New rooms and areas

Work on the project has been very on and off lately because of school so there hasn't been much progress, but I thought I'd post a few new things. They're all still under construction or just an idea.

It's dark...

Quick post. Happy Halloween.

Main Door idea

Since last post I've been adding & adjusting a few things here and there. The main door is one of them and tonight I created a short animated gif to get an idea what the animation might look like. The idea is that there's a secondary lock at the top of the door that consists of 3 sets of different color jewels; red, auburn, ice blue (i don't really know their exact colors). Each jewel has a twin and are attracted to each other. You must place all 3 jewel's twins in it's socket to activate them. There is one more jewel in the center, the black jewel, which activates once the other 3 jewels have merged.

Click on the image to see the animation.

Lighting - Lamps & Torches

The little time I've had to work on the project since last post has mainly gone toward some lighting work. I made a ton of variations to the original lamp design and a few to the original fire to fit the different lamp and torch sizes. I've known all along that I need to significantly turn down the luminosity on everything and adjust contrasts for a very dark atmosphere, which was my original intention. Now that I've placed some color lighting in the scene, it feels like this may be the time to start messing with that. I had imagined from the beginning that the lighting would play a huge role in the visual aspect of the overall atmosphere.

Transfer to Photoshop

I've spent all my project time since the last post transferring everything (everything in the hallway scene that is) from MS-Paint to Photoshop. This way everything is a separate layer and essentially individual objects with transparencies. I can now just pick up whatever I want and move it around without altering it's background. Also, when moving something, I don't have to redraw it's shadow which was excruciating and time consuming.

Hallway 1 touch up

I spent all day & night yesterday touching up the hallway and in process realized that either some things need to be moved or I'll have to remove the scene frame side panels in the actual playable file because they're going to block some things from view.

Empty Space

I've been telling myself to stop working on the graphics & start animating stuff. But it takes so long to make the graphics, that I don't have much to animate. The only space I have so far is the hallway and it was really empty so over the past couple days I did a lot of filling. And....blah blah blah its 2am, I'm tired...

Hallway 1

I finished the general structure for the hallway I've been working on. There are five sections and they're all very empty right now. I also finished the interaction and animation for moving from section to section and it looks pretty smooth. That all you can do so far, nothing else is interactive or animated.

Tedious Insanity

Today there was only enough of that sweet refreshing ice-tea left to fill my glass halfway.

Tedious:
1.
marked by tedium; long and tiresome: tedious tasks; a tedious journey.
2.
wordy so as to cause weariness or boredom, as a speaker or writer; prolix.

Insanity:
1.
the condition of being insane; a derangement of the mind.
2.
Law . such unsoundness of mind as affects legal responsibility or capacity.
3.
Psychiatry . (formerly) psychosis.
4.
extreme folly; senselessness; foolhardiness.

Life itself is extremely diverse...and at the same time it's extremely repetitive. It forces you to work hard so you can keep it going. To get that work done right, you have to be good at it. To be good at that work, you must practice. And too often does that practice involve a lot of questionably mentally-safe tedious tasks. But hey, this is 2010 and we have robots to do the work for us.

The work on this project so far has been extremely tedious. A large part of the reason for that is because I've been using MS-Paint for all of the graphical design so far. Month after month I keep expecting the speed of work to compound as my MS-Paint experience level rises. Although I have become a lot quicker in MS-Paint, the work is still way too slow and much more repetitive than it should be. The time is overdue to switch over to Adobe Illustrator. Which, I believe will satisfy all my needs.....but I'm going to stab my self in the ear with a rusty dental pick if I find out six months down the road that there's a program a billion times better for my needs.

Roots

So far the genre I'm shooting for here I suppose would be 'Graphic Adventure, Puzzle' or just a short interactive as I mentioned in the previous post. I remember playing Myst back in the day and really enjoyed it. Other huge influences would be Castlevania, Zelda and Metroid. I mention those games because I hope to implement what I think may be referred to as the 'backtracking' aspect of these games. Not that I want there to be backtracking, but I enjoyed the feeling of being able to explore something that I had desired to explore earlier in the game but couldn't - to satisfy that itch.



The graphical theme follows a strict bevel like style which I have dubbed as the 'Bevel style'. Just about everything is beveled including the light. I got this idea one night as I was getting ready for sleep and the Photoshop icon caught my focus for some reason. I had seen the icon many times before, but took the design of it for granted. Photoshop's icon is a blue square with the shapes of the letters 'P' and 's' cut out in the center. The border of the cut out area have been beveled. I immediately wanted to design something in this style so I created a beveled cut out picture of Megaman & Metalman in MSPaint.



Since then I've been designing many things in the bevel style. I think it's the ease and simplicity of giving an object a little touch of the third dimension around it's edges that makes it feel so much better.

Inception

I'm starting this blog in hopes that it will help me finish an interactive Flash project I started this summer. I was thinking that, even with the limited knowledge I had of Flash, I could push it out in about a week or two. Unfortunately, summer has gone and the project is far from done. This has only reinforced one of life's good lessons; things usually take much longer than you expect them to.