Photoshop does the trick...

I'm feeling more optimistic today. Just got 250 quid remitted to me as a wedding present, and I just watched the new "Hills Have Eyes" movie which was hachet-in-your-skull sweet.
Hell, let's skip video-games for a minute and let's talk about horror movies. If you're not into them, roll on down the page some.

Let me tell you, I am more than qualified to make a zombie-game due my Tarantino-esque obsessiveness for gore flicks. Here's a presentation of a few superb movies for you guys out there with *BitTorrent*...ahem....sorry I meant 'time to see'.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The new one. I loved this more than the original. Embedded in my brain is the memorable scene of one of the victims having his leg chainsawed from behind a washing sheet line, and Leatherface giving a hammer-sandwich to some guys head.
Most memorable scene: The prior mentioned hammer to the head. SMACK!

Dawn of the Dead
Both the old one and the new one are good flicks. The first one starts off at a fast pace, but wanes toward the end. It's actually in some ways more of a social commentary than a clear-cut horror movie. However, it is still superior to the second one, which is somewhat formulaic for the most part. Saying that, it's a great Friday night.
Most memorable scene:A zombie baby being born.

Hills Have Eyes
I haven't seen the first one so the only thing I know about it is that it starred the mongoloid guy from Weird Science.
This is a great movie. It's part of this new wave of gore-out, scare-packed horror movies that you just can't get enough of. This one goes that extra length to shock and has truly horrific and delicious moments.
Most memorable scene:Mum and daughter coming in to the trailer to save their daughter only to get blown away.

Jeepers Creepers 1 & 2
Whilst the second one is slightly better, the first one is still high viewing. The director has made good use of jarring imagery that sticks with you, such as;- two kids watching a body being dumped into a pipe, only to see the murderer/monster turn to notice them; the monster exposing his face to the kids on the bus as he 'scents' them (very nice moment), and the flying monster snatching a kid into the sky whilst being chased by the family. Excellent movies. Probably the ones responsible for this resurge in good-quality horror movies in recent years.
Most memorable scene:Ah..too many to mention

Imprint
Very rare 1 hour Takeshi Miike special, and one episode of an American show called 'Masters of Horror'. To be honest with ya, I thought the Ring and the Grudge were both shite. What's so scary about a teenage ghost-girl with hair issues? Nothing. I see she's even making her way into video-games, which sucks.
No, you could say I was skeptical about this offering, but how can you go wrong when a horror episode is taken-out of a horror series for being too grisly. I just had to have it. It wipes the floor with the other directors efforts (even f*&king Argento screwed his one up, twat). A stylish, unpredictable and ultimately sickening period piece, which I can do nothing but recommend. Though I have to admit I generally enjoy the simple Hollywood horrors more, Imprint is an hour of madness you will do well experiencing. One last thing to mention is the marvellous acting of the lead Billy Drago (Snow from that movie Vamp). This guy, with his gaunt features and demonic grin, was born to do horrors. So why isn't he in more? Come on directors, get him into some good flicks before he croaks!!
Most memorable scene:Kumomo getting tortured with pins to the fingernails. Yowch!

Silent Hill
Wow, a highly original paranormal horror. This doesn't aim to get you behind the couch as much as go for the long-term creep out. It does well in absorbing your attention for the entire runtime. People who have played the Silent Hill game will adore this. It is the best attempt of a faithful conversion of a game to the silver screen I have ever seen. It beautifully captures that mixture of mystery and the traces of ethereal sadness that the game expounded. Resident Evil was cack (how dare they fire Romero when they pawned his invention!!), House of The Dead was...ummm fuck House of the Dead. S.H. will probably remain the popular choice of the People-Who-Know-A-Good-Horror-From-Their-Arse crowd for a measure of time.
Most memorable scene:Without a doubt Pyramid-Head tearing a girls flesh off and chucking it at the door.


The Descent
Oh yes. I've left the best for last. Do yourself a favour and watch the others first because this one is the chocolate at the bottom of the Cornetto. You will benefit from that lingering taste that should be maximised. In comparison to the others mentioned here, I can only sum it up by quoting Lance as he talks to Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction "These are all real, real good shit, but this one is the the f*ckin madman". The Descent is absolutely terrifying. Believe me, I haven't reacted to a horror this way since Aliens. Everything in this movie is perfect. The cast, the music, the lighting, the residual fear of the whole situation. And it continues to scare you, again, and again, then when you've already shat yourself, one last time. Then finally, the ending is poetic, and yet deeply disturbing and memorable. Watching this movie is like going down the gym for all the constant heart-rate fluctuations you go through. Horror movie of the decade.
Most memorable scene:Can't spoil it for you. I'm not that cruel.

