eskelley.com/blog

Rocket Man

2008-05-12T11:00:00Z

Well, I'm leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow morning to look at apartments and visit temp agencies. Being unemployed sure is expensive!

It's been a busy week, so the only progress I have to show for Starlight is actually zathras' progress. You may recall I mentioned zath would be doing the music for my game, and in addition to a couple previous pieces that I've repurposed, he sent me this piece the other day:

shell.mp3

It's exactly the kind of creepy, psychologically affective music I had in mind for the abandoned spaceship (or space station, I haven't decided yet).

Don't expect much of an update next week--it's hard to work on a game from a hotel room in Simi Valley.

Not Late, Am I?

2008-05-05T04:59:59Z

As predicted, the newly-released Grand Theft Auto IV greedily consumed any time that might've otherwise been spent on Starlight development, so it was a mad dash at the very end to get something done in time for Gruedorf, this week. It ain't much, folks, but it's something. It's a sprite, in fact. Specifically, it's a Nazi truck with a flat tire.

There. Now I can sleep "the sleep of the just"--the just barely posted in time to save his 0% loss standing on the Gruedorf scoreboard, that is.

Swimming Pools, Palm Trees and Cockroaches

2008-04-28T04:59:59Z

Another busy week, another semi-lame update. I've spent the better part of the last three days just looking for apartments in LA (there are, like, thousands of them). And with Grand Theft Auto IV coming out in 24 hours, next week probably won't be much better!

Gruedorf after the jump.
]]>

Planet 0: Prison - infrared light (necklace feels warm to the touch)
Planet 1: Maze, Void Core - ultraviolet light
---
Planet 2: Asteroid belt, remains of planet - green light
Planet 3: 1930s alternate Earth, Nazis, Occult - yellow light
Planet 4: Steampunk, Observatory, Telescope - orange light
Planet 5: Spaceship, inverse square law - blue light
Planet 6: Ruins of an alien artifact museum - indigo light
Planet 7: Lilliputian world - violet light
Planet 8: Hollow planet, 'Hell', red giant - red light
---
Planet 9: 'Home', ending

Planet 6's solution is my favorite, so far. Here's hoping I make it that far into game development before going all Overkill!

Into the Void Core

2008-04-21T04:59:59Z

It's been a long, strange week, which culminated in one long, strange day.

Speaking of, I took a walk tonight and the moment I stepped out of my apartment building, I noticed something odd. There was an enormous house drifting slowly down the street. Today is, of course, the 20th of April, a date of some significance, especially in a college town like Madison, WI. There were maybe a hundred people standing along Broom Street, staring at the two halves of a big, old, blue house moving along at one mile per hour. They looked predictably bewildered.

Gruedorf after the break. ]]> So anyway, not a lot of progress on Starlight, this week, since I was in D.C., failing. The game is pretty much playable up to the point where you escape from your prison and travel to the Void Core, where the basic goal of the game is explained to you by a sort of omnipotent, purple golfball (pictured on the right.)

The omnipotent, purple golfball tells you that, while pretty much the one thing it can't grant you is the pure white light that you need to get home, you can gather seven component frequencies from various suns that have been swallowed by the Void. But I've explained this before.

Anyway, I'll be less lame next week. Here's a swirly black hole thing to tide you over.

Bride of Re-Animated

2008-04-14T04:59:59Z

Just a quick update, today, as I'm in DC for a job interview.

As I mentioned in last week's entry, when Starlight's heroine needs to retrieve a useful object from the floor, she doesn't so much bend down to get it as, well, squat unceremoniously over it. Even if she hasn't had contact with another living being for over 300 years, that's no reason for her to forgo all decency!

So now, by popular demand, this silliness has been remedied with all new bending animations for the up- and down- facing directions. The up-facing animation is actually not quite finished, so here's the down-facing animation.

Wish me luck today!

Re-Animated

2008-04-07T04:59:59Z

Fun fact: each frame of Starlight character animation is 128x256 pixels and there are between five and ten frames per action, each in as many as four directions. The walking animation consists of a total of 655,360 pixels. To make a long story short (too late!), character animation is extremely time consuming.

The animations that follow are scaled by half.
]]> Walking - Originally the walking animations were five frames in each direction, but while they looked good facing up and down, left and right were jerky and awkward. To help remedy this I added another five frames. The resulting animation is much smoother, but still awkward. (Five frames up and down, ten frames right and left-mirrored.)

