Tag Archives: video game

Sprite Lamp – Some Smart Guys From Australia

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I don’t normally talk about what other people are doing. This is a site dedicated to Dust Scratch Games after all, and I am a rather selfish fellow. But sometimes, something comes up that just knocks my socks off.

Here is a group of guys from rural Australia who are working on something called “Sprite Lamp“, a dynamic 2D-lighting mapping tool for game development. It doesn’t sound like much… why not just have a point light in your environment and move it to where you want light to be? Well, with 2D art and 2D planes, that light gets reflected the same for the entire sprite, and it appears this new tool offers a way to define the effect light has from certain positions on a sprite. The result is some incredibly detailed art, making 2D pixel art look new again.

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Project James – Playable Test Demo of a Hand-Drawn 3D Game

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Ok, I’ve had my fun with some blogging, now let’s talk about why I’ve called you all here tonight.

From my previous post, you know that the first major game by Dust Scratch Games will involve 2D hand-drawn characters in 3D space.  That’s right: a hand-drawn 3d game. This isn’t necessarily the first time such a game was made: the JRPG “Time and Eternity” for the PS3 is advertised as the first playable anime, for example. But that game had the animated sprites in a fixed position in front of the camera, giving the impression of a crude first-person game with cartoons pasted on the front. This, among other reasons, was cause to generally poor reviews. Other games that tried hand-drawn images in games were either beautiful 2D games, or suffered for similar reasons of limitations in 3D.

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What’s Wrong With The Gaming Industry?

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Yes, the games industry is in a bit of a rut.

“But Jasper,” you say, “we’re in the midst of a next-gen revolution! Shiny new consoles are being released that are 10-times as powerful as what we were using before! Some of the best games of the generation were released in the last year! Surely these are great times for the games industry, right?”

First off, don’t call me “Surely.” Second, yes the games we’ve gotten in the last few years have been fantastic. If you time-traveled back about a decade ago and showed them “Skyrim” or “Grand Theft Auto V,” they’d wet their pants. But remember that for every good game like these, there are several mediocre ones that somehow get on store shelves, but even those titles are slightly better in quality. And all of these games seem vaguely similar, despite being of different genres. I guess I’m saying after years of gaming, I just don’t feel excited like I used to.

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Foreshadowing…

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There haven’t been too many clues yet on what Dust Scratch Games actually does or what they’re working on… until now.

Check out our latest videos on YouTube: experimental footage of 2D characters in 3D space. It’s a hand-drawn 3D game. Cool, right? You gotta check out the videos to see what we’re talking about. These were done as part of a proposed research project in early 2013 (by the sole member of this site) using the Unity 3D game engine. The methods utilized here are similar to older fps (“first-person shooter”) games before 3D modeling was viable, but expanded for third-person gameplay and a freely-rotating camera, and with full HD visuals, of course. The result is completely different from any game that exists today, and is the closest we’ve come to having hand-drawn animation cut into the more popular game genres.

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Welcome to fromdustscratch.com!

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A website and news feed for Dust Scratch Games, a new one-man Canadian independent video game company!

… ok, there isn’t much integrity in that last statement, but keep an eye out for us, you might be surprised!

Projects we work on will attempt to change how we look at game development, each in different ways. Most importantly, we will attempt to change how games “look,” hence the abundance of hand-drawn images on the site. If you like traditional animation, you’ll be excited for what we have in store…

Stay tuned as the website continues to be updated in the next few months!