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.
It’s always fun to see the world change. Most changes of the last decade revolve around the Internet.
It’s hard to imagine the world without the Internet. Where would you be without email? Google? Wikipedia? YouTube? Most students don’t know how to use libraries anymore. If these websites were to suddenly disappear, we’d be screwed.
But there’s the thing. Libraries still exist. If the Internet died, we’d still be able to function, if somewhat inconveniently.
That’s not true with games anymore.
Ok, here’s some actual evidence of me doing something towards game development. A rough test animation of a character running, as seen below.
It’s a little better than how “James” used to look when running, but the legs/feet still aren’t quite right, and a few extra frames could do wonders. The top part of the body bobbing up and down is a nice touch, though. Not bad, but I should try again to improve this a little more.
Oh yeah, obviously this isn’t “James.” Who is it? Stay tuned…
Recently, “Titanfall” released. The poster child for Xbox One (despite still not really making use of that mandatory Kinect camera, and being multiplayer only), it’s certain to sell a few million this month. It’s also being released on Xbox 360 and PC, and according to recent articles, it requires about 48 GB of hard drive space to install on PC.
Similarly, Watch Dogs, Ubisoft’s newest action adventure franchise, is said to look fantastic on PC (with high settings), but requires a minimum of 6 GB of RAM, 25 GB of hard drive space, and a quad core processor to run.
These are large requirements. What happened to being able to run PC games with only 2 GB of RAM, on a Intel dual-core? Why do you need so much hard drive space, when most games used to require so much less?
Times are a ‘changing, folks. All thanks to next-gen.
