Inspiration

23 February 2014

Note: This post has nothing whatsoever to do with any progress I made lately, but I just felt like talking about Inspiration for awhile. This kind of stuff normally goes in my personal blog, but since it has some relation to what I do here, I guess I'll put it here instead.

Just the other day, I was sitting in a computer lab. At one point, the lab got really noisy. People were blasting their music and I found myself in this really irritating atmosphere.

I grabbed my handbook, contemplating to go out of the lab and take a break from what I was doing, but it felt weird to go out alone while everybody was in the lab either sleeping, listening to music or using the computer terminals.

After a gruelling decision, I grabbed my notebook and made my way out of the lab. I went to this sheltered area that is sort of like an open shed without walls. Every morning, we gather at this sheltered area, and I'd occasionally look into the distance, observing how the morning sunlight filtered through the trees. On some days, the intense rays of light seemed to make its way beautifully through the gaps between the treetops. On other days, a mist shrouded the entire area in a mysterious fog. It was also possible to have a combination of both.

So I grabbed a chair and sat down.

I was amazed by how peaceful it was. It was so tranquil, so calm. It was just the subtle sound of the whirring fans in the shed and me. So many thoughts flowed through my mind it seemed as though I was talking to myself.

I took out my notebook and my trusty orange mechanical pencil and started drawing.

At one point, a gust of wind blew and I watched tiny yellow leaves float delicately down in a pattern that resembled how snow would fall.

It was beautiful.

A friend came out of the lab to join me, but left after a short while as he felt warm. I guess I was too distracted by nature to realise how warm it was.

As much as I don't like going out, I begin to realise that a lot of my inspiration comes from outside when my mind is not preoccupied by something, which is often the case when I am sitting in front of the computer. From taking the train, to lying down on my bed with an empty mind, inspiration can strike any time, anywhere, and this is when I'd take out my phone and draw/write it down (yea, my phone has a stylus, which totally fits my needs!). When I sleep however, I have no phone, so I'd try to remember it and draw it when I wake up the next day.

In fact, the very inspiration for Introvert came from a collection of memories and experiences much too complicated to tell in one sitting.

Today, I watched
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A18Rh5gVx2U&list=UUutXfzLC5wrV3SInT_tdY0w
and thus decided to write down the shed experience I had the other day. I think it's something worth noting down.

Progress
So I lied. I was going to talk about my progress anyway.
I was trying to learn how to do this 'I am lost' picture effect for a very dark place, but I couldn't find a way to do it, so I wondered if learning to do a "Dreamy Effect" would help, so I googled that.

I ended up reading up and learning how to do the "Tilt Shift" effect, which hopefully will come in useful next time.

And later on, found a dreamy effect tutorial! Here's the dreamy effect I did for one of the scenes that is part of my "IntoDarkness" comic. I think I may not use the dreamy effect in the end. But I'm not so sure yet.

The other amazing thing is that unlike Paint, I can replicate this effect for other pictures. I can even make this effect in the game, which I experimented with, and here's how it looks like for the levels.

 A few adjustments had to be made depending on how dark / light a level is, to make the dreamy effect look proper. I wonder if it makes the levels look too pale and hard to see with the reduced contrast for the daytime levels.

I made this a toggle effect, which means I can switch between "Dreamy" and "Normal" mode with the push of a button. I'm not sure if I want this in the final version though, because I did this purely for fun and I don't know if it would be something logical or meaningful to add in the game haha. Maybe I would add this for a particular level instead of a freely toggle-able effect.

Adding this as a hidden feature seems too mundane, as I already have a ton of "hidden features" and I don't know if I want another one added to the list.

Comic Scenes part 5 and Stories

20 Feb 2014

It's been awhile since I last typed here. At some point many days ago, I wanted to find time to write here as I was getting quite excited about the things I was working on, but decided to hold it off.

Today I finally have some spare time to write here, and tomorrow is a Friday!

First of all, I have stopped working on the main storyline comic scenes. I have not wrapped them up yet since I am just taking a break from the nearly 50 scenes I drew. This does not mean I have stopped drawing entirely. Rather, I am pretty hyped up drawing new and better scenes that can potentially be used! I have also begun to work on small branches of comics and stories that seem to have really great potential and based on the comments I received, these little comics are "good"!

I am also experimenting on different methods of drawing and optimizing the time I take to draw comics to increase my efficiency.

I spend about 75% of my time tracing my handdrawn backgrounds and characters and getting the turtles to "look right". That's the tough part. Using a pen tool to trace over my handdrawn turtles just doesn't seem very natural.

The turtles also lose some of the stuff that makes it look good and they don't look that alive as commented from Li Hao when I put a handdrawn scene beside a digital scene. It looks like converting a scene to digital made the turtles look less alive.

This made me rethink about the way I draw my comics digitally. Li Hao talked about WACOM, a drawing tablet that can potentially solve my problems. It's an expensive investment though. But it will make my life smoother.

The hard part about a comic is getting a good story, whereas the tracing is the tedious part. Thankfully, I can work on the hard part outside of home, which means when I get home, all I need to do is start on the drawing. But tracing takes up so much time.

I decided to test my hand drawing skills, by drawing with the mouse, rather than tracing with the pen. I think I sort of trained my mouse-control from using Paint for several years. When I first did this on a new comic, the outlines of turtles didn't look as clean, but I could see that the turtles look more natural and alive, and their expressions are really more life-like. The best part was, I completed the same amount of work that would take an entire day, in 3 hours! Massive time saver there!

I actually began to like the handdrawn turtles. But I hope to get more opinions.

