The recent Ludum Dare has been giving me some inspiration for the new form Hooves of War will take in a most likely pony-free future. I’m going to withhold discussing things a lot, but primary things to know is that it will take things into a new art direction that makes things much easier for me to work on my own.
We’ll see where the floating cube of mystery takes us…
I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve updated my blog. That June 21st, 2012 date on the post below this one is rather shameful to look at.
So what the shit happened? Well, nothing, mostly. I ended up having some major distractions this past summer because I didn’t know where I was going to live starting late August as my plans for roommates completely fell through and I didn’t have the money to afford the 4 bedroom apartment I was suddenly stuck with. (Yes, some very bad mistakes were made.)
Because of all that, very little was accomplished on Hooves of War. After housing was resolved later on, university started back up in September and I just didn’t get a whole lot done. Then with Tucker going off for basic training, I have been at a loss of art.
So what does this mean for Hooves of War? For the time being, it is basically not getting worked on at all due to a lack of time and art. I also started a job at Garmin Aviation recently. So that has certainly been keeping me busy.
Additionally, if you’re a pone enthusiast, I’m sure you’ve heard about how Cease & Desist-happy Hasbro has been with all things fandom. Even though I’ve never considered Hooves of War to be a fan game by any extent of the imagination, it is pretty obvious that the FIM character models heavily influence Tucker when he was designing ours. In general, this makes me nervous to move forward since it might mean losing all our hard work. I’d still love to make a worms-like game for mobile platforms, but ponies have turned into a liability and I really don’t like that.
So what now? For now: I’m going to focus on keeping my blog more personal. I’d like to start doing smaller weekly updates, probably more journal style.
I’ve also found a much better theme for my blog in general, so hopefully it won’t be all stupid like the old one was with some screen sizes. :D
Today was my Reddit cakeday! For those who aren’t Redditors, your cakeday is like your Reddit birthday. So, I’ve had my account on Reddit for 365 days (I made my account on June 22nd, 2011 and this year was a leap year.)
I had planned for a while to do something big Hooves of War related for it, but alas we ran behind schedule and it snuck up on me so I didn’t get to make a gameplay video like I had hopped.
Anyway, this is the first time I think I’ve gone this in depth on Hooves of War in public, so if you want to learn more about Hooves of War, go on and take a read! Lots of pictures to look at too!
This week has been a really great week for Hooves of War, but more on it later.
Today I want to highlight a recent plunge I took that is only resulting in good things.
First off, I am a programmer, I am not an artist. That is why I write code for the game and my friend Tucker is making the art for the game! As an programmer, I like open source software a lot, I could rant about how I can change something if I don’t like it, but what it all really boils down to is that it is free after all. (Ok, I also like the community aspect a lot and being able to hack away if the need arises.)
As such, my image editing software of choice is GIMP (and Inkscape!) GIMP does everything I want it to, and is works pretty great! Sure its UI sucks, but breaking down user interfaces into patterns is one of my interests (and I am really good at it) so GIMP has never bothered me. I do wish though that the developers of GIMP weren’t so cocky and would just accept their UI is pretty people unfriendly though.
Anyway, I’m gonna avoid this turning into a FOSS rant or something. Now, for my work, I use Microsoft Visual Studio Professional (with Visual Assist X) for my code. Why? Because I do it a lot. I actually get a lot out of these tools that rivals like Eclipse and other open source IDE’s dream about. I have yet to find an IDE with auto-complete functionality that rival’s Intellisense (and when you throw Visual Assist X in there its not even a contest anymore.)
Similarly, Tucker isn’t making Hooves of War art in GIMP or Inkscape, he is using his industry standard Adobe Illustrator. Besides Illustrator being what he knows, Illustrator is also a more professional tool compared to Inkscape and has a much more diverse feature set. This barrier between us was created some pretty serious problems in our programmer <-> artist communication. I would either try to import an Illustrator file directly into Inkscape or have him send me an SVG export, but then I’d also always have to have him render it out so I could be sure it was coming up correctly in Inkscape. This created many issues, the primary ones being:
So, how did we solve all these problems?
Me getting CS5 has completely eliminated all of those problems in the past week.
However, it had another unintended side effect! As a result of owning Illustrator I can now also write extensions and scripts for it! Already I have written a script to help automate the exporting of levels from Illustrator! The script was very easy to write and took pretty minimal effort to get going. (I’ve only tried to automate GIMP once, and I remember it being an unpleasant experience.) The script’s current output for the above level can be seen in-part below:
So what does it do/how does it work? The basic gist of it in its current state is that it exports every top-level group in every layer as a PNG, but why not see for yourself?
Since these scripts have been useful to me, I figured that maybe someone else could use them (or learn from them!) Basically, why keep them internal for pretty much no reason?
Anyway, here they are, hosted on Bitbucket!
Anyway, that’s all for today! Happy Friday, everyone!
I got super philosophical and realized just how amazing it is that we live in an era where artists can be given the tools to create data which is rendered into more data that is a long series of pictures and is combined with more data that represents sound and music, and that data in that order creates a work of art that tells a story that provides entertainment and evokes human emotions in the form of what we call movies and we all undervalue and under-appreciate the huge scale and work contributed towards making it all possible.
Everything can be represented with “just data”, but true works of art, expression, social iteration, and entertainment are more than “just data”.
WHY PONIES?
One question I get a lot when I talk about Hooves of War to people is “Why ponies?” Excellent question, actually!
Ok, lets see, I haven’t made a blog entry since…OCTOBER!
Anyway, with the much cleaner interface, hopefully this will mean more posts by me!
Well screw that! Whoops. I need to ramble more, I guess.
Hmm, what to ramble about.
OH! I know, something about game design. Yeah! I do that sometimes!
The forums got attacked by spam bots and I don’t have time to deal with it right now. I’ve been meaning to do away with them soon anyway.
Sorry for lack of updates, I’m thinking I want to start some non-Pathogen Studios stuff soon, like reviews of game design and what makes games fun and stuff like that. Help keep content going when Hooves of War is in that “technically good but uninteresting” stage.
Graphics acceleration, Wireframes, and lack of mip-maps. Oh my!
New rendering system is coming a long nicely. That is all.
Tucker is working on making wallpapers and descriptions for the main ponies in Hooves of War! Here is his first wallpaper for my personal favorite pony: Voyeur.
About Ramblings of Pathogen David
