Cut scenes

With Sketchboys walk cycle in the bag, my tiles done, and the backgrounds mocked up, I began working on the cut scenes. With time fast running out, and Kah's emphasise on keeping the visual integrity of the game constant, I decided to try and go for a simple but elegant approach. I started out by video myself drawing sketchboy by hand, my intention was to heavily speed this up into only 2-3 seconds and use it for the intro movie. However it didnt come out terribly well, and looked quite grainy when played at the game resolution (800 x 600)

So I decided to just draw sketchboy the way I did for the rest of the game, in photoshop with my graphics tablet. I drew progressively more of the character onto a series of layers and animated these which worked out fairly well.

For the inter level cut scenes, I wanted to go for a nice simple pan from one 'environment' to the next, I experimented with importing one large image into flash and motion tweening my way around it, but found flash didn't really deal with rotating or resizing the image very well, and the image lost quite a lot of detail each time. So I ended up doing it in another program, recording it, an importing the video into flash.

Here is a fairly rough version of the cut scenes all linked together (The levels will load and play where the clip currently pauses)

I still have to work on a final cut scene

Level design

Ive been working on the 'Backgrounds' for each of the 3 levels. We wanted each level to have different background images behind the tiles, and for these images to match the style of the tiles to be used on it. For example the first level with the very sketchy looking tiles, was to have quite a crude looking background.
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3

Level mock up

I took the rotoscoped frames, loaded them into falsh and lined everything up, threw on some basic walking code, and the Sketch Boy character was finished.






I passed this .fla on to the rest of my group and we each began experimenting with the code Glenn and Ashlee had been working on. I drew up some tiles in photoshop and animate them to appear as thoush they were being 'drawn in' and then incorporated these into the code. Im quite happy with how it turned out visually, but its still very buggy.

Rotoscoping Process

With the process and style of how I wanted the character to look, and the rest of my groups agreement, I began the immensely time consuming process of rotoscoping all of Sketchboys 4 isometric walk cycles.

I was perhaps a little over ambitious and opted for 14 frames per walk cycle, in reality I probably could of gotten away with 8-10 and it would of looked fine, but I initially didn't realise quite how long the rotoscoping would take.

56 frames and 12 hours later and it was done..

Here are the sprite sheets.. I hope they're worth it...

Project 3 Update

Ok so I realised I haven't really blogged any of my work for this project so far, so I will try and rectify this now by posting some of the bits and pieces I've been working on.



Here are some experiments I did on various techniques to get the sketchy hand drawn look I was after for sketchboy. In the first experiment I rendered out a simple walk cycle from 3DS Max, I then printed these frames out, traced them by hand and then scanned them back in. Although it was quite quick to do, I felt the finished piece looked quite flat and lacked detail.



Next I tried drawing over the frames in photoshop using the line tool, this was quite slow going, and I wasn't really all that happy with the results.



Lastly I tried drawing over the frames with the pencil tool, and used a Wacom to do so, This was much faster than using the mouse and produced a much better result.

Project 3 Design Document

Here is our groups Design Document.

Clicky

Project 2 Finished!

Side Scrolling

Final .swf

With the 11th hour fast approaching, I went and saw Dan for advice on how to fix the hit test issue. Dan worked out that the problem was the code I had written simply told the main movie clip to go to the hit movie clip, and as a result, for as long as the hit test was true, the main movie was continuously being redirected to the start of this hit movie clip, rather than being directed to it once, and then have it play. Dan showed me how to fix this by setting up a counter which, when the hit test was triggered, would start increasing until it reached 40 (the length of the hit movie clip) and the revert back to zero, and this counter was used to directly cycle through the frames of the hit movie clip when activated. Simple eh? I then made it so this would only happen if the duck key was not being pressed, a little bit more tweaking to do with the area of the hit test (so it is only activated when the block comes in contact with the monkeys head, rather than the start of the monkeys movie clip, which is back by his tail) and it worked almost perfectly (if the monkey is walking backwards when he gets hit there are issues, but i didn't really have time left to fix this)

I also added a basic preloader as i noticed the size was getting pretty big, and when the .swf loaded in the browser, it do so a layer at a time, which looked pretty awful.

Apart from a few changes not really worth mentioning that pretty much wraps up this environment. I'm really happy with how it worked out. It would of been cool to add some sound effects like footsteps and impact noises but time didnt allow it.

Isometric Environment

Final.swf

The isometric environment was a bit of a mixed bag to be honest, after not reading the brief properly initially (My own fault) and as a result only starting it about half way through the assignment, and then with less than a week to go working out that my current approach was pretty unfeasible, and having to basically start from scratch, this environment didn't get as much time as the side scrolling, isn't nearly as polished. I still couldn't get the character walk animation to stop playing once the key is no longer being pressed, and the scrolling isn't perfect. Although i feel I have managed to modify it pretty heavily form the original tutorial i based it on.

Overall I really enjoyed this assignment though, and learned heaps.