Here are some naked-mole-people style avatar headshots from the paper-doll avatar catalog which I’m building for my game.
So far I’ve made a few layers for different body colors, eyes, eye colors, and a few noses. Only one mouth so far.
I may need to browse through Foundation Flash Cartoon Animation
(amazon) from the Apress Friends Of Ed imprint for some more ideas on how to layer the pieces.
For example, I made one Anime style hair piece but the facing ear was under the hair because I have the whole body in one layer organized by fill color. This is going to be a problem when I add layers of clothing. Obviously the hands and facing ear will need to come forward and be in another layer.
If I add something like headphones, the far ear will also need to be in it’s own layer and one earphone will be in a layer covering it but under the shape of the face.
Oy vey!
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I’ve been wanting to make a paper-doll (wikipedia) style avatar selection for my game, but I’ve been baffled and overwhelmed by Adobe Illustrator in the past. Illustrator, or some vector based program, seems like the best choice because of the … well … vectors.
Being too timid to use Illustrator was obviously a problem. One option was to have someone else make it for me, or maybe I could borrow/buy one from some other person. In the end I realized I would need to buck up and get over my fear of Illustrator.
I’m happy to report that Illustrator is now my bitch. I am able to bend it’s anchors and paths and make it do my bidding. I can select groups and paste them front, send them back and forth in the layer as I will.
I owe it all to this fine, fine tutorial on how to make Killer Chainsaw Bunnies.
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I’ve been working on the mechanics of the game more. I hope to have a limited mechanical preview available to some people to play test in about 2 weeks.
I had a really silly bug that looked like some Ajax wasn’t updating, and had the smell of a race condition. But it turned out that something should have been <= instead of just < in a query. Took me a while to find that.
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An early preview of things to come. Still working on a lot of the UI mechanics before trying to clean it all up and present it nicely.
Yii framework is working really, really well.
I hope to have a functioning game in early September. Lots to do after that, but my goal is to have it basically working before Boston Indies next month.
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Some people know that I’ve been working on a web game that I plan to integrate with Facebook. The initial prototype took a few weeks of halfhearted hacking and thrashing around between PHP and MySql, getting used to LAMP style programming again. I got a working proof of concept up and running and started making notes of what really needed to be done to make it work. Then, I admitted to myself that I was making a giant mess that I would not be able to build on for very long.
I looked around for a PHP framework to make things easier. Something scalable and lightweight, but sensible and clear. I found the Yii framework after peeking at CakePHP and CodeIgniter. I chose Yii because it seemed to make sense to me at first glance. I was able to get my model defined and had CRUD stuff up and running in no time at all.
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I’ve been working on a game project in my spare time and need a good tool for vector illustration. The obvious choice is Adobe Illustrator, right? Well, I wanted to explore my options and see if I could find something cheaper. My primary criteria: Mac OS X and Wacom Intuos4 tablet support. Secondary: some sort of Adobe Flash-like animation for cut scenes would be a nice feature to have available; especially with tweening.
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