My Game

Contests 4K Game Competition - 2010
#1

Actually I’m not sure what my game is yet, I have mostly been working on bits and pieces. I am thinking something along the lines of AdvanceWars but not sure. I finished an interesting piece that I thought might be of use to others, click the image for demo + source:

http://angryoctopus.co.nz/java4k/block_test.png

The block images are made up a few rounded rectangle draw calls and only take up a few tens of bytes. The shadows could be dropped for even less space but they make a big difference in your perception of the relative height of a block.

I’ll update this thread and change the title once I have a more concrete idea.

#2

Ooh, really purty. :smiley:

I’ll be excited to see where this goes next.

#3

agreed, it does look very pretty, the art style does remind me of those free graphics released on lostgarden a while back http://lostgarden.com/2007/05/cutegod-prototyping-challenge.html

#4

The style is based on the LostGarden tiles, in fact I didn’t actually pick the set of rounded rects for the proto-block. I evolved it randomly with the fitting function based on the sum squared pixel difference to plain block in the Cute Planet set.

#5

Very pretty. A few tiny nitpicks though: I’m not sure the left and top sides of the blocks should have a shadow (where would the light source be that causes both sides to be shaded?) and the overlapping shadows don’t look right.

#6

[quote]A few tiny nitpicks though: I’m not sure the left and top sides of the blocks should have a shadow (where would the light source be that causes both sides to be shaded?) and the overlapping shadows don’t look right.
[/quote]
The light source is the diffuse scattering of sunlight through the atmosphere. It is not strictly speaking correct but it is a good enough approximation for a 4K game.

I based the shadows on the lost planet guide:

http://lostgarden.com/uploaded_images/PlanetCuteShadowMockup-700720.jpg

Mine don’t look as good because I am not using gradient shadows (particularly prominent where shadows overlap as you point out).

Here is diagram of how the shadows are applied.

#7

I actually have the same complaints about his shadows. I think yours look better than the ones from lost garden anyway; they’re cleaner and more stylized.

#8

Another bit done that may be useful to others: Vector Graphics


http://angryoctopus.co.nz/java4k/svg_test.png

Click the image for the render/converter source code.
The graphics are encoded in strings and only take up a few hundred bytes. I am using a very small subset of SVG (only path elements and solid fills) and the coordinates are only at 9-bit resolution. You can still do a fair amount with that and i even managed to massage the SVG Tiger into my format.

#9

Woah, nifty! You’re making some really cool resources!

#10

I saw “Vector Graphics” and the picture and thought “that’s amazing!”

Then I saw that your format comes with a from-SVG converter. That’s beyond amazing, that’s just magic.

Out of curiosity, how many bytes was your tiger?

#11

[quote]Woah, nifty! You’re making some really cool resources!
[/quote]
Now if only I could get started on an actual game. :wink:

[quote]Out of curiosity, how many bytes was your tiger?
[/quote]
Around 17k uncompressed (original svg was over 100k). It is pretty nasty, the paths are insanely complex.

There is still a bit of redundancy I could get rid of. Also you really don’t need 9 bits of precision, smaller sprites only need 6 or 7. The converter isn’t very magic, only path elements are supported so you generally have to edit them in Inkscape a bit to clean up any unsupported features.