Yuckfu Dev Diary #6 – Flat Shading or Textures?

I spent the past few days to create the main graphics for my game. After lots of trail and error, I was quite happy with the flat shaded cave I had created (topmost picture). It did not look realistic in any way, but rather computer generated – which is, as I said earlier, probably not something everyone can enjoy. However, the flat shading worked really nice with the dynamic OpenGL lighting (quite a complicated topic of it’s own), which gives the whole scene some more atmosphere.

When yesterday a friend saw some screenshots of the game, he told me that it looked all well and nice and then asked a very innocent question: “How will you texture the background?” My response was of course “not at all” – I mean, it’s a flat shaded game, right? I turned out that he wasn’t the only one who thought that this flat shading was just an intermediate step towards the final look.

I was initially opposed to using textures at all, but after some discussing, I decided to give a shot. I unwrapped the whole scene in Wings3D and used Photoshop to slap some colors and textures on it. The second and third screenshot are the results. One with a more comical approach, the other with realistic textures. To be honest – after all this I’m not very satisfied with either one. I don’t even like the flat shading anymore.

Another friend asked me today, why the game is set in this cave in the first place. Wouldn’t it make more sense if you’d collect these boxes in some sort of space hangar? Well, yes… yes actually it would. I’m not sure why I didn’t loose a thought about the overall scenery at all. I just blindly took the very vague cave look from the original game without ever questioning it.

So, I guess I’ll start anew with the background graphics. At least I’m now quite comfortable with Wings3D. It’s a good thing I don’t have a publisher in my neck. Wish me luck!

Yuckfu Dev Diary #5 – OpenGL, Fonts and You

After my last post I read a bit more about displaying text with OpenGL. One of the more popular solutions is to have a single texture containing all (ASCII) characters of a font. As it turned out, there are several applications to build such a texture for you. Bitmap Font Builder is one of them. It looks a bit clunky, but gets the job done nicely – and it’s free!

Here’s a quick test I did with the Helvetica typeface. I exported the texture as a transparent PNG file, cropped it and added a simple drop shadow effect in Photoshop. For now, I only used the upper case letters. I’ll probably come back later and export the full set of Latin-1 characters.

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Yuckfu Dev Diary #4 – Gameplay

It’s been a while… I finished the basic gameplay mechanics of my iPhone version of YuckFu just a day after my last post, but hadn’t yet found the time to write about it. So here’s just a short update.

As you can see in the screenshot, the game still looks like crap. But that’s intentional (no really, it is). The main focus of YuckFu was always on the gameplay, so thats the first thing I wanted to finish. Just to make sure it works on the iPhone – and it does! A game with good graphics that is no fun to play isn’t worth anything. A game, however, that doesn’t look nice and shiny but is fun to play, is still a good game. Just to clarify: I’m aiming for both, but I’ll still need to tweak some values and let some friends test it before I move on to the graphics side.

And of course there’s on thing still missing: the score. Displaying text in OpenGL applications has always been somewhat tedious. I haven’t yet really looked if OSX provides some different solutions, but as far as I know there are only two viable options: Using a single texture with all glyphs in it (built in Photoshop or whatever), or loading a TrueType font and rendering each glyph into a texture. With both methods you’ll face the same problems: Each glyph has to be stored in memory – this is fine for ASCII characters, but can get challenging with UTF8 characters. So a scoreboard with names consisting of characters outside of ASCII is probably not going to happen for YuckFu. The other problem is the lack of support for “features” like kerning. Even displaying proportional fonts can be a pain. So, maybe I’ll just settle with a retro looking bitmap font – but not before I’ve checked if OSX does indeed have some magic way for solving these problems! Although they are not exactly on the OS side…