July 26, 2010

CroctoFu

Today, I made a game in 2 hours with a friend, Snail. This is a game that makes little sense, but is sort of fun to play. You are a crocodile defending a cookie from muskrats on rockets made of bacon. You must vomit bacon at them to stop them. This is a link. http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shooter/croctofu/3015/
I should probably get back to work now.

July 16, 2010

Up and walking

Now with a better camera, and 16 frames of walking animation, 1 for standing still, and another as he starts to walk. He actually collides with the walls correctly, and it only took a little frustration to get it working. It turns out his "gimp" is actually a result of a conversion program centering each frame individually, and so destroying the art in my fancy walk animation. I only see one possible solution, so hopefully it works when I attempt it either later today, or tomorrow.

July 15, 2010

Animation Successful(ish)

 < rant>
I got my rig working today, thanks to many painful hours of trying to figure out why my object wouldn't export correctly. Basically, exporting .obj files from blender is whacked, and kills UV maps. So I exported them correctly, with dead UV maps after hours of troubleshooting, changed the UV maps in one, exported its UV coords with UVMapper, and imported it into the rest. One-by-one.
< /rant>

Anyhow, to the left here is the current product, with a texture that shows all of the polys. Currently, he walks around, albeit a small gimp. The gimp was part of the sequence where he moves up, however, various programs turned "up" into "forward". He's animated with a mere 8 frames, and a standing frame. More to come later, if I don't end up shooting myself.

July 14, 2010

Character Design

Trying today to get some character design done with blender, possibly for a game, if I can manage to texture this guy. It's very low-poly work, as the engine I'm using runs interpreted code, which is slow. Hopefully it doesn't overload it too badly, this is 254 polys, and it will be the only one of its complexity in the game. Anyhow, if all goes well (which it most likely will not), I can try to implement a game that utilizes 3D gravity, maybe a shooter.


Assuming that I'm too bad at math to get it to work, this model may just grow a layer of dust for the next few years.

July 13, 2010

3D Planet Gravity

This morning, I woke up with an unexplained thought in my head.
I knew exactly how to implement 3D gravity such as that in Super Mario Galaxy.
I'm still not quite sure why I was thinking about that, or why I pushed all of my sheets onto the floor in my sleep, but I think I was right.

A basic concept of 2D rotational gravity is to send out 2 rays from the
bottom of the character, one closer to the front, and one closer to the back.
From this, you calculate the angle between them, and use it to properly
rotate your character, and set the gravity of the character.
Optionally, for a more complex, but smoother situation, you find
the potential collision point, and gradually move towards the spot right above it.

In order to do 3D gravity, it's a little different, but the concept should be the same.
Send out 3 rays in a triangular arrangement from the character, and calculate a triangle from the points.
Take the resulting triangle, and use it as a reference for gravity.

Easier said than done, but the idea is there.