I’ll do it on monday!

Okay, so I’m going to start posting more often, if anyone cares.

Considering an adventure game is going to take lots of content, ie backgrounds, animation, sound, and music, i’m going to at least attempt to be a bit versed in a few things. If I get to a point where you can see how the finished game will be, and I end up making a bit of money later I might hire out. Until then, I need to do everything myself. So I sort of instituted a plan.

Firstly is art. When I was a kid I used to have some aspirations of becoming a Disney animator. Of course back then all I could do is copy Disney cartoon characters out of books and things. Come 16 years later and that’s still really all I can do. I need to learn drawing. I mean really learn to draw. I probably need to get some schooling, but money is scarce for me and I’m pretty much nervous around anyone I don’t know. However we have these two wonderful things called the library and the internet. So I’m going to soak up what I can off of online drawing courses/tutorials and maybe even a few library books.

Furthermore, I do have a graphics tablet and since paper is sort of a hassle (you have to draw, then scan then animate, and find a place to keep all that paper), I’ve decided to go digital and forgo the paper. Maybe sometime in the future when I wax nostalgic, I can go buy myself some paper and do it old school, but until I get more room, more money, and more time, the graphics tablet is the way to go.

Next up, we have — cartoon characters. Well I used to could copy cartoon characters, but in order to draw like the classics, one must study the classics. To that end i’m going to be pulling out my dvd’s, freezing frames and copying pictures (on the tablet I might add).

Finally we have animation itself. I’m sort of a fan of animation. Not really a die-hard fan that has every single cartoon known to man, but I enjoy classic cartoons from the 40’s and 50’s. (some before, some after). It’s a natural fit.

See when I build Enchanted Lands it’s going to be a 2d cel-style animated point’n'click adventure game. It’s going to take a lot of animation, and I don’t have any money to hire anyone to animate for me. So for the time being it’s me.

I decided every Monday and Wednesday I would learn each of these 3 things, 1 hour each. The rest of the day could be spent working on my game.

This comes to the other side, audio, that is music and sound. Well for the time being music. I’ve got an acoustic guitar which I can’t really play, and an electronic keyboard (and old yamaha portatone which like over 10 years old), which I’ve never really played. So I decided I spend an hour on guitar, an hour on keyboard, and an hour learning music theory. Firstly though I’m just going to learn to read sheet music, and see where I want to go from there.

So the music thing is Tuesdays and Thursdays. This leaves me with Friday, for which I’ll allow myself to play 3 hours of games :-)

So today I was spending time installing programs mostly. Since I have no money I’m using some free art programs like Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/ — Pixia - http://park18.wakwak.com/%7Epixia/ — and Artweaver - http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version

Pixia is a graphics editing program, and art weaver is a natural media paint program. (like Painter).

For animation I’ve been looking at Pencil — http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php

Also a good friend online who goes by the name of DrPetter ( http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/index.html ) created a program called celsynth, which allows me to use a tablet to draw frames and animate them. Pretty simple program, but does what I need it to. (You can’t find celsynth unless you go into the forums and look under general feedback)

Well let’s hope tomorrow I can get setup to learn music as well. Should be fun.

Keith Weatherby II

Umm… sorry I haven’t been posting. I haven’t done much lately, and thus don’t have much to write. As if anyone is reading anyhow. I signed up for facebook. Since I have some time to myself since my last build, I’m still trying to do something about Enchanted Lands. I went back to WME for a while, and then decided to take another crack at learning Torque Game Builder (Torque 2D). If I can do something in that, I might use it instead, because I can have my game running on mac osx. Even possibility of getting it on the xbox 360 (using torque x builder and xna creators club).

Keith

Well, I suppose I could have actually posted something about it while I was doing it. I entered for the first time ever. I did win managing nearly 78k.

Here’s the link to my NaNoWriMo Profile

I was thinking about blogging the chapters but some people informed me that if I ever seek publishing that first publishing rights are a big deal I guess. If I blog my story it’s considered the first publishing. Which means I would get less money, that is assuming it’s ever in a publishable form and someone actually wish to publish it. I figured I would get some opinions as to whether or not it would be worth while to edit, rewrite, and polish so I’m still debating. I mean most people wait years to see their stuff published, and some never do. Then there’s the rejection slips. Not that I would be that bothered but it would mean that people won’t get to read it for years or not at all. So I risk losing first publishing money if I blog it. But then I risk not letting people read it if I don’t.

