I can tell from the hurtful lack of emails and comments that this past week without update has been noticed by most of you. I can explain. And this isn’t just one of those explanations meant to stall for time and an opportunity for escape. It is that, but also nothing more.
There were a lot of things to be done after coming back from Victoria this past weekend. Most interesting being a second game demo contest with Shaun Kiernan, to be judged by his girl-friend’s sister’s boy-friend Richard.
Once long ago a similar competition resulted in Prawnager’s Nightmare (which can be found somewhere in this blog’s past). That time, we had a month. This time, we had only a week.
The limited time forced me to leave bits and pieces I’d have rather included out. Smoke does not rise from points of fire and destruction in the distance. There is no in-game restart, null-opt rich menu, or title screen. The player animations are limited and few. And the princess. I had only ten minutes or so to draw the princess. Which is why she is in silhouette. Unfortunately it was anything but clear over the dark, looming mountains which hints at explanation for the gross gradient.
Oh, well. It was submitted with only three minutes to spare. And I think it looks pretty cool.
Also, I really like the way I handled parallaxing, code-wise.
The demo is here. It’s of reasonable size, so it might take some time to load.
I wrote the design document while ‘at sea’. So, ferries don’t sport scanners anymore. Guess I missed the newsletter.
E-mail from a cell phone eventually got the images ‘into’ the computer, which might be the reason the quality is low. Oh well, Shaun didn’t even submit a demo or design doc!
What a guy, he didn’t even complete the contest. Thoughts?
Once upon a time (quite a while ago, in fact), I was sitting at a table in Gloria Jeans Coffees. They offer, amongst their heated and caffeinated beverages, moderately priced and wireless access to the internet. Perhaps you’re familiar with it?
It came to pass that my time ‘online’ expired, and I was dropped into a situation that was somewhat awkward, and not even in the good way. Feeling lazy, I abdicated responsibility for resolving the situation and began to draw on my napkin. What became of that was a worm, all dressed up but still oddly melancholy. Perhaps he sensed his impending doom. A doom that would descend upon him from the napkin-skies above. Perhaps he was reminiscing of days long past. I don’t think that we’ll ever know for sure.
I decided to do a quick animation featuring that very worm. I even attempted to do it in the style with which he was drawn. Sadly, I failed. I blame flash and its horrible drawing interface. Also laziness.