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Back to Video-Games

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm forced to make my death-scenes with some simpler animations. Truth be told, Snakeman's one is done now and it's not half-bad.

I'll post a pic today or tomorrow.

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Don't you just hate it when you spend a great deal of time on some element within a game, only to realise it'll never work?


I came to this conclusion the other night after irritatedly trying to piece together a decent animation.
After discovering that Flash could embed avi's and compress them into satisfyingly small files, I thought I might try to make some decent CGI for The Damned - some death-scenes for when you get killed by the bosses.
However, I got as far as a Snakeman animation with him pulling the main character out of the boat and down to the depths, when I suddenly realised something very important. It looked shit.

I don't have the skills in Max yet.

Bugger.

It was taking far too long, and for all the effort it still never looked anything better than what it was, a beginners effort to make something that looked pro.

Oh, it could have been great. Let your imaginations play on;

a) Snakeman biting the hero, and then dragging the paralysed meat down to the bottom of the lake.
b) A quiet EvilK scene where you see him tossing a blood-drenched burlock bag off a cliff, which opens to reveal all the hero's chainsawed body-parts inside.
c) Lucifer tearing out a chunk of hero neck. Then almost as soon as the hero has died he is raised to be undead, and follows Lucifer out of the scene.

It sucks, but what can you do?
For the time being I suppose I'll finish the death-scenes with simple animations alike to the one you can find in the game now. No wow factor with any of that crap.

So hey, if any 3d masters out there fancy getting their names on a game, (and maybe some cold hard cash IF it sells), how about you rustle up a few nice animations for me?

Pretty please????

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New Weapons

BEAT-EM-UP TUTORIALS

It seems like the beat-em up tutorials I wrote on GotoAndPlay() are gaining in their popularity or something because recently I've had quite a few folks out there sending me their own home-grown examples of their own fla files complete with a million bugs and a beg to save their game. I'll likely make a FAQ, because it's always the same problems that pop-up. Basically, too many people out there are trying to make SF2 before they can even make DragonNinja. Doh!
Because of the amount of requests, the tutorials updated with new improvements and better code are being linked on the blog today. I also felt guilty for using code on movie clips so that has also been corrected.
I'm a little unhappy with GotoAndPlay.it because despite having sent them a couple of tutorials (of which the originals were wiped from my pc that exploded), they haven't done anything about publishing them. Oh well, you will find the tutorials on the sidebar, and future tutorials on here or FlashKit, if they'll take them..?


THE DAMNED

Shotgun now available for the third level of The Damned.
I was considering only having the handgun for the entire game, but I figure every good zombie game has got to have a couple of chainsaws and a shotgun, so I went ahead and rendered me up some 3d models and voila!
Actually the code to operate switching between weapons have been finished already. However, I'm thinking the shotgun will be more of a special weapon that only lasts 10 seconds or so but does immense damage to the enemy, to keep the balance in the game.

Something else I have to do is some more death-scenes. There's only one at present, when you get killed by the water-zombies. So today, I shall be working on something for Snakeman, perhaps a little embedded video of our hero getting dragged to the depths of the lake, like that scene in Friday 13th.

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Blogger is behaving today.

Here are the other bosses that have been created so far;

EVILK



A pyscho based on LeatherFace who tries to carve you up with a chainsaw. EvilK is a shite name for a game boss, but leaves no mystery as to which flash coder authored the original game, in the case of E.Baum or another criminal stealing it and claiming property rights. The showdown with EvilK is 100% complete already, and I'm 98% happy with it. You fight him in a dark cave, and I've used an actionscript generated tint to colour him black so that you only see him when he comes running out of the shadows. It works suprisingly well, and has the desired effect of scaring the poo out of you on first sight. He also has a blood-curdling scream to go along with the ear-ripping chainsaw sounds. (Update 8/2010 'EvilK' became 'Project K' in 'THE INSANITY 1 & 2'

LUCIFER



Lucifer is a demon that was accidentally raised by a necromancer who foolishly believed he had will enough to master. Unfortunately for him, he raised a sovereign monster far beyond his control and was slaughtered. Lucifer is a quick boss that grows wings in his second stage of battle, and can also raise other creatures to his aid. He doesn't have any special weak points, unlike Snakeman or EvilK- you simply have to be nimble with the mouse to catch him under the crosshair.