Bending Down - Speaking of awkward, the bending animations suffer from the opposite problem of the walking animations--they look better facing left and right than they do up or down. As Austin points out, the character's animations don't really fit with her wardrobe. (Five frames in each direction.)

Climbing Rope - And lastly, the climbing animation. Syn commented last week that it may be pushing the limits of PG-13. Since this production is fueled entirely by nostalgia, it should be no surprise that I'm drawing a lot of inspiration from the independent animation of the 80s (think Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice.)

Well, that's it for this week! Next week I'll be in DC, so there probably won't be any new screenshots or sprites to show off.

Frankenstein's Karaoke Phonics

2008-03-31T05:07:07Z

Anyone not looking to waste a whole lot of time should probably avoid visiting The Video Game Name Generator. I had to pry myself away to write this week's Gruedorf entry, but not before coming up with a few dozen genuinely good ideas for short video games (thus the title of this post). But before I start making "Morbidly Obese Dessert Assassins", there's work to be done on Starlight.]]>
Each of the seven suns emits a different frequency of light (Earth's is yellow, of course) which our heroine must collect using a special gem in her necklace. At each planets' surface, however, the gem would take thousands of years to absorb enough light, and while the main character is immortal, the player is not. Possible solutions include optics, rocketry, and magic. As you gather more light, you gain access to new worlds. And once you have pure white light, you can go home.

Of course, before you can travel to other planets, you must first escape from your prison. This far into the development of the game, I have discovered two things: firstly that character animation is extremely time consuming-- especially at 128x256 pixels per frame --and secondly that a game where a character just walks around is pretty boring. So the heroine must not only walk, but bend, climb, reach, etc...

I've decided to enlist the help of a superior character artist, Hyptosis, to do a few still frame cutscenes to take the place of particularly complex character animations like swinging from vines. And speaking of help, musician Zathras will be lending his talents to the project.

That's all for this week! Next time on Gruedorf, I'll show off some of that tedious and time consuming character animation.

And the Bridge Will Bring Us Back Together

2008-03-24T05:10:47Z

I'm sure you noticed that the title of this post is a line from a Fleetwood Mac song ("Temporary One"). Okay, probably not. As anyone who knows me well (and probably anyone who's ever met me) could tell you, I love me some Fleetwood Mac. Anyway, on to this week's Gruedorf entry.

I'd like to start off by apologizing for last week's terrible post. No, please don't go back and read it to see just how terrible it is. My only excuse is that I had a migraine and only 30 minutes remaining before the Gruedorf scoreboard deemed me a capital-L Loser. The pressure got to me! As of this post, I maintain my 0% Loss, 0% Lame standing--I think that means I win, or something! Wait, no, I probably have to finish a game first.

Well, McGrue gave me a pass, this week, to fulfill our ancient pact instead of showing progress on my own game, Starlight. You heard me, an ancient pact. Is your interest piqued? Read on to discover how I can stretch out an entire blog entry about a pixel-bridge!
]]> ancient as far as the internet is concerned), I contracted McGrue to implement his webcomic system on my site, and in return I agreed to draw a pixel-art bridge for The Sully Chronicles. Well, he half-assed his side of the deal, so I completely forgot to draw him a bridge.

And then, last week, Grue asked for his bridge.

Step 1: Outline the basic shape of the bridge. I had the perilous rope bridge from Temple of Doom in mind while I drew the silhouette.

Step 2: Add basic colors, using the black and white image as a mask. Usually at this stage I try to keep it to one color per element. But as you can see, I got a little ahead of myself, and added texture to the rope and wood posts.

Step 3: Add texture detail using shadows and highlights. I ended up with 16 unique colors (not counting transparency, here represented by dark teal). This is the most time consuming part of pixel art.

Step 4a: Reduce the number of colors by half. You see, McGrue is using an indexed color palette, so he is limited in the total number of unique colors he can simultaneously display on the map. This is because he is still living in the mid-1990s.

Step 4b: To finish it off, add the near-side posts and rope. Voila! Not my best work, but not bad for using only 8 colors (all of them brown).

