My Games During Black Friday + Unity3D Files For 3D Cel Animation

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.

 

Continue reading

New 2D Faces on 3D Characters – 2D Live Euclid

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:

Continue reading

An Update From Your Friendly Neighbourhood Gamedev

I should write more posts. Especially this month, there have been a ton of new announcements.

Those video game awards 2014 were cool, although the only big announcement I got from it was that Nintendo’s new Zelda for Wii U is worth buying a Wii U for and that Nintendo might best Sony and Microsoft in 2015. Sony’s new PSX happened, and a few cool demos came from it. Street Fighter V is PS4/PC exclusive, and doesn’t look that great, albeit it looks like what SF IV should have looked like, instead of those awkward jagged poly-models everyone said looked incredible. New game “Drawn to Death” looks like good fun, but it tries to mimic pen-drawings with computer models and cel-shading again. Similarly, that new Guilty Gear game is out this month, and also uses 3d models instead of painted 2d ones.

I mention those last few games because I can’t help but feel disappointed. They would all have looked better if they utilized styles similar to my work, where you literally use hand-drawn sprites/cels in 3d environments.

Continue reading

Unity 3D Shaders for Two Transparent Textures

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…

Continue reading

“Hullabaloo” About Successful IndieGoGo 2D Film Project

Around the time of this writing, IndieGoGo campaign “Hullabaloo” will end.

“Hullabaloo” is a 2d animated film project. It features a strong female lead in a steampunk world. It basically hopes to accomplish what Disney and other big-name animation studios haven’t done for over a decade. Yes, it’s technically a series of short films, but it’s success may also lead to a feature film if we’re lucky.

I pledged just before it ended (for the record, IndieGoGo made it incredibly easy to pledge even without an account, making me like it even a bit more than Kickstarter). I’m excited for this project. Not just because I love 2d traditional animation. I’m excited because, when asking for $80,000 on IndieGoGo, it raised over $450,000. That’s a lot.

Continue reading