New Project!

I said I wanted to be more open in whatever I developed next, so it’s time to talk about my only-started-this-week project with no name. The idea behind it is that it will be a platform game that teaches music theory. The main control mechanism will be an on-screen musical keyboard on the iPad, and when you play notes and chords in the right key, the character will run, jump and attack. Not at all sure how that will all work yet. This week I made a start on the artwork – as artistic ability is my primary limiting factor, for me it makes sense to start there, although it does defy conventional wisdom. I’ve decided to use Blender to create all of the assets in 3D – the rest of this post explains why, and shows you how I’ve created the cartoon look so far.

Why make 2D looking characters in 3D?

My initial thought was that I could do all the art for this project using vector art in Illustrator. I’m definitely no artist, so I knew this was going to be a challenge, but I’m always up for expanding my skill-set and decided I’d give it a go. Here’s what I came up with initially:

He looks ok I think, and I got some good feedback from people on Twitter. So my next step was to put him in some kind of action pose, but I didn’t get very far! I found that keeping proportions, and getting a good pose was pretty hard. But for this project I was going to need tons of sprites to animate the character walking, running, jumping, attacking, getting hurt, dying… In Flying Cats Game I did about six frames of animation per cat, and that was a tedious process. I’m guessing there must be easier ways to create 2D animations than creating duplicates and moving bezier points around, but it was at this point I decided I’d go down a route I’ve been contemplating for a while, and launched Blender.

I’ve done a tiny bit of 3D animation in Blender before, and I kind of know about rigging and animation. Plus, one day I plan on making games in 3D, so it makes sense to improve my skills in that area. The plan is to animate the character in 3D with a static camera and render the frames for each animation so that they can be combined on a sprite-sheet and brought into the game; a technique pioneered by Rare on Donkey Kong Country, back in the days when you needed a massively expensive Silicon Graphics workstation to do this kind of stuff. Thankfully technology has moved on somewhat.

I’ll blog more about exactly how to go about doing this with Blender and cocos2d at some other point – as it stands I haven’t got that far yet myself. My initial problem was in keeping a two tone cartoon look that I’d created in Illustrator when rendered in Blender. The eventual look of the game that I’m aiming for is something akin to Wind Waker, but as I said it will implemented in 2D, which I imagine will make it infinitely easier than what Nintendo achieved with that game.

Technique

Before I’d finished the model, I started experimenting with rendering. The obvious place to start was with Blender’s Toon shader models for diffuse and specular material properties. I’m going to assume some basic understanding of Blender, but hopefully you should be able to follow along even if you’re a beginner. I’m using Blender 2.56, which has a much friendlier interface than pervious versions. It might still be in beta, but I’d recommend using it unless you have a strong reason to stick to the stable version.

You can follow along in this five minute video tutorial (sorry the sound is peaking a bit):

I’d love to hear your feedback on the project idea and the tutorial – please get in touch!