Level Editor Goodness Tags: Games, ESA, Small games, Other ESA trailer post-mortem (or something) Tags: Games, ESA, Other, Art, Article Masjin!? ESA is now on Twitter Tags: Games, ESA, Social media ESA TRAILER OH MYYYYYY Summer Tags: Games, ESA, Plans, Other Environmental Station Alpha keeps going Tags: Games, ESA, Happenings, No More Sweden Uh. Weird. Cloud Realm! Tags: Games, Cloud Realm, Ludum Dare Woo! Tags: Games, Cloud Realm, Ludum Dare Pages
Posted on 2012-07-16 06:15
This is kind of silly and not at all cool and amazing, but I just finished a level editor for a competition collaboration project I’m working on (along with ESA and such). Thing is, this editor has some functions that I haven’t tried implementing before, and thus it feels really cool to see them in action. It’s kind of hilarious (in a tragic way): it feels really good to create a level editor that looks and feels solid and bug-free, but actually creating a game using said editor can be feel like a huge chore.
Here’s said editor:
For comparison, here’s the rather simple (but useful!) editor of Environmental Station Alpha:
Posted on 2012-07-11 18:55
A friend of mine thought that the way I created the trailer was hilariously overcomplicated and thought it’d be interesting if I made a post describing the process, so here we go.
First of all, due to being a poor university student I don’t have the money to buy expensive video editing tools such as Sony Vegas; all videos I’ve made this far have used some combination of Camstudio and Windows Movie Maker (yeah, I know). Then again, I haven’t really given that much thought about the trailers and videos I’ve released this far, so I haven’t minded the awful quality.
With ESA, my intention was to really put some thought to the trailer, and for the first time actually use music made specifically for it. The plan was that I’d make a “raw” version of the trailer and send it to Noby, who’d compose a fitting song around it, after which I’d adjust the video so that the video and audio sync properly (I have no idea how the process ‘should’ go). However, a big problem was that if I did the trailer the usual way, i.e. by recording some gameplay and then mixing and editing it in Movie Maker, the result would be horribly grainy and fuzzy due to the enormous amounts of compression Movie Maker applies to the videos (I don’t know if there’s any way to avoid this – all the codecs I’ve tried apply a lot of compression).
After thinking about it for a bit, I came up with a solution that’d be really really weird but also (hopefully) allow me to create a video with high quality and proper audio. This was to build the trailer in-game, in Multimedia Fusion 2, the program I use to develop ESA. Now then, actually setting up scenes with AI-controlled player movements and such would be a huge pain, so what I actually did was to record a scene in-game with Camstudio, and then turn the AVI to a GIF, the latter of which could be opened in MMF 2. This way I’d get every in-game footage as an animated picture into the program, after which I would be able to connect them to each other with fitting transitions.
Here’s an example of a ‘raw’ footage gif that I used in the trailer:
It’s pretty small, because the game uses a resized window.
Recording and GIF-ifying the gameplay footage was quite time-consuming, but after I had that part done, the only things I still needed were short lines of text to show in-between the footage, as well as some special scenes that weren’t recorded in-game, such as a spaceship flying through space, or a closeup of the space station ESA takes place in. These weren’t that hard to implement, but I ended up creating a sort of a ‘code’ that’d tell the program how long a line of text would stay on-screen etc. This was to ensure that I could later sync the video easily with Noby’s music.
After I had ensured that the whole of the trailer would play properly, I recorded it again in Camstudio to get a raw version of the trailer, without music but with all the assets that’d be in the final. This I sent to Noby, who began to work on the trailer audio track. The music he made resembles the main theme of the game, and I was really happy to see how well it fit the trailer’s atmosphere. It’s good to have more than one person thinking about the ‘feel’ of the game, see. Anyway, the “toughest” part of the process was to actually add the music to the trailer. I had no video-editing tools that would screw the quality of the video file, so I actually added the music track to the in-game trailer and recorded it yet again with Camstudio, this time enabling “Stereo Mix” so that the program would also record everything that came out of my speakers. Since Stereo Mix records only what comes from one’s speakers, I had to turn my computer’s volume to 100% to get the volume levels correct. I use rather cheap headsets which let out quite a bit of sound, so I also had to muffle the sound under some clothes while recording (living in a student apartment can be a pain!) After this I finally had something I could call a ‘final’ version of the trailer.
