Archive for September, 2008
Five games that need a comeback!
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in nostalgia on September 20, 2008
Twinsens Odyssey (Little Big Adventure 2)
I have this thing for quirky odd games, and Twinsens Oddessy is certainly quirky. It’s kind of an action adventure game about a boy and his ball, on a quest to save his girlfriend.
The art style is a mash-up of isometric interiors and 3rd person perspective outside areas. Many of the characters you meet are humaniod-animal creatures and to be honest I can’t decide if it takes place in a fantasy world or a science fiction one.
Want Little Big Adventure 3 please!
Phantasy Star
A couple weeks back I purchased the Sega Megadrive collection for my PS2 and its got Phantasy Star II, III and IV on the disc.
These games were freaking expensive when they first came out, as they took up more than 2x the amount of memory on the cartridge compared to other titles at the time.
The games are best described as Sega’s answer to the Final Fantasy games. Phantasy Star is an RPG series that spans many millenia of the Algol solar system. Its a J-RPG at its finest, before the genre decided they wanted to make 40 hour movies instead of games.
We need another Phantasy Star game, and I’m not talking about this Phantasy Star Online business. Incidentally Phantasy Star I and II have been remade for the PS2, and they look amazing. Unfortunately the games are only avalible in Japanese.
Gateway
Gateway and Gateway II homeworld are text adventure games with pictures based on Science-Fiction author Frederick Phol’s series of novels of the same name.
Gateway II was probably the first text adventure game I played seriously, probably back in ‘95 or so. The story and the puzzles are first class and unlike alot of adventure games, things actually make sense. You don’t have to keep guessing what the designer was thinking of when they designed some of the puzzles.
I’ve been meaning to pick up the Gateway novels for a while now.
Streets of Rage
Ah, beat ‘em ups. What more can I say, lots of enemies and cool moves to kick their collective asses. Give me another Streets of Rage. If I had a 360 I could probably get Castle Crashers for my beat ‘em up fix. But for now, I’ll just pine for another Streets of Rage.
Moonstone
Moonstone is one of the most bloody and violent games I have ever played – The pixel art is fantastic and the game can only be described as a blood fest. You play one of four knights on a quest to do… something – I honestly can’t remember, but I think it involved a dragon? Anyway, it kicked ass.
On Programmer Art
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in programmer art, rQuest on September 2, 2008
Programmer art is any artwork done by a programmer, it’s a derogatory term – Because, well most programmers can’t draw.
But I’ve been practising my pixel art lately – I was looking at my budget for rQuest and it really wasn’t adding up to include the massive amounts of gorgeous artwork that I had been hoping for. (Especially after how much that last dentist visit cost me… ouch.)
Thankfully, everyone can create some sort of art, the trick is finding what kind of constraints to impose in order to produce a consistent level of work. One of my favorite essays that I find myself re-reading every now and again is Hugh MacLeod’s How to be Creative – Now, say what you want about his drawing skills, but his artwork is very unique and certainly very clever.
So finding myself lacking in monetary funds I took it upon myself to just start creating the artwork for my next game. And bellow is the current work in progress. (Click for large version)
It’s starting to tighten up, But I still have some details to fill in and there are some shadow and perspective problems to fix. But thats all part of the process, it also may look very simple so far, but it has literally taken me many, many hours.
What I’ve also discovered as I’ve been creating my tileset is that programmer art is really good for using as test art – “Well duh Josh,” you might say, “that’s the whole point of using programmer art in the first place.”
But I really mean test art in the literal sense.
As programmers, we create unit tests, test data, use cases and so on to ensure that our programs are as (hopefully) free as possible of bugs. But I think that programmer art is under utilised as test data.
The key thing is to use assets that are placeholders for the real thing. Use the correct file formats and sizes, directory and archive structure. It doesn’t matter so much what it looks like, but it really needs to have all the same features that the final art will have. If your game calls for animations, create mock up animations to test the code with. It may seem obvious but doing this kind of work helps iron out flaws which might become hard to retro-fit.
For example, in creating my above image I’ve discovered that I should really build a shadow layer into my map file format, this was something that I didn’t think about until I started creating my test art. Also getting the stairs to fit nicely into the grid with that perspective was quite difficult and I’m going to have to implement a special ’sprite y offset’ on those tiles.