Updated: Step 5: Apologize to McGrue for assuming that VERGE still used 8-bit graphics and upload a version of the bridge that uses 16 colors (all of them still brown).

Next time on Gruedorf: Back to work on Starlight, where I have the freedom to use every color of the imagination! Even Snurple!

Lovecraftian Steampunk Western... with Nazis!

2008-03-19T00:37:16Z

We appear to be living in a world where the average consumer of popular media has developed a finely tuned sense of the hackneyed, clichéd, and otherwise overdone. I've listened to friends and acquaintances complain (at great length) about how much they hate rip-offs, remakes, and the derivative genre "crap" that the mainstream media has been churning out as of late. Some people seem to believe that mankind's last original idea was finally thought-up sometime in the 1980's, or whatever decade they spent the majority of their formative years in. The truth is that there are no new characters, only new characterizations; no new stories, only new storytellers.
]]>
This brings us to the beauty of genre conventions. Narratives can borrow archetypes, plotlines, themes, settings and styles from as many genres as the storyteller wants. Genres can of course be broad (Drama, Comedy), narrow (Horror, Fantasy), or highly specialized. Ideally, a text should stay within the bounds of a genre enough to comfort the audience, while exploring outside the bounds just enough to excite them. [To read more about these topics, see my college essays linked at the end of this article.]

So what genre(s) will Starlight draw from? At the moment I'm getting most of my inspiration from Lovecraftian Horror and Fantasy Steampunk, though the latter hasn't shown itself in the artwork as of yet. I would love for later chapters to have a more Western or Victorian Steampunk feel to them.

There probably won't be any Nazis, though.

That's all for this week, folks. Next time on Gruedorf, I draw a bridge for McGrue!

For more, read:
"Lead and Lasers: Genre Hybridization in Firefly" (2005) and "The Steampunk Genre and Energy Concerns in the Japanese Popular Imagination" (2006)

"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

2008-03-11T19:37:30Z

My first exposure to the adventure game genre was at Camp Island Lake, in a darkened cabin full of sweaty kids, all grouped around Macintosh Classics. I can't remember what we were playing. Honestly, what I remember most was how unbearably hot a closed room full of computers and kids could get in the middle of the Summer in Starrucca, PA. But despite the heat, we were entranced by the game we were playing. ]]>
The popularization of the Internet killed the point-and-click adventure game by making it far too easy to obtain quick solutions to otherwise challenging puzzles. (Of course, the Internet subsequently resurrected the genre, with the new Sam & Max serials, but that's beside the point.) Walkthroughs, FAQs, and UHS made it all too easy to play through an adventure game in an afternoon. Consequently, people stopped working together to beat the games. Instead of discussing the puzzles at school or work, they got the quick fix online.

I remember when my stepfather came home with the Myst strategy guide. My initial thought was, well, what's the fun in that? He never felt the genuine satisfaction that my friends and I did when we finally figured out a solution and moved on to the next puzzle. But then, he never had to feel the same frustration we did, either.

So here I am, designing my own retro adventure game, and I've come to accept that if more than a handful of people ever actually play it, someone will probably write a walkthrough. The first puzzle is escaping from your jail cell, which is fairly obvious and linear. Later puzzles will require more thought, experimentation, and travel, of course.

The question remains, however: why bother if people are just going to cheat? And the answer is nostalgia. I'm making this game for the people who still want to feel the satisfaction that only a kid at summer camp, suffering through heat and frustration to finally figure out a puzzle, can feel.

Gruedorf, meet Starlight

2008-03-05T00:58:20Z

So apparently it's not enough to simply declare that you are entering Gruedorf, as I so foolishly did yesterday. No, you have to prove that you're making progress on your project. Well, I was making progress up until last night, when I realized that I was going about it all wrong. I was trying to make a Puzzle/Adventure game in RPGMaker VX, which is somewhat like trying to make a sandwich in a blender. Sure, it'll probably taste fine, but the texture will be all wrong, and in the end people will just point at you and tell their children not to do what that man over there is doing. Okay, lets retire the sandwich-blender simile.

More after the jump. Oh, god.. I can't believe I just said that.
]]> Adventure Game Studio another try, and was happy to discover that it had since graduated to version 3 (just like that other game engine), bringing significant improvements. AGS is perfect for the game I envisioned, tentatively titled Starlight, and furthermore is a game engine I can use without being ridiculed by my peers. Oh, I am going to regret saying that.

