A Time For Reflecting
Did you know that over here at Sprixelsoft, we’ve been working on Super Hematoma for just over a year now? That’s right, the anniversary was September 30th. Rather than a traditional quick update like we normally do here on Fridays, we decided that a proper Retrospective / Post-Mortem of our first year was in order.
Be warned, it’s a long read. But this is what we’ve been up to this past year.
3D Pixel Effects
Getting my head wrapped around doing effects for Super Hematoma has been a real challenge. I actually took some classical animation in college, but that was really focused on character animation more-so than effects. In fact I think I only did a couple of exercises on paper that involved any sort of effects, so it wasn’t until I started learning to do fluid dynamics in Maya that I began to really think about that side of production.
Flame On!
We’ve had it in our heads for a long time now, that this Oil Sands level that we were creating was going to be a hazardous level to play in. While admittedly it’s looked pretty straight forward until now, that’s because it’s really only been half complete. It’s now like… 60% complete. Or something.
Back To The Grind
As you’re probably aware already, we missed doing any sort of an update last week as we were both at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. This was our first time at PAX and it was a way for us to get a little bit of a handle on what exactly these conventions are like. We plan on having a booth of our own some day and figured that it would be worth it to check the scene out both for the analytical point of view as well as for pure enjoyment.
Rain City
There’s been yet more animation done this week, however as a change of pace I decided to take a stab at fleshing out one of the next levels to come for Super Hematoma. It’s going to be a rainy night-time city level from the west coast of Canada.
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
Well… maybe not infinite, but if you do the math… we’ve currently got two genders, nine eye types per gender, nine eye types per gender, fifteen skin tones, and twenty seven hair tones, why… that means we’ve got 984,150 possible combinations at the moment that could come out of our Bruiser Generator. Not a bad starting place, in my opinion.
Joan, Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?…
Make over!!! Having introduced our first female bruiser last week, I continued ironing out her design this week, we’ve got a slight improvement to the existing hair style, and a bunch more designs for options to be placed in the bruiser generator. Aside from that we’ve got some additional animation cycles for our lady in red.
Here Comes A New Challenger!
I’ve been working on getting new animation done for a while now. I’ve got a mostly complete set of animation cycles for our first male bruiser. I still need to do poses with different types of weapons, and some cycles that won’t find themselves into our first level. For the moment I’m taking a break from our beefy dude, and concentrating on getting all existing cycles done for a fierce female bruiser.
Tidbits
Yes, I am still alive in my nerdcave. This is going to be a very quick run-down of some random morsels of progress information.
Getting the Gang Together
Earlier in the week, I linked to the Mega Man 25th Anniversary Art book. I absolutely love the old artwork that was done for NES era games. Legend of Zelda, Mario Bros, Mega Man, Metroid… these were games that all came with boxes, and booklets, and some charming hand drawn art that made everything fun.