It’s official. After months of work and blatant self-promotion, “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” is available to buy, download and play from Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/346200/
Well, technically, it’s been on Steam since last week, on February 4. As a reminder, it is also available on Desura and IndieGameStand. And like those other stores, there’s a launch discount of 25% off, ends in two days.
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…
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.
Disclaimer: I am the developer of this game. Which makes it a conflict of interest that I would write a review. But given a lack of written scored reviews elsewhere, I felt it best to write something to make sure people know what they would be getting into should they buy the game. It also acts as a release for me, a psychological exercise after releasing my first game. In the meantime, there are a variety of preview posts and playthrough videos online that I encourage you to check out.
A variety of puzzle types in this platformer, all not too challenging.