Changing the format of the game means that I will need all-new graphics—sprites, backgrounds, items, menus, etc... I've decided to use a cartoony style so it will scale well. As anyone who has played a Sierra/LucasArts adventure game knows, the character sprites often move far away from the "camera".

That brings us to today's proof-of-progress: enter, stage right, a nameless immortal. Having been sentenced to eternity in the Void for her crimes against humanity, you must help her escape from her prison. Or you could just let her sit there forever. The choice is yours!

Stealing is the Sincerest Form of Imitation

2008-03-03T08:51:27Z

0x22.com was one of my more ambitious coding projects / timesinks. It has since fallen by the wayside, and even spent the better part of last year offline. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this site. Look similar? It should! It's identical, but for its (eye-melting) color scheme.

Now, I should mention that Overkill (the blogger in question) is an acquaintance of mine, so this isn't totally random. (We hang out in the same IRC channel, as do most of the Gruedorf competitors.)

But this situation raises a few questions. Is it imitation? Is it parody? Is it outright theft of my clearly-copyrighted HTML and CSS? As SDHawk pointed out, my design was generic Web 2.0 to begin with, from its rounded corners to its 'beta' tag, so how much is he really stealing? Where do you draw the line?

Well, I say the line must be drawn here! This means war! I'm throwing down. I'm throwing my hat into the Gruedorf ring. It's on, baby. It's on.

Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Digg

2008-02-27T08:01:27Z

It's a widely known fact that Diggers are the ever-vigilant watchdogs of the internet, always ready to correct you when you're wrong. Never fear, gentle reader, for enlightenment is a mere five steps away!

Global warming is a vast left-wing conspiracy perpetrated by the greater scientific community for the sole purpose of scamming more funds. And of course that funding comes from your taxes.
Taxation is how the government steals hard-earned money from its citizens without providing any benefits (such as infrastructure, education, or defense) in return. Your income would be better spent on campaign donations for Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is the only candidate worth supporting in 2008 because he will eliminate taxes, legalize marijuana, encapsulate the contiguous United States in an impenetrable bubble and launch it into a low Earth orbit. Plus he won't censor your violent video games.
Video games aren't as great as they were back in the good old days of [insert console you grew up with here]. The Xbox 360 has a 99.9% failure rate; the Wii isn't truly "next gen"; the PS3 has no worthwhile games and costs more than you make in a month. Thankfully you can still emulate Super Mario Bros. on your iPhone.
Piracy is cool, honorable, and absolutely justified. Johnny Depp wouldn't mislead you, would he?

Artificing on the Cake

2008-02-11T13:27:06Z

"Namtar" is a name I give to any number of current projects. This is for no other reason than that I own namtar.com and feel it is, at present, a waste of a perfectly good six-letter domain name. And should one of my projects pan out, I'd have a URL ready and waiting.

Namtar was an ancient Mesopotamian god of death and pestilence. Also it spells "rat man" backwards. This is mostly irrelevant.

In years past, I worked on a short-lived webcomic called- what else? -Namtar. It wasn't well received, because people expect a webcomic to be funny and here I was trying to tell a story. The only positive comments I ever got on the comics was that they were pretty.

And so my new plan is to tell a story through pretty pictures, alone. I'm a bit out of practice with the whole art thing, but I'm fairly happy with how Namtar #1 (see above) turned out. I started on it around 2:30am and finished not twenty minutes ago. Insomnia has a use after all!

If this should turn out to be an ongoing thing, I will start posting these images on namtar.com. Until the then, the domain remains in a sad state of disuse.

A Return to Greatness

2008-02-05T18:57:00Z

When I clicked the Title field to name my first entry on this blog, Firefox generously offered up four recommendations: "The Colour of Magic", "Microsoft Xbox 360 Premium System w/ Gears of War", "355-309 In Class Video Project" and "A Return to Greatness". Sleep deprived as I was, I decided to just run with the lattermost suggestion, in part because it was the only one I didn't immediately recognize.

So here it is. My blog. If not a return to greatness, then at least a return.
]]> CA355-309 In Class Video Project is the title of a YouTube video I posted (see below). As an ungraded exercise for Intro to Media Production, we were divided into groups of four and given two hours to shoot a two-page script.