New Screen Resolution Test

Trying new screen resolutions before I start finalising UI. As I have not created myself a little UI tool to help with offsets and the like, I do not want to have to rework UI if I fancy a screen resolution change.

Old size 480 x 270

New size 320 x 180

Gameplay

So. Where am I? I need to start to think about what sort of gameplay is required. How will it play. What type of game is it ? Comically, I've still no idea at the moment. I think a few experiments and gameplay mock-ups will allow me to see what's fun and what isn't.

Blowing stuff up is always fun, but in a cycling game? Why not ? Need to have a think.

Farm Scribbles

Vehicles Update

I've decided that the vehicles will have more visual appeal if they are drawn from a three quarter view. These still look ok when simply moving left or right across. It simply adds a bit of depth to the sprites and scene, making the whole thing look a bit more solid. Obviously the campervan sprite seen below is still only going to be used parked up on a mountain side somewhere.

New Cafe

There is a new website called Patisserie Cyclisme which combines cycling and the even more important cafes and cakes. The site already features many cafe reviews, and even allows you to upload your own cafe review, thus providing an ever growing database of cycling friendly cafes. This is a great idea.

This inspired me to create the cafe for real in the game :) I've therefore updated my buildings tile-set to include a new cafe called "Patisserie Cyclisme".

The Patisserie Cyclisme logo was used with permission from the owners.

Video : First Look

Managed to capture a video using CamStudio. This experiment proves I really need to look at different compression/codecs as it looks more than a little shoddy. Forgive the framerate issues; they are in the video not the game. Honest :)

Rural Scene

Been working mainly on the French countryside. I've created a distant rural landscape background that scrolls and creates a nice sensation of depth.

The other focus was creating telegraph poles and wires to string along the roads. Initially the wires were black, but they created harsh aliasing issues due to the black pixels being so large on screen.

I needed to fade the wires thus giving the impression they are thinner than they actually are, and creating a form of anti-aliasing (as the background can be seen through the wires). I could have created a separate sprite for the wires and rendered those sprites to screen using an alpha value, but I wanted to create the poles and wires together as a single sprite to make placement along the route easier.

I used the function:

sprite_set_alpha_from_sprite(telegraph_spr,telegraph_mask)

Here, telegraph_spr is the main source sprite for the telegraph pole and wires and telegraph_mask is the alpha mask.

telegraph_spr

telegraph_mask

The other trick was to create a single sprite that could be placed along the route, to represent a long sequence of poles and wires. You may notice that in the sprite, the two poles are identical. This is so that when the sprites are placed down, the start and end poles can be overlapped thus creating an unbroken line of poles and wires.

Rainbow Stripes

I've extended the weather system to include a rainbow. This fades in and appears immediately after a downpour for a brief spell. Those odd colour choices represent the rainbow stripes of a World Champion. But I guess you already knew that.

Weather System

As every cyclist knows, not every ride is under beautiful blue skies. I therefore felt it necessary to create a simple weather system.  Whilst it's in the test-bed, the weather system simply cycles between sunny and stormy over a set period. I've written the system so that it can be triggered at any point in time, or at any point on the stage. For instance, you might want the rain to come in after the first mountain climb.

The weather system currently consists of 2 layers of fog (blended in over time) and a particle system for the raindrops.

There is a fog layer between the clouds layer and landscape. This is only used to darken the clouds as the storm rolls in. There is another (more subtle) fog layer over the entire screen. This is used to create a mist layer to 'grey out' the scene.

The raindrops fall and create splash effects upon hitting a surface (eg. rooftops and roads). It's tricky to make out the splash effect from the screenshot, but looks good moving. I have also created a simple lightning effect triggering a full screen 'white-out'.

It is intended that the weather system will affect gameplay; examples could be rider fatigue, puncture frequency, tyre choice etc

Sunny:

Stormy:

Stone Bridge

I've created a little stone bridge from tiles. Again, the bridge is made from two layers of tiles, creating a 'foreground' and 'background' element allowing the cyclist to appear to be riding between those layers. The system that I use to define a path for the cyclists allows me to easily add the hump for the bridge. It looks great when the peloton rides over it.

I might experiment with using rivers or waterfalls as natural breaks in the scenery. This might get around the problem of how to blend urban to rural and make it look convincing.

Tidy Bush

Ok. I now think I'm getting somewhere with the rural countryside. A simple bush sprite has created a nice backdrop and make the terrain tiles appear more 'random'.

I think I now need to start focusing on the more urban areas. I think the biggest issue I can see is how to go about creating the transition tiles between rural areas and urban areas.

The Birds

Small details here, but I've added a new instance for a bird. The instance (initially on the ground) gets triggered after a proximity check with the rider. This allows the birds to take flight once the rider gets near giving a nice bit of interaction with the environment.

Windmill

I had a bit of a late night so I could tinker with the game. I'm still focusing on the environment, and I wanted to create more movement as it feels very dead at the moment. The cliche windmill. Very simple to program. Each instance of the windmill has a random rotation speed for the blades so no two are the same.

Cobbles

I have now got different surface types in the game. This was important so that I can have tarmac sections followed by sections on cobbles. Those into cycling will understand the relevance of this. At the moment there is simply a collision check to see what surface type each rider is on, which then sets a variable. At the moment, this variable is only used to create the particle effects for the dust seen in the screen-shots. However in the future, this variable can also be tied into the game engine affecting stamina, comfort etc for each rider in turn.

Watermark

I have created a simple watermark, which will appear in the bottom right of screen-shots from this point onwards. I think there's nothing more frustrating than discovering a screenshot on the web and not knowing where it came from.

Mountain top Chalet

More work done on the housing last night. This time a mountain top Chalet. "Afro-boy takes to the descent with hair-a-wobbling".

That's just reminded me, all riders will have a flapping/wobbling animation triggered on the descents. I tried it without, and it was clear it just didn't feel thrilling enough.

Mountain Backdrop

Created a snowy mountain backdrop for the mountain stages. Also started on small details such as signposts and armco safety barrier as can be seen here. In this shot we have 3 layers. The clouds in the background, the mountains in the middle-ground and the road in the foreground. All move at different speeds, giving a nice parallax effect.

Finish Kite Animation

Another simple 6-frame animation. I remember seeing the energy sponsor "E.ON" on a kite once at the Tour of Britain. Thought I'd play with that idea and swap for "FIN". Not entirely sure why it's moving in the wind so much, as the rest of the game has no wind effects. Balls. I may have to re-look at it, but again for now it'll do. Actually quite pleased with how it turned out.

Waterfall Animation

I created this simple 8-frame animation in Photoshop. I'm still not happy with it (the top water surface for example has noticeable frame jumping), but it will go in for now, and I may revisit it at some point.

Mountain Pass Screenshot

So after a late night session on the environment tile-set last night, here is a screenshot to show how the visuals are progressing. I never had any clear vision for how this game was going to look. I wanted it to very dynamic in the way it progressed and evolved. It's nice not to be constrained to time scales, briefs and schedules. I am doing this for fun remember.