Interesting things that may lead to other interesting things.
So I announced my newest project “True King” a couple weeks ago… it featured a tiny character you could barely see.
While most of the game will be like that, I spent a lot of time experimenting with my animation systems for the characters in this game. Here’s a cool video that shows what I’m working with.
This blog is about my journey as an indie game developer. But I do other things too: last year I finished my Master’s degree with a thesis on artificial intelligence. In my defense I talked about a new algorithm concept of my own design, and how it improved over existing implementations. I also secretly intended the design of this algorithm to be usable in my next game project, which I am currently working on.
So with this justification and with my last paper on the subject published, I will briefly talk about my Master’s research in the article, and why I think I may never take a job involving “academia research” again.
It’s that time of year. Black Friday eve, when North American shoppers all eagerly seek the best value for their dollar. Also, American Thanksgiving.
As expected, my two games “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” and “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” are both on sale this year at only $1.94 on Steam. This sale lasts until December 1, although you can expect a certain “winter sale” to repeat these prices soon. If you don’t like Steam, both IndieGameStand and MacGameStore should have similar prices at similar times in the next week or so. This is my first time having games available on Steam during the infamous Winter Sale, I hope “Unfinished” will break its first milestone of 1,000 copies by next week.
More importantly, I’ve posted tutorial videos and given talks about my unusual technique of using 2D animation in 3D space, which I like to call “3D Cel Animation.” Many people have asked directly for the Unity3D files, and I finally got around to uploading them. You can find them on my GitHub account, which I now hope to update more often in the coming years. These files should work with Unity3D personal addition, v5.0 and higher, and contains the complex layout of perspective planes around an object with a script for the camera to determine which plane to make visible. You’ll have to do the drawings yourself, and I hope to see what other people come up with soon.
Look below to watch some of the old videos I put up to remind you of the process.
CES 2015 happened last week. Beautiful tvs, new laptops and tablets, a lot of car-tech… but I’m going to talk about an innovation from about a month ago that’s more up my alley.
Most of the posts on this blog makes it clear that I like 2D animation. My first game (which got Greenlit on Steam recently, I’ll talk about that more in a few weeks) is one of the first truly 3D games that has a hand-drawn character. I did this because I am annoyed that no one has really done that before. However, “Live2D” is a company that has been trying hard to make it easier for developers to do that, and so their latest effort, “Live2D Euclid,” comes closer than ever. Their website is available here: http://www.live2d.com/en/ , and a video of their latest technology can be seen here:
I like programming. C++ and C# make sense to me. Graphics and shaders, less so. I understand them, I just don’t have much experience with the syntax used in Unity 3D’s shader system.
And so, I was annoyed when I wanted to have a shader that faded between two transparent textures. I assumed that this might be a good way to smooth out 2d animations. But while I could find shaders that would fade between two normal textures, I couldn’t find ANYTHING that supported alpha transparency in those textures.
Anyway, after much experimentation, I made up the shaders myself. They work quite well, too. Sadly, they don’t work well for what I need: the first shader is based on Unity’s transparency shaders, which work great by allowing semi-transparent colors, but this causes errors with rendering order and isn’t good for more complex scenes with a lot of transparent textures. I typically stay away from that and use cutout transparency shaders, which don’t allow semi-transparency, but don’t have the errors I mention. From an animation perspective, the first (transparent) shader looks better, but the second (transparent cutout) is necessary for actual use but doesn’t look as good. I provide both here, hoping it helps some of you out. Maybe I can use it elsewhere…
