Aaron Booth, a friend of mine and Last Stand:Union City artist, made this awesome bit of Team Fortress 2 headgear for the sniper.
Head over to the Steam Workshop page and vote it up to get it in the game, I want to be able to buy it!
For those of you who aren’t familiar with 19th century Australian history, read up on our beloved criminal.
[View the VERY UNFINISHED Full Image]
I recently got something that I’ve been putting off buying for years and years, a graphics tablet. I’d tried them in the past and thought “I can’t do this, I’ll stick to the mouse for doing my art”. I couldn’t have been more wrong and I really wish that I’d bought one sooner.
The tablet I ended up with is an Intuos 4 from Wacom and it’s hands down the best new tool I’ve used. It just makes doing this sort of thing such an enjoyable experience, so much so that I’ve found myself painting for this strange thing called “fun” over the weekends. It’s just odd for me to be doing something creative that isn’t tied to being shoved in a game somewhere.
Above is my first attempt at a completely digital painting without a reference. What you’re seeing here is about 3 hours work and is far from being finished so I’ll keep posting as I make updates to it as I find the time. Just thought that given the subject matter you guys might be interested.
As for games I’m working on, I really can’t say anything right now, just be assured that I’m doing something and that you’ll all hear about it in the next month or two.
Long time coming, but here’s Part II of my long winded post-mortem of The Last Stand: Union City.
I’ve made characters the same way since The Last Stand. To put it simply, they’re 2D puppets made of MovieClips for each part. When I was first confronted with making a bunch of zombies, it seemed like the most obvious choice. I should note thought that I’m a bit of a hack and there’s probably other more experienced devs out there screaming at their monitors right now.
It worked for me, remembering that this was an AS2 project and I didn’t have the bones system or IK at my disposal.
The benefit of building characters this way is that you can animate the “dummy” once and then have all your clothing pieces as frames within the individual piece movieclips. It also has the huge plus of being super simple to animate, provided you’re ok with a bit of frame by frame action.
For the combat in The Last Stand: Union City I wanted to retain the feel and satisfaction from the previous games. The biggest difference between the previous games and this incarnation was immediately obvious, without the barrier between the zombies and the player, the player is always at risk. Even though the barrier was gone, things stayed much the same. The zombies now attacked the player directly rather than bashing at the wall, in effect the player became the new barrier. Same thing, different bucket in the end.
The combat only became a real issue when it came to blending it with the character levelling / progression. The formulas started getting a bit crazy in places as all of the following needed to be taken into account in some cases.
- Recoil (size of cursor)
- Weapon accuracy
- Precision attribute
- Luck attribute
- Weapon skill
- Stance
- Move state
- Jump state
All of those factors came into the equation of just the direction of the bullet. Past that it would calculate the damage and chance of missing with similarly complicated information. In the end I think I struck a decent balance between player skill and the numbers. My biggest fear was that I’d end up with something like Deus Ex (the original) where I felt like I was at the mercy of the numbers.
Grand plans. This best describes what I’d intended for the “world” of Union City. Early on I toyed with the idea of creating rooms dynamically and randomly through code, a lot of technical issues and the difficulty in making things look “right” put a stop to that. I also considered building an external editor to create the scenes with, that too ended up being more effort than it would have been worth.
In the end, I decided to create all of my environments internally within Flash. With the rooms /environments contained within MovieClips, I could quickly place and arrange scenes from a handful of props. It also allowed me to re-use props in different ways by scaling and tinting them to look like other objects.
Rooms were created from wall and floor pieces, with props such as windows, doors, containers placed over the top. That whole container was then converted to bitmap at runtime to make everything run smoother. For all of the searchable areas, doors, lights etc, I just used named movieclips. When creating the world, the engine just goes over everything in the scene, figures out what each object is and treats it accordingly.
