My Creatures

June 27, 2008 at 6:55pm.
There are 2 comments.

I did download the Spore Creature Creator demo. No, I will not spend $10 on a demo. The free demo is just as good. I’ll save my $10 for the real game.

Anyway, I whipped up a couple of little creatures and figured why not share them with the world? They’re nothing all that special, but I think they’re each cool. So here are those magical PNG files you can just drag into the game to import them. I would love to see a read up from the developers on who thought of that and exactly how it all works.

 

 

I’m a Convert

June 19, 2008 at 10:37pm.
There are 2 comments.

I’m switching over! To FRAPS that is. A while back I had a discussion in IRC about screen capture and was told that FRAPS would give me a better video quality and let me easily record my game’s audio. Initially I was skeptical because I had already tried tons of screen capture software and was really happy with HyperCam. But then I tried FRAPS…

It’s really nice :). HyperCam is still far superior for tutorials and things because it’s more lightweight making it better for long videos. Not to mention FRAPS only works for games. But if you need to record some gameplay, better believe that FRAPS is a great way to capture your video and audio.

I then usually will take that output (a rather large AVI file) into VirtualDub with the Xvid Codec and shrink it down. Usually it turns a 500+MB video into a 20MB video. It’s that good.

Logo Contest!

May 01, 2008 at 12:04pm.
There are no comments.

I need a logo. And I suck at art. My programmer art makes other programmer art look like masterpieces worthy of gallery display. In light of that, I’m reaching out to you, my readers, for help. I need a logo made up. And I’m paying for it. $100 to the logo I choose to go with. (I know, real companies pay way more, but I’m broke so work with me).

The logo is for a company called ‘metacreature’. It’s going to be my game development studio I’m hoping to open up sometime in the not-too-distant future. I’m shooting to make mostly E-T rated games with the possibility of a M rating, so my target audience is more of the family gamer. Currently Mykre is helping me out with one idea, but I wanted to extend the offer to others as well.

I’m rather open to ideas. Mykre is working on one interesting idea for me. A second idea is a simple logo similar to this one. I like the simplicity of it and the separation of the text and image. A logo like that gives you flexibility to use just the image, just the text, or the whole thing. For a design like that, I’d like to see the text ‘[metacreature]’ (with or without brackets depending on how it looks) with some sort of creature outline or silhouette in the space above it. I’m looking more for a cute/friendly creature than a scary one so if you try to go with this idea, keep that in mind.

Or if you have another idea, feel free to give it a shot. Email any designs to me (nick@gravelyn.com) and make sure “Logo Design” is in the subject. I’ll give it a few weeks and if one comes in that I decide to use, that artist will get $100 for their work. In addition I’ll post up any submission that wants to with a link to the artist’s page so they can get a little exposure.

Good luck!

Castle Preview 3

April 29, 2008 at 6:41am.
There are 6 comments.

I’m making baby steps with Castle. Yesterday I tossed in some really stupid AI characters so I made a video showing how many I can spawn, shooting them with fireballs, and flipping gravity on them. One of these days I’ll make a video that’s actually cool, but for now these just help keep me motivated to work on the game.

Still thanks out to XNADevelopment.com for the sprites.

Censoring Praise?

April 12, 2008 at 1:07am.
There are 2 comments.

I recently got a Zune and as such got the Zune software. Part of that is the whole social aspect. You get a full page that shows what you’re listening to, your favorite artists, friends, etc. You can see mine here.

On that page you’ll see there’s this cool status bar that acts like the Facebook status or Twitter or something. However there are some things you aren’t allowed to put in there. So far I’ve found you cannot put “Microsoft” or “Zune” in your status. Hilariously I was trying to give Microsoft praise for how well all the Zune stuff worked, but apparently that’s not allowed.

Anyway, it is a really cool service and I like the way it’s built right in (unlike iTunes where I have to get some third party plugin to do it). If you’re into that whole “web 2.0″ “social networking” (I’m on a quotes kick) thing, you’ll want to check it out.

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