Monday 4 July 2011

Check out these great books!

As an indie game developer i can highly recommend a few books that will definitely help guide you in the right path and avoid some seriously hidden pitfalls!! speaking of pitfalls, i really wish someone would do a remake of that classic!

Saturday 2 July 2011

10 Actions in motion reference videos ...

A great way to create motion for animated characters in an adventure game is by using or rotoscoping video references. You can find a number of videos on Youtube that show profile and front references of a person walking. Personally I found this a great help in creating realistic animation without much skill as an animator!

I've compiled a few youtube videos below that I personally found useful. If you would like to save these for offline viewing, i suggest using a service such as KeepVid which allows you to paste a youtube link and save the file in its original format. Then all you need do is open the quicktime in Photoshop, add a new layer on top and simply trace the frames. And yes, unknown to many people you can indeed open a quicktime file in photoshop and play it. Give it a try :)

And now the videos; (in all cases take a look at the channels for each respective video, as a number of them have multiple examples of motion.)



















Friday 1 July 2011

10 adventure game development suites

Luckily there's a number of great tools available for developing adventure games. They exist in different levels of complexity, a few are aimed at just the adventure game genre and typically these are easier to learn, while a few others which have a steeper learning curve can be used to create just about any kind of game.

I've listed 10 of these development tools. In descending order which i feel are more suited to creating adventure games:

Wintermute Engine

Winternute is a great engine, and my personal favorite. The great advantage to this engine above some of those immediately below is the ability to use 3d characters with 2d backgrounds. I think this can really help to ad an extra element of depth and professional finish.

Adventure Game Studio

AGS is definitely one of the more popular 2d engines for creating classic adventure games. The learning curve is relatively forgiving with this one and logical, again like others the UI and approach to using AGS is very much aimed at artists with little to no experience in coding. The reality is, as with all game engines, you will need to write scripts for various events in your game. However if you're intuitive you can easily patch together code using various examples and scripts found on forums.

Visionaire Studio

Visionaire is another 2d engine for creating content similar to AGS. Visionaire definitely stands above the rest with support from the developers who are actively developing new iterations of the engine. This one really is tailored to the needs of the artist. At the time of writing this, Visionaire is a 2d engine only; however within the next few months a new version will soon be released that supports the development of 3d content and port to mobile platforms such as the iphone.

Multimedia Fusion

Another 2d engine i'd like to add to the list is Multimedia Fusion from Clickteam. This suite is highly recommended for quick and ease of use and can export to mobile platforms too!

Unity 3d

Unity is becoming very successful in the field of independent games. It's pointless in asking what can be accomplished with Unity, and instead ask what can't be accomplished. There's some great examples of work that can be found throughout the community, games that rival a lot of AAA games. The great thing about Unity is that you can download it for free and like other engines in this list, Unity is designed from the ground up to be as artist friendly as possible. That said, there will come a time when you have to learn one of the scripting languages used within Unity, but with a commitment to learning the basics, you can still accomplish some great results. Unity comes in a number of options from a free version to a premium version which include the tools to build iphone and android applications.

Unreal Development Kit

UDK, is the engine behind a number of successful games such as Unreal Tournament. Like Unity, UDK is a swiss army knife capable of tackling the most demanding of indie game projects in full 3d specularity.

Both Unity and UDK are equally far more advance than the above engines such as AGS and Visionaire, however when developing your own work, consider carefully which tool is right for your needs. If your project is completely 2d, then using Unity and UDK might be overkill. However if you intend to create full 3d environments then these will be the ideal options.

Adobe Flash

Blender 3d

Cocos 2d