on Kickstarter. Maybe next month.
At the very least, take a look at all of these projects.
I keep thinking about better ways to improve my method for pseudo-3D hand-drawn graphics in games. It isn’t a very advanced method, and yet expands older methods that have been abandoned decades ago, creating traditional animation in 3D games in ways that computer animation has still be unable to mimic.
The problem with it? Never mind how it looks (I am not a professional animator in any sense, that it looks as good as it does with my ability alone is enough to convince me of its potential). It takes a lot of work to animate (still less than the typical animated film, which is hardly a comparison). More importantly, it takes a lot of RAM and hard drive space. Unlike CGI models, where the animation takes less data than the model itself (and thus animations can be added to a model with less concern), my method multiplies RAM used with every frame of animation. Every frame is its own, hand-drawn texture.
Add that there are different perspectives of one character (currently 24 in my latest version). If I have one animation with five frames, that’s 24*5 = 120 frames. If I have several animations, or add more frames for smoother animation, you can see how one character can have thousands of hand-drawn frames.
