Hey! We are back after a really long time; actually so long that no excuse would suffice this delay. But, trust me updating the blog when you have startling things going on at your end, is not that easy! There exists a good phase and some bad in the cycle of an indie game development. Since the last few weeks, we had been in what can be called a bad phase; but guess what? We are still here; going tough!
Anyways, enough with the emotional drama; let’s switch back to the development updates – Since all these days, we have been working on other monsters and the European puppets. We have come up with some awesome monsters which would chill your spine when they come on screen. After “Octo”, which was our first monster (you can read about it in Dev Diary: Part5), we have come up with 3 other categories of monsters. In total, PABLO and the puppet punch would have 12-15 monsters! All with fierce attacks. We are expecting each monster to have a minimum of 5 animations and hence in total, the monsters alone would have around 75 character animations! Don’t forget about their sizes, each almost occupies half of an iPad screen. How are we able to do load these many animations on a device with so many memory constraints? The answer is skeletal animation! You can read more about this technique here. This avoided the frame-by-frame coloring of each animation, which is saving a gigantic amount of resource, run-time memory, time and effort.
Programming Update:
So, coming to the most interesting part of the dev diary – Programming updates/implementations:
This time we were working on some shader techniques, which we needed in the game. We basically wanted an ice-effect on the puppets, as if they are frozen. Once option was to create a frozen version of all the puppets, but that would literally double our memory and time. So we chose the other option of achieving it through graphic programming. We were at last able to create something like what is shown in this image:
freeze-effect
Which was nearly what we wanted. You can read this tutorial to learn about some custom graphic programming techniques and we heavily recommend this site http://www.raywenderlich.com/tutorials , for someone who wants to learn iOS programming. They have tutorials for all levels of programmers, which makes it complete.
Apart from this, we have been heavily working on AI of the puppets and monsters. We are trying our level best to make them smart enough, apart from the fact that they are scary. I just can’t wait to get this game tested and see the reactions of the people playing it, which we would most probably be starting by next month or so; Testers! Keep yourselves free.
SFX & VFX:
We started working on sound effects and VFX. Our animator fortunately turned to be a very good sound designer too! So, here’s a sample SFX with action:
Regarding the VFX, it wasn’t as difficult as we thought it was; Thanks to the unlimited Adobe After-Effects tutorials online, we are kind of doing the VFX in-house itself, even though there isn’t any VFX expert in the team. The best we found so far is http://www.videocopilot.net/. They have some real good tutorials to create some awesome VFX on Adobe After Effects. Some free presets are also provided which makes your work easier.
So, that’s it for this time. Next time, we will update you with another cool graphic programming technique which we have promised to update long back – Theater Lighting and Shadows. So, watch this space.
Signing off,
Team MechMocha
FB page : https://www.facebook.com/MechMocha
Twitter :https://www.twitter.com/#!/MechMocha
Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/user/MechMocha