Lucifer has been rendered but I've yet to get him into code. I figure after he's done I'll tweak the game up, see what the public thinks, and then maybe make a few more levels if it's popular.

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Apologies for a long absence..

No excuses, other than myself being lazy to update I'm afraid. Well, not exactly lazy- in fact pretty busy. Not with chasing hot babes and driving fast cars, worse luck, but with coding.
I ran into a coding problem with Nexus and decided to drop the project temporarily. I hit a brick wall and realised I don't have the programming know-how to deal with the ever fiddly tile-engine. Instead, I've been working on my first game, House of Splatter (now retitled with the less daft-sounding 'THE DAMNED').
And man, what was a tiny little shooter has now matured into a top-notch game. Who would have known it had such potential. In its current stage of completion it features new graphics, bolder death scenes, extra blood'n'gore, an intro page, and some perversly evil bosses:

SNAKEMAN





Snakeman is a creature kind of inspired by Jason from Friday 13th. He lives in the lake and protects his vulnerable tongue with a tempered steel mask. *HINT*

Go ahead and check out the first level of THE DAMNED on link section.


Sorry the rest will have to wait as Blogger isn't uploading pictures properly right now.


The bosses have some fairly predictable AI patterns, but won't be beaten by any lazy trigger fingers (saying that though, Snakeman is a bit too much of a wimp at present). You also have to time your reloads very carefully or you will get a game over - as a unique aspect of this game is that you have only one life.

I'm quite chuffed with the mileage I can get out of Poser these days. When I first got my hands on the program about 5 years ago, it was of little real use and just a way to waste an hour making two crappy looking-models kung-fu fight, or do 3d humping for a laugh.
Nowadays, it is much improved.
It's a bug-ridden application that crashes more often that not; a pile of cack compared to Max or any of the other big boys, but it certainly can do the job at times. Now that I've figured how to wrap textures around models correctly with UVMapper, deform them with magnets, and have mastered the Cloth room, Poser truly has become indespensible for making realistic keyframe animations. I recommend it to other newbs who are embarking on their journey into the world of 3d animation.

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Tile-Engine Rebirth

It's highly enjoyable remaking old classics of your childhood. but it sure is time-consuming. I'm embaressed to say how long it took to make some of the backgrounds alone. Today I got quite a lot done though.

Check out the Nexus link for some new updates.

You can press Q to punch, and if you're in the elevator room, you can see the doors open too when you press it. I haven't as yet implemented a proper elevator system as of yet(that's probably next) but if you tap Space bar it flips arrays and you can see the next level when you leave the screen.

CODING
First, I got around to rewriting the art/tile based hybrid engine. If you check the Nexus l*ink you can see the little beauty in action.
It wasn't much of a hurdle to code- in fact, I'll post the code here for the newbs.

tile_width=60;
tile_y=50;

myMap = [5, 4, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 0];

//myMap is the array for the background. The numbers refer to the corresponding movies. Ah, you'll get what I mean in a minute..It'll probably end up as a 2d array (to deal with levels) but I'm just keeping things simple for now.

myMiddleMap = [[0,10,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0],
[0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,2,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,1,0,3,0,0,1,1,1,0],
[0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,10,0]];

//myMiddleMap is a double-array that contains references to objects held in movies that combine to create the middle tile layer.

this.createEmptyMovieClip("background", this.getNextHighestDepth());

background.attachMovie("cavetile_" + myMap[current], "cave", background.getNextHighestDepth());

//In the library, my backgrounds are all named like "cavetile_1" "cavetile_10" etc, so all the above line does is check the myMap array to see which one is up, then attaches it to an empty movieclip called background.


for(var i=0;i < style="font-style: italic;">current is a referer to which screen you are actually in.
First we check to make sure the array reference isn't 0. If it is, that means there's nothing to plot, so we do nothing except go to the next tile, 60 pixels further to the right. If we do have a tile that needs to be placed, we give it a name "Midtile" with a number from 1-9. and we position it appropriately by setting its x co-ords to i*the set tile width.