(Except I had to record it again thrice because the volume levels still weren’t correct.)
Now that was a wall of text. Also typing it out makes it sounds much weirder than it actually was. Maybe I’ll try get that Sony Vegas for my next trailer, dohoho.
Posted on 2012-07-11 03:26
I released yet another update to Masjin; this time to fix a bug that has made joining games almost impossible lately. Not that anyone ever playes the game, I just felt sentimental and wanted to play around a bit. Maybe I’ll organize a game someday.
Posted on 2012-07-09 20:58
Well yeah, it looks like that. I personally dislike Twitter quite a bit but it seems to be quite a good way to spread information.
Head to https://twitter.com/ESAdevlog and follow, if you feel like doing so!
Posted on 2012-06-19 18:39
Yeah, it’s there. Great!
(Broken video)
On sadder news, I still haven’t finished that ~summer game~ so work on ESA wont continue for a while still.
Oh and I also made a painting:
Also also my birthday was yesterday. I’m now one step closer to godhood death.
Posted on 2012-05-29 14:12
Well then. I’ve had to stop working on ESA for the time being because I don’t have a job this summer and thus need to earn my money some other way. I’ll try to make some simple flash thing so that I don’t starve or whatever. Hopefully I’ll be back to work on ESA in a month or so.
Posted on 2012-05-12 16:27
Yaay, more enemies.
Also, this year’s No More Sweden is slowly approaching – the event will be 20th of July. If you live near Malmö, Sweden, I suggest that you visit the event website!
Posted on 2012-05-07 00:47
So then. I just finished level 14 of Beyond the Black Hole, that endless project of mine. The engine is, as I’ve stated previously, very very awful, but the game has some really neat things going on so I really want to finish it. I think I’ll try to finish 20 or so levels and then call the game finished. I’ll definitely want to re-revisit the concept later, though, because it allows for a lot of creative freedom.
It took me 17 months to finish this one level. Cool? Nope.
Oh, and also, I’ve been adding parallax scrolling to Environmental Station Alpha. Like so:
Posted on 2012-04-23 21:44
Too busy to write anything new, so copying from other places:
I made the game Cloud Realm! In the game you control a boy with a glider-type apparatus and fight against a huge robo-serpent thing. There’s only one enemy due to running out of time, but in my opinion the atmosphere & controlling of the glider work pretty neatly and thus I’m pretty happy with the game. There’s also some sort of a “backstory” or “interactive intro cutscene”, although in hindsight I have no idea what I was thinking there. I’d definitely love to make a larger game out of this, but I’m also quite sure that this kind of gameplay would be best fit to be made in flash. Maybe this is the True Motivator for me to learn Actionscript?
~CONTROLS~
A & D – move around
W, SPACE & Left mouse – jump when not flying
ESC – skip the first part of the game (in case you want to get to the action quickly)
Left mouse – shoot while flying
Right mouse or E – leave a bomb while hanging from a surface
Space – cling to a surface and jump off it, more about this in the in-game instructions
In the game you’re controlling a glider-ish vehicle, so horizontal momentum matters a lot – you glide when your horizontal momentum is high, but start losing altitude when you slow down. However, diving a bit and then accelerating makes you gain height. This may need some trying but you have infinite retries!!
All this is also explained in the in-game instruction screen. Shouldn’t be too weird.
screenshots:
(Broken image)
(Broken image)
PLAY THE GAME HERE
Here’s also a timelapse for the game:
(Broken video)
Posted on 2012-04-23 00:38
Approximately 3 hours 30 minutes left, and I’m quite far into my project. I think I’ll make it! After finishing this, however, I have to return to work on school stuff. The joy!
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