Ships.. that glow o.0

Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Ships.. that glow o.0

Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#1]


I recently said about another game that had these sort of sprites that the art was a copout, and the the art style gave me a sore head, well it's still gona give me a sore head when it all gets moving, but the art isnt a copout, so I take that back.

My son had a shot of the other game and liked it so much he's pushed me into using the style for one of my ports from an old blitz3D game.

Having never really done this glowy thing for a game would love some feedback.

Last edited 2012


GfK(Posted 2012) [#2]
The effect is OK but if you're going for a retro feel, you should only be using straight lines, not curves.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#3]


and



With a fill, playing with the idea that their lines until hit then they fill and eventually fade back to lines again.

or might just make em all solid not sure.


skn3(Posted 2012) [#4]
The red line version looks nicest, kinda reminds me of a virtual boy game!


Kryzon(Posted 2012) [#5]
I don't like the gradient color - I think it fits better being just a single one.
I like the designs you came up.

You could try a 4th version with a strong outline and very faint interlaced fills (similar to your 2nd version), always keeping it the same color.
Then add a glow to all that and voilá.

You could also try some white, cyan and other cool colors to break that hotness (maybe for pickups and bonuses).


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#6]
Yeah I have the. Plots already picked out just did t show them.

Thanks for the feedback will tackle it tommorow .


Matty(Posted 2012) [#7]
I like the ship designs very much....


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#8]
Lol just read my above post , iPhone auto spell for the win. :)


Ross C(Posted 2012) [#9]
Very nice solid stuff!


Trinosis(Posted 2012) [#10]
Nice ships.

Glad you've seen the light.

I'd prefer some neon glow to them.

But thats just my personal preference.

I used blurred layers in photoshop to get the neon glow effect.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#11]
Yeah they have a slight glow at the moment, I plan to have two per ship, a flat layer for good collisions detection and then the glow layer.

not sure if that's how you did it to get around the glow causing detection's when it should'nt.

As for seeing the light lol, blame my son.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#12]
Here is the tileset for area or stage 1, not sure if this is a complete set yet I might add a few more things to it, but it will do for now , its enough to let me code the tile system that I will use for the game, OH it will be a traditional up screen scrolling shooter.

red lines are the tiles, 128*128 in size, the blue line marks the screen resolution, 800^480 which as I understand it is the default windows phone screen resolution.



Oh yeah forgot to mention, this will be for the windows phone, and the xbox 360, but building for the phone first will scale up the resolution once the game is complete.

again feedback welcome.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#13]
forgot to say the bit at the bottom is the launching mothership, once your clear (automated) the pink stuff will all be collision detected, so bump it and smash.

Still early days yet but probably going to go the traditional shooter gameplay as well, so 3 lives, take a hit and BOOM!, I don't fancy the bullet hell type game mode where you can collide a few times before you die because there are so many bullets on screen.

So aiming to give the player a rough ride, make them work for a complete level and punish the hell outa them if they screw it up :P


CyBeRGoth(Posted 2012) [#14]
Looking good so far, nice simple geometric shapes are always fun to make and play with


Trinosis(Posted 2012) [#15]
I didn't use pixel perfect collisions in my game, but circle to circle distance checks, to keep the speed up.

So, it was just a basic collision area system.

Pity i won't be able to playtest this as i'm a windows only user.

Also, if you havn't seen it yet, check out the neon glow graphics used in Gravity Crash.

They're the best i've seen yet.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#16]
Yeah the glow effect in game will be a lot stronger than in the above images, as their taken from my image editor not code.

I will check out that game for ideas, always good to see what other people have done.

As for the collisions, yeah I want a more accurate collision system with it being a more traditional and hardcore game, means less bullets on screen that move faster and have better collision detection.

This will be release on windows, linux, WP7, XBox360 and possibly Android. iOS will have to wait until I can get a mac, or a duel boot mac install.

Although I am developing the WP7 version first, the PC version will actually be released first, as I will be waiting till Jan 13 to buy the dev licence.


Matt Vinyl(Posted 2012) [#17]
Looking very nice indeed! Just a (slightly newbie-ish) question - but would you add the glow 'on the fly' or have it 'hard drawn' in from Photoshop etc.? And, if it's the latter, does image drawing (coordinates etc.) become more complicated? Having said that, I imagine all the 'shapes' are .PNGs. Hmm, ignore that last point. Heheh...


