Friday, August 29, 2014

Game deployed on Android

Exporting to Android with Godot (and Ubuntu) is really easy. The main problem  get was to configure correctly my smartphone in order to enable USB apt by composing #0808 dial. The result is exciting, although now there are a lot of usability issues, but won't be too hard to fix I presume.


Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Introducing Little Shadows composer..

Some of you may wonder who made the amazing music of the trailer video (which is also in the game). So let me introduce Nature Zhang, the composer who accepted to make such a beautiful music for Little Shadows.

You may find more info on Nature Zhang compositions on his website:

Nature Tianran Zhang

Nature Tianran Zhang


Nature writes music for diverse commercial clips, trailers and games for both indie studios and large media firms such as China Central Television. His wide range of music styles include traditional orchestral music and electronic influenced modern film score. As a former Microsoft visual designer, Nature has the strong sensibility on visual media and filmic language. 

As the winner of 2014 NYU Film Score Competition, Nature's film score was performed in Broadway.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Trailer for the Gamescon 2014

I was very excited to be able to present Little Shadows at GamesCon thanks to the Okam team who is developing the Godot game engine. Here is a preview of this trailer. Many things have changed in the game, and we're not very far from beta !!

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Using non-linear drag forces

I wanted to create a big ivy which could balance itself smoothly when the little girl was passing trough it. The best way, I think, for doing that was to create several segments of ivy. Each segment has a rigid body and a collision box associated to it, in order to deal with collisions with the little girl, and walls.



However, just by doing that the ivy behavior was shaky, even by trying to adjust the weights of each ivy segment to gain some inertial effects that could potentially solve the problem. It didn't help, so I decided to customize the dynamic integration system for the ivy, adding some friction to stabilize the system as mother Nature always does !

So I have just re-implemented the integrate function of each segment of the ivy, sharing the following gd script

You may realize that I didn't used linear drag forces, but non-linear, ie proportional to the norm of the velocity vector. This allows to stop fast motions faster than slow motions. You could even think of adjusting the friction parameter according to the velocity magnitude (for instance piecewise constant), but it's too many non-linearities for me today.

And here is the result...




Sunday, June 1, 2014

being a platformer

Some late Sunday night update ! I have finished the first tileset, and I have been able to construct a complete platform level.

Many details improved (altough the little girl motion and physics is still a bit messy...): platform design with leaves, moving platforms, lightings, interactions with stone walls, blue star badges, running hound... I think the global look is starting to be okay, and I will now start to add new effects to the little girl (magic spells), add sounds to make it more realistic and few animatimated ennemies or characters in the background.


Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Behind the stage

I'm desgining my graphical elements with Inkscape, which is a great, great tool. Here is an example with some concept art of the forest level... black platforms, blurred elements on the baground, glows, gradients... Really some effort is needed to make an appealing visual style...






For development I use Godot, which is a game-development engine: OpenSource , under the MIT licence and... supercool !! It has been released earlier this year in open source and this then the developement seems to go superfast. I'm very confident that it will very soon, in a year or so, compete favorably with Unity.




Here is a small snapshot of LittleShadows developement with Godot (you may notice that I'm using godot in Unity, but that's only my distro's name... :-) )
Setting the stage...

Setting up collision polygons to avoid interpenetrations

Adding few elements (trees, glows) to make the stuff a little more fancy...



First ScreenCast...

I guess that the design will change a lot, but I like this atmosphere... Many details are wrong (the little girl is more sliding than walking, collision boxes aren't perfect, gameplay is ... which gameplay?), but it just give a rough idea of what I want to do.


First concept art

I spit-designed (thanks Inkscape) some elements setting up the atmosphere a little bit...


The same, but with additional textures




Blog launch !

As soon I got my first NES, I wanted to create my own video games. I was around the age of 10, and I was drawing scrollable backgrounds (I guess it was just while playing 'the Adams Family' title). But I was missing the skills at that time, neither able to design or code anything, so my dream was hardly possible to come true.

Twenty three years laters, I am a professional programmer with a background in mathematical modeling of mechanical deformations, with a good job that I love and which challenges me. But I miss the creativity fun I had when designing the backgrounds of my ideal games.

So I decided to create my own platform game. Inspired a little bit (very much indeed) by 
Shadowplay: Journey to Wonderland, 


Limbo, 
and Outland 


but all those games were created by teams of skilled people... So, I just hope to create something nice that some people will like... and I'll work as hard as hell for that. This blog is the story of this amazing journey.