Last Online: 5/31/08
Chris Hildenbrand
Hi, I am pushing pixels, turning nodes and moving polys... I have been working on game graphics since the early Amiga days and am still enjoying it...
life is too short to play bad games
daydreams...
Pumping out content
The past few weeks have been rather turbulent and extremly busy. I decided to help a friend out with the art for a XNA competition with less then 2month to go and starting from scratch. Visualising the coders' ideas into something that looks like a game you really want to play is a lot of fun - to see the coders actually take it and work out engine that makes the game look like the designs is amazing.
With time being very limited - all team-member in a full-time job - the choice of style was essential for the overall success. With a game running on XBox 360 in widescreen mode pixeled or painted art was out of the picture - with way too much screen to fill. 3D animations would have been nice but were too timeconsuming in the initial character creation - and with the game engine being 2D based wasn't making a lot of sense. The faster way to "pump out" a lot of art (over 750 animation frames, various objects, background elements as well as player selection, title and menu screens) turned out to be vectors. The simplistic style worked well with the fast paced 4 player game action and nice bitmap particle effects.
With 2 days to spare the art got done in time. Now it's a matter of keeping the fingers crossed and wait for the results of the compo at the Gamefest in August.
Learming from mistakes
I just spent the past few days - including the weekend :( - working on a localization of a PSP and DS game. I thought I was pretty smart keeping all the button texts and graphic elements in a separate vector file for easy editing - but it still proved a time consuming task putting in the translations for 4 additional language while keeping the size of the short and crisp English texts.
Next time the buttons will be bigger from the start and whereever possible the text will be added by code - let the coders worry about the length of a simple Highscore text in French - believe me it turned into a long word.
I will also try and keep my sourcefiles layered and my palettes better organized... but I am sure there are a million other problems waiting for me on the next project... :)
Starting the year
Geee... getting back into the work mode seems to take time... Took me until this week to really enjoy it again... but now things are rolling... with two indiegames about to be finished and another one approaching the finishing line it's a busy ride... and I am loving it!
Now all I have to do is grab some screenshots and post them... been putting it off as I really should redo my outdated website...
Off to Brisbane
Heading to Brisbane for the weekend to attend my step-daughter's graduation and visiting my wife's family... Getting up at 4am can't be a good start for a long weekend away... at least the flight was pleasant and the seats fairly comfortable for a "budget" airline... but arriving in Brisbane made me realize why I prefer being as far away from big cities as possible... too many people, too many cars, stupid talk-radio and toll-bridges...
HeliAttack4
Chris Rhodes [iopred] spent a couple of days up here and besides touristy things, some diving and a lot of fun, we started mapping out the next sequel in the HeliAttack series.
We are going for another Flash-version - pushing the limits of Flash 9 and topping the level of polish that made HeliAttack3 one of the most popular webgames of all time.
[this is still a HA3 screenshot - don't get excited yet]
The past few weeks have been rather turbulent and extremly busy. I decided to help a friend out with the art for a XNA competition with less then 2month to go and starting from scratch. Visualising the coders' ideas into something that looks like a game you really want to play is a lot of fun - to see the coders actually take it and work out engine that makes the game look like the designs is amazing.
With time being very limited - all team-member in a full-time job - the choice of style was essential for the overall success. With a game running on XBox 360 in widescreen mode pixeled or painted art was out of the picture - with way too much screen to fill. 3D animations would have been nice but were too timeconsuming in the initial character creation - and with the game engine being 2D based wasn't making a lot of sense. The faster way to "pump out" a lot of art (over 750 animation frames, various objects, background elements as well as player selection, title and menu screens) turned out to be vectors. The simplistic style worked well with the fast paced 4 player game action and nice bitmap particle effects.
With 2 days to spare the art got done in time. Now it's a matter of keeping the fingers crossed and wait for the results of the compo at the Gamefest in August.
Learming from mistakes
I just spent the past few days - including the weekend :( - working on a localization of a PSP and DS game. I thought I was pretty smart keeping all the button texts and graphic elements in a separate vector file for easy editing - but it still proved a time consuming task putting in the translations for 4 additional language while keeping the size of the short and crisp English texts.
Next time the buttons will be bigger from the start and whereever possible the text will be added by code - let the coders worry about the length of a simple Highscore text in French - believe me it turned into a long word.
I will also try and keep my sourcefiles layered and my palettes better organized... but I am sure there are a million other problems waiting for me on the next project... :)
Starting the year
Geee... getting back into the work mode seems to take time... Took me until this week to really enjoy it again... but now things are rolling... with two indiegames about to be finished and another one approaching the finishing line it's a busy ride... and I am loving it!
Now all I have to do is grab some screenshots and post them... been putting it off as I really should redo my outdated website...
Off to Brisbane
Heading to Brisbane for the weekend to attend my step-daughter's graduation and visiting my wife's family... Getting up at 4am can't be a good start for a long weekend away... at least the flight was pleasant and the seats fairly comfortable for a "budget" airline... but arriving in Brisbane made me realize why I prefer being as far away from big cities as possible... too many people, too many cars, stupid talk-radio and toll-bridges...
HeliAttack4
Chris Rhodes [iopred] spent a couple of days up here and besides touristy things, some diving and a lot of fun, we started mapping out the next sequel in the HeliAttack series.
We are going for another Flash-version - pushing the limits of Flash 9 and topping the level of polish that made HeliAttack3 one of the most popular webgames of all time.
[this is still a HA3 screenshot - don't get excited yet]
I am trying to add some more as I find time...
Tutorials
I wrote a tutorial for the IllustratorWorld.com newsletter a while back. It's finally out and available for download.
Check it out:
"Creating art content for flash"
http://www.illustratorworld.com/resources/tutorials/november-eMag_november.pdf
[30MB PDF doc]
Check it out:
"Creating art content for flash"
http://www.illustratorworld.com/resources/tutorials/november-eMag_november.pdf
[30MB PDF doc]