---

So I began to work on this new comic codenamed comic Jig (seen above), and another comic, CliffTop (seen below), that was completely handdrawn on my phone.

I would upload them onto my computer and the only thing I would need to do is to add colours once I reach home. This eliminated the drawing I needed to do at home and saved me a lot of time. I was quite happy!

Sadly, at this point, I am beginning to realise that perhaps game development isn't something I might pursue, since I am doing better at other areas, from what I have been told. While this project has come a long way and I am more proud of it than anything else I have ever done, I feel it lacks a lot of the feeling that I express through drawing.

But I still have lots to do, and I wonder what the future has in stall for me.

Comic Scenes part 4

1 February 2014

I've been caught up in plenty of drawing and implementing of the comic scenes. I managed to create several special effects for almost every scene. This is rewarding, but also extremely time-consuming.

Not being as strong a programmer as I am in drawing stuff, tasks that involve coding tend to take up a lot of my time. Thankfully, this is the week of the Lunar New Year and I have roughly 6 days to work on as many of the Countryside scenes as possible.

A lot of the scenes are meant to be simple when I draw it out in free-hand (hard copy), but when I draw it on my computer, I make things a lot more complex (or if I want to see it in a good way, more detailed). Making things more complex makes my own life harder, but I still do so sometimes when I want to achieve a particular effect.

Since I am taking a break from development now, I shall just walkthrough one of the scenes I did recently.

I usually start off with a hand-drawn scene. I don't do it all the time, but I think it makes my end result look better, and I can even see the flow of the story before finalizing it in digital copies. Here's a scene I drew free-hand on the left, and the digital version on the right:

 

     Few minutes, or even seconds                                       Few hours, or even days

I wanted to choose a scene that was changed dramatically from handdrawn to digital, but in this scene they look mostly identical without much added detail. Even so, I have the tendency to add parallax scrolling to the scene. It adds depth and looks more realistic. Take the bottom right picture (the one with the moon).

Instead of making my image flat, I do what most other platformer developers would do: make layers.

Sky as background                                Trees as "middle-ground"                      Characters as foreground

The three parts of the scene above when stacked together and set to scroll at different rates as the camera pans, provide for some really cool effects that I can play with, fueling my ideas to create some ambitious effects that often cost me more time than I actually plan to use. This is one thing that makes this stand out from my normal comics. Not only do they allow the possibility of animations, they allow for scrolling for enhanced realism.

Sadly, I am not skilled enough when it comes to creating the effects in Flixel itself and when multiple effects are stacked together, complications rise. I was trying to combine two scenes with camera panning together, and to do this, I needed to use two cameras. The main camera will navigate from scene to scene as per normal, whereas the scene I want to add special effects to (such as scroll or zoom), is attached to the secondary camera, so that if I zoom in or out on a specific scene, I do it on the secondary camera and the other scenes aren't affected.

But well...even tasks like these can end up giving me problems. And recently, because I've been coming up with more and more special effects, my productivity is slowing down when I implement these scenes. e.g. What if I want to display a  scene with scrolling beside another scene that is zooming?! And when I spend more time programming, the lesser time I have to devote to drawing. Aww!

Final scene (Story35)

If you want to see how the scene looked like when it was in progress, there's a picture below. I actually drew this in "daytime" mode because I draw a lot of the scenes in daytime mode, so I have to use the same colour scheme for the trees and grass before adjusting them to the appropriate "night" scenery.

Scene in progress

The above scenes I showed are Story scene 34, Story scene 35 and Story scene 36

I have at least 40 scenes of this comic completed and best of all: IMPLEMENTED, which means they are already in the game itself, viewable with most of the effects for the scenes completed.

Currently in progress are:
Story 39
Story 42

I don't always do the scenes in chronological order because I just start with whatever I am motivated to draw, but I still try my best to not jump too far ahead and skip too many scenes. Just to list down some of the effects I managed to do (YAY!):
- Camera panning from scene to scene + Individual scene scrolling
For a lot of the new scenes, I tend to put many of them together on a single page. But the game screen is only large enough to contain 1 or 2 scenes. So I pan my camera from scene to scene. Sometimes, I stop the camera at a specific scene to play an animation, or do its thing (scrolling up/down). This was the most difficult thing to do. I do this a lot with later scenes.

- Individual scenes' zooming effects
Gives illusion that the camera is moving to, or further away from an object or character. I think this is the coolest effect so far. I use it sparingly because of its limited uses. Only two scenes utilize this so far.

- Lightning flash

There is one scene with cool stormy effects. When a lightning flashes, the scene illuminates and the side of trees/ characters facing the lightning will brighten. But it's always the same side that brightens lulz.

- Scene illumination / lighting changes when sun rises or sets
A simple effect that looks great. Starting to use this more frequently.

Story43

I completed this scene this noon complete with an awesome sunrise.

- Moving clouds
One of the first thing I did with early scenes, and probably still the only moving object in my later scenes other than the sun.

Once Story 50 is finished, I will take a break from comics. I've also started to add watermarks to any significant pictures I post here. I'm only doing this because these pictures are being used for a purpose, and I don't want them taken by unknown people before this project is completed.

I'm fine with pictures that aren't being used in this project though, but most of the things I put here are related to the project in one way or another.

Fun
I wanted to put this picture above as I was writing about programming, but I decided to leave this till the end anyway. Here's a piece of code I wrote for fun. It's called "HowMyBrainWorks.as"

HowMyBrainWorks.png

Failed to compile. Unknown function "sleep()" does not exist.