#licecap

Trying something I might delete imediately I guess it's no seizure risk. But you have to click on the center one to actually see the crude animation. It took like 5 tries to get one that didn't offend my sense of rhythm.

I guess I just miss fliphones or something. No wait there was a cheap camera once that sort of was like this, wasn't it?!

https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

LICEcap simple animated screen captures

LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or .LCF (see below). 

@lavenderandvanilla hope you’ll try it when you get time

036 // Distractions VII: “Stupid Jaywalking Game, Part I”

So I decided to take a break from my normal project to try this new thing that flew into my head that felt like it would be fairly easy to carry out, and this is the result so far.

The basic concept of the game is that the player has to move from their current location to another point on the map-- some point at the side of a road-- as quickly as they can. The challenge is that they will frequently be called upon to cross streets full of cars. Cars which will hit them if they do not time themselves correctly. Being hit by a car concludes the game.

The cars follow a set of predictable rules and broadcast their behaviour in various ways, and the player can respond to that by planning out their trip from their location to their destination accordingly. The sooner they arrive, the more points it is worth to them.

So far, I have been working on the cars’ basic movement and map generation, which has been fairly straightforward. The map in the animation above, for instance, is generated from this list of points: [(50, 50), (200, 50), ('B', 350, 50, 24), ('B', 450, 200), (450, 350), ('B', 450, 500), (580, 500), (660, 500)] The xytuples give fixed points and the 'B'-tuples indicate Bezier curve control points, and some other data for the curve generator. Getting Pygame to make maps from fairly simple strings was not challenging and the Bezier curve generator was pretty easy stuff, too, though having the cars adjust their speed as they navigate sharp (and shallow) corners was a bit troublesome due to a few clumsy mistakes I made with numbers.

The next thing I need to do for it is have the roads connect properly to intersections, which will have a traffic control unit that directs approaching and waiting vehicles. I also need to have vehicles determine complete routes through that intersection and the map at their destination. Some buildings to decorate the map, a mechanism for choosing destinations for the player, and I suppose, the player's representative in the game, as well. A few things; not many. Not bad for three or four days' work. I am looking forward to working more on it, too.

I have been working on my main project as well these past couple of weeks (sorry I missed last week's post, by the way), but I have also found myself sidetracked somewhat. Windows 10, though it has been civil so far, has taking a change of attitude from "Unremarkable but cooperative" to "You are not my father and I will install whatever broken updates I want, and start waking up from hibernation while you are carrying me in your bag." The garbage update was especially jarring because my computer was stuck in a weird deadlock state where it could not boot up. Another surprise update had incapacitated my other laptop at the time, as well. That was at three in the morning. I was less amused. Again, one of my brilliant girlfriends helped bail me out, and now things are more or less back on the rails. But Windows 7 never gave me this kind of obscene trouble. Additionally, I discovered that it was scaling everything on my screen up to 125%, which is great for looking at whatever, but it had been making a huge mess of my art at 1xzoom. I had noticed the problem long ago but did not know what the source of the problem was exactly. I found it and corrected it. A nuisance, but at least this one was understandable.

Anyway, I will try and post more of my artwork from the main project sometime soon; at this point, it is not much to show, but perhaps you will find it entertaining in the time it takes to scroll past it. <3

033 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.2: “A Tree In 2,023 Steps!”

I captured this from the redo stack of a tree I drew recently as a technique study, and I thought that I might also post a capture of the creation of it. I hope you find this kind of thing as mesmerizing as I do.

Start to finish, it took maybe three hours to do. Slow, but I am becoming better at it, I think.

As if you had missed it, the name is a reference to the plentiful and very useful, if slightly frustrating, tutorial images available online that offer you a lesson on drawing something in six or eight steps, which tend to leave out some critical leap or structure that tells you exactly how to get the details the way you need them (it tends to be around the fourth or fifth). Instead of that, I would like to offer you the complete process, directly from my edit history, from vacant workspace to signed product. Confounding step? Miss something? Need a bit of interpolation? Go back to the exact moment where it happened and study the result in this fun, 108-second animated image, uncluttered by explanations, descriptions, or frame numbers! Tell your friends!

The tree has ten colours, plus a transparency value. 1,971 of the GIF's 2,023 frames are of its construction, and the remainder are just me being fancy, plus a bit of LICEcap being a nuisance at the end.

Anyway, this has been a good week for neither my game nor my health, so I am afraid there is not much to see here. Hopefully, there will be more to see next time.

035 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.3: “Tree Super Redux”

The tree-drawing-visualization thing seems to be popular right now, so here are some more I made just today! They are not quite as articulate as the usual ones, but should do well for near-backgrounds and views through windows.

The first ‘lumpy’ tree is more of an artistic experiment than a legitimate game asset. I doodled a couple of leaves in with the second set and they are really there more as a mascot than anything. :1

- The first tree is drawn in 125 steps. - The second tree is drawn in 159 steps. - The third tree is drawn in 172 steps. - The last tree is drawn in 238 steps (+2 where I relocate it in the workspace). - All of the trees use five colours, except for the first which has seven, plus a transparency value.

I drew this as another sort of design study, mainly to have a few samples to put into a map to see if they look any good. I will post the results of that experiment later.

I hope thse low-fidelity trees amuse you! They were also fun to draw! :D

Incidentally, I find I have collected quite a set of GIF compression solutions to make up for ASEprite's unfortunate GIF-saving shortfalls. As before, I had to make some revisions to the original LICEcap capture (934kB), and when I went to save the altered version out with ASEprite, the result was 22.4MB! This is not really so horrible considering its size and length of the thing but is hardly internet-friendly and shows some considerable bit of a space for improvement, algorithm-wise. Anyway, I ran it through a sketchy online compression tool (a new one this time; the last one broke!) and got this 1,045kB lossless version back, and hooray!

Anyway, that is that for now, I will also try to put out another post this week, since this one is not really that interesting, game-development-wise.

024 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.1: “Part of ???’s House”

So my health has not fully recovered and there are a couple of other projects I have going on. This is fine, I suppose, since things are improving. I did want to give you something, though, since it has been a while, and this is it! I have started working on the buildings of Matan Village, and this is one of them (or a part of one of them). This is a home! People will live in it! I will not tell you whose home it is just yet, because I want to keep a couple of surprises for later (and also it could change depending on whether or not I think of something better in the interim). Seedbird shown for scale. Obviously, I have not entirely finished it yet.

Anyway, there will only be a short post for this week (unless I get around to writing another-- unlikely, m’fraid), and I will tell you about my side projects later, because I do not have the time just at this moment (it involves Tkinter again).