Tron underdesk lighting. DONE!

Overted a desk disaster. Wire to one of me desk led lights got severed. Works again now. Soldertastic!

Wire does it hurt?

Spring clean phase 1
Unplug and remove gear. So many wires. :-(

As Blair is in the news....

Here's a little something I did a few years back... 

An old Footy gif

Whilst trawling through some old files in my documents folder I came across a directory which contained a couple of old animated GIF's created for past projects. Sadly both projects never saw the light of day but it's always nice to see work files one more time before they get filed away for another couple of years in darkness.

The first was created for a mobile phone game about fishing called 'Footy'. ;)

As you can see it's nothing to do with fishing!

Actually this was really starting to look good it was just a shame the phone hardware at the time was dog slow and just couldn't handle the sprites , scrolling and ball at the same time!!!

I'll probably add a section about this game to the new Hobeka site when I get round to updating it.

I especially like the skating players!

Blendertastic knicker elastic!

Development of the front end continues with the addition of my Rydek-12 illustration which is sitting inside Blender rather nicely now.

Next step is to get the stars all key framed up and jiggling about doing  their thing.

Just discovered a cool Blender material button located in the Material panel called 'Shadeless' which is great for profiling stuff on the quick without having to worry about setting up lights. It saves valuable time trying to get the render to look the same as your 2D mock up. Sorted!!!!

 

Blobbit sprite conversion

Rather than just do a  quick conversion job resulting in a load of blurred undefined sprites I've been adding extra glow and opacity to some of them.

When we did the original game the sprites were for the most part quite old school and were drawn in 8bit with no alpha channel data. Not bad but the iPhone has nice transparency effects we can use, so why not use them?

Here's a Binscee Droid before, during and after a little bit of subtle editing...

I've highlighted the transparent liquid bit.
Cut out the area that needs to be transparent and set it at 80% so it's still mostly green.
Next I paste this back into the original frame and the sprite frame is now complete.Ta Da!

Taking this image into an editor you will see that the liquid is indeed transparent which should look quite nice when it's in situ.

Here's the original animated 8bit version...

Damn that Ursula, me tea is missing.

An empty mug of tea simply will not do.

Had to be done

Nice.

Game developer fuel

Another mug or five.

Blobbits' love Unity!!

Having written the new GDD(Game Design Document for those not in the know) for Blobbit iPush which also includes a few concept sketches and illustrations, the next step is to start some proper development work.  A little bit later than planned but hey, better late than never I say! Ta Da!!

After a few seconds of thought and a couple of emails to Mark it become clear that Flash wasn't really the way to go and Unity the rather most spiffingly excellent indie developer friendly 3D engine and game dev system would do the trick rather better.

Enter Unity...


It's been a few days now since I began my tinkering about with the editor and generally got my head around the Unity interface which is really rather straightforward once you get past the initial bewilderment associated with something new and alien. Well it is to me anyway...So far so good.


I've spent most of today and some of what was left over from last night converting the Blobbit Push sprite set over to Unity. After a false start and a dodgy mouse button which has incidently got worse, I can say that even the added bit of alpha blending is making an appearance on the enhanced set of sprites. 

Look it's the death anim... The sprites may be smaller than the original set but I've managed to retain the detail and given them a bit of extra smooochie smooth stuff for their outing on the iPhone. Lubberly!!

-Stoo-

Cool hat!