The NEW Style

The new style of the Pretend is based on the art style of John Bauer. John Bauer is a storybook artist from the early 20th century whose art is based in trolls and overall norse mythology. Its awesome:

The mood and Autumn-afternoon lighting is what I feel would give this game a nice, fantasy look.

A Revival

This is the Revival of the Pretend Project. This revival is going to take on  a new artist direction and level design. This will be a much more percise and orderly project than before and we will be updating more frequently than before. Currently the team members are Tessa Liddington and myself so ww will be finding people along the way to help us in this journey of....VIDEOGAMTRY.

Handed Over to the Arts

Now that most of the mechanics are working in Pretend, I've handed the game and all of it's files to my friend and team member, Osei, for some art direction.

With my other projects in motion, this particular one has been placed on the back-burner of my priorities list.  I leave it to him for now to make the world of Pretend a beautiful one!  Thanks, Osei!

How Do Artists Do It?

I must say, making Pretend pretty is quite a chore.  Because I'm a programmer, all of the animations are going to be two or three key frames for now.  I'll find someone to inbetween them or actually redo them entirely (because you know my digital art skill sets aren't quite there yet).

Err... that's a Nerf gun.

This is my sorry piece of work for the first idle frame for the boy.  Even though I've got a wacom tablet, I still suck at this sort of thing.  They're just too small to make brush strokes pretty!

The Alpha test that is currently posted will be the last Alpha test.  The next version to be released will be the first of the Beta tests.

Testing in Mobile

So we're almost ready to actually making it look pretty!  I've got the PC controls and mobile controls working, a lot of bugs pertaining to winning the game still remain, but the mechanics have been hashed through and are decent enough to enjoy the game.

 

A screen shot of the Pretend being tested in Device Central.

The mobile controls obviously won't be available for testing here, only the PC controls will be published.  But as you can see in the image above, there are two "input zones" as I've been calling them.  The zone on the left is always jump (except it goes inactive when you become the bird) while the right adapts to be the special move (also becomes inactive when you become the bird).  To move forward and backward, you tilt the phone in that direction.

For what it's worth, I was super proud in getting the accelerometer working properly!

It's a Mobile Game?

Why yes, yes it is!  Pretend will become a mobile game for the iOS in about two weeks when I finish up the new controls, but I'll be having this game available to be played on my personal iPhone at the Portfolio Review on September 13th, 2012.

After the new controls are made available (there will still be the testing versions for the PC here), I'll be fixing the collision issues.  I've known what they were for a while, I just need to find the time to getting them.  Lots of projects!  Also, the issue with the back buttons were solved.

Apparently the movie clips on the main timeline didn't like having simple buttons in them.  All is well though, I solved the issue by turning the simple buttons into movie clips and then just programmed the hover states myself.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything pretty to show just yet.  Come back in a week or two, I may have something updated then!

[Resolved] Hosting Issues.

While relaxing on vacation, I made the astonishing discovery that my computer has nothing fun to do on it.  It has all of the necessary programs to do my work, but nothing fun to play.  Not a single game.  So I played around on designing some graphically pleasing images for the main menu (if the main character is a six year old kid, I'm sure I can draw like one).

So my point is that I've got alpha version 1.7 available, but my website host is having issues and I cannot upload any new files.  So you and I will just have to wait to play the new version.  Sorry everyone!  Here's an enticing picture, instead!

I enjoy the font very much.

Update

I talked with a customer service representative today regarding my hosting issue.  The issue is actually unrelated to the hosting service.  Something must have bugged when my desktop updated to the most recent version of Java.  My laptop, a school computer, and the representative all had no trouble accessing the account.

To solve the problem, I downloaded an FTP program to avoid working with Java applications and successfully uploaded alpha version 1.7 to my server.  There's new bugs in my menus now, but ... LOOK AT THE PRETTY BIRDY!