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.
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.
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.
Of the movies I’ve seen that have influenced me the most, there is the original Star Wars movies, and there is Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The soundtrack is by Joe Hisaishi and seeing him conduct an orchestra playing themes from that movie is just sublime.
YouTube – Joe Hisaishi – Nausicaa of the Valley Wind (Part1 of 9). <- link is much higher quality video than embedded one below.