This blog now lives at www.thepixelcrush.com.
-------------------------------------------|Digital Animation & Game Criticism|-------------------------------------------
Friday, 7 March 2014
Long Live The Pixel Crush
After over 80,000 views (lets pretend that's significant) its time for the Pixel Crush to go through a phase of reinvention, to turn it back into a place I can't help but write and share things on.
This process has already begun, a new website is well under way with being designed and the site address already points to it's half built corner of the internet. I don't know how smooth that transition will be, its been a bit tricky so far but I'm hoping I can maintain you, my faithful readership, without needing to claw back the meagre following I have neglected recently. I'll do my best
I'll make a grand announcement when I'm ready to cut the ribbon and usher you all into the new Pixel Crush, until then, hold tight.
Olly.
This process has already begun, a new website is well under way with being designed and the site address already points to it's half built corner of the internet. I don't know how smooth that transition will be, its been a bit tricky so far but I'm hoping I can maintain you, my faithful readership, without needing to claw back the meagre following I have neglected recently. I'll do my best
I'll make a grand announcement when I'm ready to cut the ribbon and usher you all into the new Pixel Crush, until then, hold tight.
Olly.
Monday, 27 January 2014
Global Game Jam 2014
Global Game Jam comes around once again, that annual event where for 48 hours there is a mass sacrifice of spare time, healthy sleeping patterns, and an outpouring of game based creativity centered around a surprise theme.
My fellow team mates were Aardman colleague and game jam vet Gareth Williams, and master composer Eduardo VC.
This was the theme announced on the Friday, along with an emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity.
With a good plan for what we wanted our idea to be locked down, we went home on Friday ready to start the actual creation of the game on the Saturday morning. We had lots of complex ideas about player swapping places in order to fix things and having to impart information to each other verbally in order to get the job done, and that core thing is in the final game. Other stuff to do with an interesting kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship between players based on the 6 senses got lost in the mad dash that is game jam.
By the end of day one I had had a little meltdown over animation not importing animation correctly into unity and we had little visible progress, even though invisible progress had been made in terms of code and design decisions.
Turned out that it was a scaling issue to do with the .fbx file importing the mesh and rig at different scales, so I set my export settings to centimeter (which was technically incorrect) and it worked.
The team stayed up late and by morning Gareth had a functioning prototype, and I had fixed my animation issues and finished the character creation. Video evidence from 2:30am:
Day two was super productive and by the submission time we had a basic playable game that had compromised in all the right places, leaving the best mechanics intact. Team AHOD making important creative decisions:
The game demoed well when it came time to show the other jammers what we'd achieved and it even came away with the best audio award, to Eduardo's credit. Here's the poster I assembled from the assets for the game's upload page
And a screenshot from the game:
It was great coming up with the game design for this, I was lucky to have like minded people to collaborate with and bounce ideas off in a really encouraging environment. I'm pretty pleased that I managed to get so much more done successfully than last year, probably largely down to the team this year and me having more experience than last time.
The game can be downloaded from here for Windows and Mac should you like to assemble 3 players to try it out, and groove to that award winning sound!
My fellow team mates were Aardman colleague and game jam vet Gareth Williams, and master composer Eduardo VC.
"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are"
This was the theme announced on the Friday, along with an emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity.
 |
| The theme, and some sketches on the layout of the environment for out initial idea. |
 |
| the view from our bunker jam room at the Bristol Games Hub |
By the end of day one I had had a little meltdown over animation not importing animation correctly into unity and we had little visible progress, even though invisible progress had been made in terms of code and design decisions.
Turned out that it was a scaling issue to do with the .fbx file importing the mesh and rig at different scales, so I set my export settings to centimeter (which was technically incorrect) and it worked.
The team stayed up late and by morning Gareth had a functioning prototype, and I had fixed my animation issues and finished the character creation. Video evidence from 2:30am:
Day two was super productive and by the submission time we had a basic playable game that had compromised in all the right places, leaving the best mechanics intact. Team AHOD making important creative decisions:
 |
| left to right: me, Eduardo, Gareth. |
And a screenshot from the game:
It was great coming up with the game design for this, I was lucky to have like minded people to collaborate with and bounce ideas off in a really encouraging environment. I'm pretty pleased that I managed to get so much more done successfully than last year, probably largely down to the team this year and me having more experience than last time.
The game can be downloaded from here for Windows and Mac should you like to assemble 3 players to try it out, and groove to that award winning sound!
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