Later on I make sure to replace 'cave' with the new backgrounds at screen change, and remove the previous one when it's out of view, along with all the tiles that are attached to it.

I quite like my little tile engine because it's fairly flexible. Though the mid-tiles have to retain a set width, their height is dependant upon you. Further more, since they're all movies, they can be animated and code put on them.

For example, an invisible wall tile is pretty easy to implement.
When the character runs, before incrementing or decrementing his x position, we check to see if a collision flag has been raised. If so, we disallow any changes. The collision flag check is performed within the tile movie itself. You run a hitTest to see if the _root.hero has collided with it, and if so it returns true and our character stops moving towards it. With most tile-engines, you have to check every frame for a collision, but because the code is inside the tile and not on the main program, it's that little bit faster as it only runs tests after it has been created.

I'm either really smart, or my code is pants and I'm just too dumb to recognise it.
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I was thinking about whos faces to use for the undercover agents. In the original, the faces were digitized and probably mates of the programmers, but I figure "Why not just go the whole hog?" and put my favourite actors in there instead. So look forward to seeing Christian Bale, Al Pacino, Di Caprio (haha, just kidding), Christopher Walken, and plenty of others make an appearance. I figure I'm never going to get sued since the game is being made basically just for my entertainment, and if any Ebaum or wherever steals it without my permission for their site then they'll likely be the ones getting the finger pointed at instead. Hell, I'd find it hilarious if I was a famous moviestar and some cheeky Brit used my face for a crappy game.

Well, it'll be a laugh getting to that, but first and foremost I need to get the levels working properly and a tracking system up and running. Did I mention I welcome volunteers? Sigh.This is going to take forever...

Labours of love.

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Bollucks. The worst thing that can happen to any programmer happened to me. I know, you're thinking "Your doctor told you you've got 6 months to live". Nope. Worse.

My laptop died. I know, shocking news. What makes it even worse is that it was smack-bang after I had just finished coding a sweet little tiling engine that worked exactly in the way I described in the below post. Oh man, it was so perfect. There I was, rubbing my hands in glee and self-congratulation, and was 5 seconds from saving when I knocked a bottle of wine over the soddin' keyboard. Instant frizz-out. I'm now writing from our new nifty 80 gigabyte 1.6 mhz Dynabook, so, some good things can come from bad.

Oh but Nexus. Shite. I lost all my Poser animation files. The actionscript. Everything I worked for. And none of it was backed-up because, hey, who ever imagines your PC is gonna fry? I mean, maybe your flash memory stick or CD drive but the whole thing. Let's just say I will learn from my mistakes. It takes the piss that I will now have to use a decompiler, and try to salvage whatever crap I can from it. I'm pretty hopeful I'll get the code back, but all the graphics...unlikely.

All for now, folks. Will update you tomorrow on the how's-it-goes.

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Nexus [2]

Didn't have time to fiddle around much with Nexus today. In the morning I noticed that I had forgotten to remove movies that were no longer visible to the player once another background movie swiped over it, so I fixed that. Then later on in the early morning I made a few more screens for the cave level. Trying to make sodium lamps in the walls was a bit of a bugger in Photoshop, but after dabbling with a million filters I finally got a result I was satisfied with.

You can check out the additions now - I've updated the link below.

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Nexus [1]

Working on Nexus kept me off the porn all day, much to my wifes delight. (not that she ever catches me anyway, *chuckle*)

TILE-ENGINE




Originally, I had decided I was going to use small 50x60 tiles for everything, but today I was going over it in my head and I thought "Well, hang on EvilKris, that could be a waste of time - since the screen isn't that big in dimensions anyway. Why not just use 1 big tile per screen - for the lions share of the background- and one simple row of tiles that runs along the middle of each screen for objects and doors."

That way, even if the main background on each level is fairly homogenous, I can just chuck in whatever 8 tiles I like sort of randomly and each screen will still look unique. I probably won't need to piss around with many 2d arrays or map editors as much.

Anyway, I designed a couple of screens of the cavern where you meet the first Nexus member in the original, and suprisingly, designing the main background tile-engine only took about an hour of my time (guess my coding's improved), complete with an RPG style screen swipe'n' all.






Simple is best eh?

Will update the flash file on this page in a week or so..

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