Kryzon(Posted 2012) [#18]
While Taiphoz doesn't answer...

to have glowing graphics you either do it realtime (pixel shader) or baked sprites (draw the line-art sprite, then the correspondent glow sprite overlayed on top of it).

For baked sprites you don't need any coordinate fiddling: simply set the line sprite and the glow sprite to be both mid-handled, and draw them at the same location: they'll be aligned.

For realtime glow, you need one framebuffer (an extra texture the size of the screen). You draw the line sprites normally, then read this raw image with the pixel shader with a gaussian blur onto the extra framebuffer. This framebuffer will hold a blurred vision of the game scene.
You render this framebuffer on top of the game scene with an additive blending and you're done (in a manner of speaking; this is quite complex stuff especially the blurring shader).


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#19]
Yeah mine are pre done, its going to be a mobile game so didnt want to lumber the hardware with having to render blurs or force it to do any more calculations than it needs to do.

I also think you get a bit more control over how it all looks, something I have not shown but might later is that the glow in the final tile set will be much stronger on the inside of the lines, than the outside, I want all outside lines to have a glow but be much more crisp.

I will knock up an image and show you what I mean, and I couldnt do that if I just blurred the image in realtime, needs to be done in photoshop.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#20]
And here we are.

The left wall has had the effect I was talking about applied to it, all inner surface has a falling off glow effect but the outer sides are nice and crisp, only did the left side so you can easily see the difference.

This makes it look nicer I think and gives you the impression that its actually some kinda solid or at least object with a bit of mass, as opposed to just a line.



as always feedback welcome.

Last edited 2012


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#21]
Note, I changed the above image the inner glow is now solid, it's actually sitting about 45% alpha so although you cant tell from the picture stars and background stuff will be visible behind that left wall.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#22]
I am thinking that the color of an object will dictate as well if its something you can collide with or not, the game play could get a little manic I want an easy way for a player to just look and know that somthing with make their ship go boom if they fly over it.


Trinosis(Posted 2012) [#23]
I like it.

Looks nice and crisp while retaining that neon glow look.

But it's quite monochromatic.

I'd like to see alot more color.


Steve Elliott(Posted 2012) [#24]

Glad you've seen the light.



lol. Can't beat a bit of neon :)

Looking good :D


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#25]
Yeah the player ship will be three main colors red, green and blue this reflects the type of power its using.

the levels will also be colord depending on stage, and then aliens will each have their own so once things are all in there should be plenty of shiny glowy type stuff moving about.


Leon Drake(Posted 2012) [#26]
bring on the epilepsy woo!


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#27]
little bit of gameplay , well I say gameplay but it's really just me shooting and changing power types.

Also if you watch this, and do not hear music, then I apologize now, seems when I was recording there were people on our team speak server playing track mania and they used some adult language lol, I have used youtube audio swap to apply some music but at time of posting its not been done yet.

best bet is to mute sound, nothing to hear anyway..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6puPnU3VQU


Htbaa(Posted 2012) [#28]
Seems to run pretty smooth. I like the graphical style, fits in well.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#29]
Yeah it's running real nice under XNA.

And it's running nice at 60 fps under flash n html5, I should note that the part where I shoot bullets in all directions, this is a bomb, and should only fire one round, but I spam it in the video to check frame rates, if I spammed it like that under html5 or flash I suspect i would get lots of frame lag.

Target is initially mobile tho, windows phone 7, once that's done I will rank everything up for Xbox 360 , PC and Linux. as well as flash and html5 so should be able to release to most platforms.


Steve Elliott(Posted 2012) [#30]
Really cool.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#31]
Going to stop posting. Now thanks for all the feedback guys , just need to get down to the grind and get it done now , anyone interested can follow it's progress on my site , dont want this thread turning into a work log which was in danger of happening .


Thanks all.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#32]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH6OIpao2CU

I seem to have gotten mixed up with my posts, or my posts have converged around this project lol, I am sure I posted some where today that I think I will keep posting in here with my progress because I find its giving me motivation to keep working on it.

But cant seem to find where I posted that, must have been in another thread by mistake I dunno.

Anyway, as its relevant to this project the above video shows some bullet patterns. hope you enjoy. and feedback on the patterns is also welcome.


Paul "Taiphoz"(Posted 2012) [#33]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HujGTB5kcZE

I plan to do one every week or possibly every two weeks, to track my progress with the game, if it goes well and does not take up to much time I will probably make this a regular thing for all my new projects.

Should be fun in a few months time to look back and see where things were when I started, and to see how things change from video to video.