Right now I settled on emailing to friends or anyone who feels they would like to read it. I doubt many do, and it’s probably complete trash, but if you ever have an urge to read what’s in my head sometimes — uhfgood -+=AT=+- verizon -+=DOT=+- net

Don’t feel just because I typed this out you have to read it. It’s just some online friends have heard about me doing this and the fact I wrote 78k words in 30 days impresses them ;-)

Keith

I need to keep doing these until I get it right.

This time the timing was a bit off… so it looks like it slows at some point. It doesn’t look as bad in the animation itself. But somehow when i made the video and tweaked the speed settings, it doesn’t quite loop properly. It’s not terrible, but the last one was alot better.

I decided to put it on youtube because then you can hit play and it doesn’t have to load up thereby taking less time.

Well here’s to next time.

Keith

Edit. I just did a gif animation version, and the animation was smoother when looped than the video is… So in order for you to judge correctly, i’ll put down the animated gif here too. When I figure out what I did wrong, i’ll continue using you tube videos for even short animations in the future.

I was going through a book that had a flipbook as one of it’s exercises. I decided since I was going digital i’d do it with a tablet and a piece of software, DrPetter’s program to be exact. So to keep in the mode of a real flipbook I decided no onion skinning (if you’re doing the edge of a phone book or whatever, you’re not necessarily going to see the images below) and straight ahead animation. What results is something that looks like a grade-schooler did it. But I think it’s fun. Note the video may be a bit hard to see as it was just on white background and I sized the video to be a quarter size to upload to youtube.

Keith

Okay so basically I was deciding whether I wanted to get a new setup for animation. I was looking at animation desks, and graphics tablets to decide whether or not I would go paperless. It seems like it’s kind of becoming the rage now, 2d animation, but done completely digitally. In any case, I borrowed my brothers tablet which is 6×8. At first when I tried it in some programs I couldn’t get used to it, especially having to press down hard to see anything. Then I was on the afternet irc network in the #ludumdare channel and I got to talking to a guy who goes by the nick DrPetter. He was pretty much convincing me to maybe go paperless ;-) In any case I was talking about how I couldn’t really seem to do decent sketching with some of these free programs i had (gimp, an open source animator called pencil, and a few others)… I finally tried a demo of digicel’s flipbook and it seems like the software made the difference because it was easier to sketch in it. So anyways I was talking to DrPetter and he claimed he wrote a sort of sketching/animation program a while back, which I guess he never got to finishing or whatever. He sent it to me, and instantly I was able to sketch on the tablet appropriately.

Keep in mind however this is only my second day using a tablet, so my control isn’t all that great, but I think I was able to sketch up a walk cycle (the arms are still a little wonky)… And now i’m uploading it as a gif animation so you guys can see.

Keith

I decided to redo it, to make him a little taller… it looks okay but there’s a part that looks like it’s jerking and i’m not sure why.

Edit:
I could possibly fix that first one, but I decided after reading some of the Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams that I’d have a try at a walk cycle his way. Only this one looks almost like a double bounce walk. Not really what I intended, but amusing none-the-less. I guess I’ll have to go back to the drawing board yet again.

Edit Tuesday October 23, 2007 –
I tried again… that’s the third guy (the one on the right)… I think i’ve nailed the legs, well maybe, now that I look at it, it looks a bit funny. The arms were a bit rushed because i wanted to get it done within the time i was awake. So do you think I should go on to the next direction or redo this?

Keith

Check this one out. It’s the second one, the first one looks like it has a limp.

Edit: Here’s the updated version –

Edit : Oct 18th, 2007 (thursday)

I started on the front view… His feet don’t look right, his arms surprisingly look ok…

Keith

I decided to make 8 frames showing a standing rotation. It’s not perfect, but it will do, as I needed to be able to see how the figure would face in each direction as an aide to animating the walk cycles. Also I will probably just need 8 standing poses, but I will use them to adjust the poses as well.

Keith

Got the feet right, now the arms are wrong. I think I need to take on a completely different tack on this.

Keith