I’m realizing I’ve learned quite a bit over the last year and a half. I had very little Objective-C experience (not to mention Cocoa) when I started and just yesterday I realized I could have made a much better architecture choice in my code. Going back to some of the original code is kinda painful sometimes, but it all works just fine.
One major feature I added is a visual one:
Cel-style outlines on the basic stage geometry.
My last post is a bit painful to read. Soon after that elated optimism I had to do some deep digging into my code.
This is me in July(!):
The technical stuff is almost completely over with: one gameplay glitch to tidy up — not a show stopper — and a few more sound effects to shoehorn in.
So that glitch wasn’t the only one, and that glitch did stop the show for a while. Ah, innocence.
Snowball Touch is picking up speed rolling down the hill towards release. On the way it’s glomming some new features onto itself.
There will be some very basic victory animations that change every 5 stages or so to help with that feeling of progress. Plus, you can try to beat your own times and see if you could have completed the stage with fewer steps. You can also see how long it took to figure out with restarts included.
I love me some 8-bit and 16-bit gaming. I’ve got a Metroid-style-platforming-shooting-adventure-exploration game knocking around in my head (yeah, I wrote some notes down, too), I’m just not sure where to target it.
So, I’m starting to get time to work on Snowball Touch, again. Getting used to the new little guy, after all.
Basic 2D-sliding/zooming/layered cinematics are go. That’s the last major feature that needed to be added. The pic below is from the opening (short) story cinematic and it’s in motion on the device. Kind of a camera pull-back reveal to give some depth and excitement.
Here’s what I’ve been tinkering at lately
Snowball contemplates options
I just put up a little sneak peak about Snowball Touch up on YouTube. Kinda weird putting it out there as I’ve been working on it for almost a year. That sounds more impressive than it is, though.
About 4 years ago, my friend in LA, Dan Trezise, decided it was time to make a short film. He was going to make a project from the idea we had worked out together back in film school. We had storyboarded it back then as a possible promotional film for Kodak’s Cineon software. It was far too dark and ambitious for such a purpose, and soon Kodak imploded and dropped Cineon altogether. Now, ten years later he wanted to take a crack at it.
Back in 2001, the web was growing rapidly as a place for rich media to be viewed thanks to the ubiquity of Macromedia’s Flash. People seemed to be making money on websites like atom.com with short animated films.
I was fresh out of RIT’s Film/Video/Animation program and gave a go at starting my own online flash animation series, hoping to win a deal through an upcoming contest.
A couple decades passed before I realized that an idea was just a point to push off from.Reason tells me that the little happy rush we get arm in arm with a new idea is adrenaline meant for action. Sadly, my young self was mostly content with just finding more push off points.
This is the debut post on a blog I intend to keep for those interested in my professional life. Hopefully, it will be a way to keep people who care informed about what I’m up to and what makes me tick when it comes to work. Please comment and encourage and critique and we’ll see if this gets interesting or not.