Plans for LD16
Well, last contest I think I bit off more than I could chew.
I tried to use a new language Processing, which I wasn’t that familiar with. That’s extremely hard to do, even though the language is actually really easy to learn. It’s a simple language designed for creating graphics.
My goal in the last contest was to create a game that only used dynamically created graphics. I think the fact that I was unfamiliar with Processing hurt me in trying to do this. Also, dynamically created graphics requires algorithms that take a lot of trial and error. I ran out of time before I really got going.
I have been playing with the UDK and I’ve been considering using that to create something, but I really am still lost because there is so much there. I think it just feels a little too much like work to mess around with for a fun contest. Playing with UDK has made me realize something: that it is all about content these days, and not so much about programming any more.
So with that I’ve decided I want to focus on “Eye-Candy” this year. Even though I’m not an artist, I think I’ve come up with a way to create great art of the year’s entry. For Christmas this year, I’m getting about a 3K digital camera setup which includes a Canon 7D, an amazing Tamron 60MM f2 Macro lens, a Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash and a ridiculously fast high-capacity CF card.
So Saturday morning, after I already have a game design, I’m going to spend half the day taking pictures for my game. All backgrounds and game objects will be real life objects. The macro lens will let me do close ups of things such as toy cars or tops as objects and water and sand and such for interesting effects and backgrounds. I might even dabble in trying to use the video since the 7d has an amazing 1920x1080x30 video mode.
The RAW pictures I’ll be taking will be a resolution of 5184 x 3456 and they will be extremely high resolution, sharp pictures, so I’m expecting to come up with some amazing graphics. I’ll use photoshop CS4 to process them and the Ez Mask plugin to extract any backgrounds from foreground objects I want in my game. Ultimately, I’ll probably downscale the graphics quite a bit and create JPGs out of the backgrounds and PNGs out of the objects. I still want the game to be hi-res, so I think I might aim at 1920×1080 resolution for the game. This will be interesting and fun, and I look forward to getting my camera next week to try out my ideas.
I want to spend more time on the content and less on the actual programming, so I’ve decided to use something simple, an easy 2d framework preferably. Yet I want high performance because this is going to be a high-resolution game with a ton of huge images. So I’ve decided to use the Community Framework of BlitzMax. I’ve got several game examples and it looks like this should be super easy to code, so I can focus more on the graphics and gameplay. Small amounts of code goes a long way in blitz.
I don’t know what the gameplay is going to be because I don’t know what the theme is, but all I know is I am going for super simple gameplay. Again I want to spend as much time as I can putting “eye-candy” in the game and not writing complex algorithms.
Well, let’s see how it goes this year. I’m sure there will be plenty of challenges as there always is, and things don’t end up as I plan. But it is always fun to try!
So far, already not looking. My camera has been delayed at least one day, and it’s raining hard and supposed to rain all week. May be hard to go out to take some shots. Urgh.