Hanson's Half-A-Page

Diz

2011-07-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

My blog is home to projects old and new, so here's one from the vaults.

It was 1999. As part of my second year university course work I made a few little games. The first was "The Hypergalactic Adventures Of Diz", a gravity based platform game. It looked a bit like this...

The design wasn't bad and the pixel popped artwork was ok considering I hadn't done any pixel popping since my teenage Amiga-Deluxe Paint days. More importantly, it was my first go at any kind of programming and I'd definitely bitten off more than I expected to be able to chew. As you can imagine, the controls were very ropey but to my own surprise, I actually got the game finished.

---

Fast forward a few years to 2005, I was between jobs and in need of a project. I decided to have a bash at redesigning the Diz character in 3D. I'd never really got to grips with 3D software and it was distinctly lacking in the courses available back in my day so I saw this as an opportunity to improve. While I was at it, I honed my skills with regards to programming controls.

After a couple of drafts of the game, I'd pretty much made a quite faithful reboot of it, opting for the simpler title of just "Diz". The same three planets were each seperated into almost the same three-levels-and-a-huge-boss formula, making for a twelve level game in total. Although my modelling skills weren't all that, I didn't let it stop me from blasting out some basic rendered 3D assets of varying quality. To my satisfaction, I actually made a generally well balanced game.

Perhaps the most out there thing I did was to ramp up the difficulty, speeding up the pace and removing the continue screen which meant that the player had only 3 lives to complete the whole game! But I feel that this is where a lot of the replay value is. It's hard!! ...but but the controls are now slick enough that with enough practice you can just about get through to the game's ending sequence.

Amongst other improvements, I took out the clock, added original music, sound, etc and generally smoothed out transitions and animation sequences. This version is missing a few details: An in-game loading bar at the beginning, a company logo, a few bits of graphics here and there that I meant to put in but never got around to adding. I probably will one day, but for now here's the fully playable ...and maybe slightly buggy remake of Diz.

Enjoy...

PLAY DIZ

m

Bugaboo The Flea - Part 4

2011-06-09T23:28:00.000-07:00

Hello,

So, my little Bugaboo game is all but done now. Here's a few screen shots of what I've added since we last chatted...

I've added an intro in which, in a nutshell, a spaceship arrives at a new planet on a terraforming mission. A flea jumps off the ship's dog, goes exploring, bumps his head and falls down a hole. That's where you come in...

I've also added an ending in which..... well, you'll just have to find out what happens for yourself. I'll be showing no spoilers here.

All that's missing now is sound and music. While I've got most of the audio cues set up, doing sound effects and music properly means setting up my old computer. It might take me some time to get around to that, so it's just going to have to wait while I do a spot of project-hopping.

In the meantime, asside from a bit of tidying up here and there, the rest of the game is pretty much ready. Here's the link.

http://www.hansoncreative.co.uk/shockwave/bugaboo.htm

enjoy.
m

Bugaboo The Flea - Part 3

2011-05-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Hello.

For those of you who've been keeping up, here's an update on my little homage to the classic 8 Bit game "Bugaboo the Flea".
So far I've been throwing levels into the game and with a few tweaks here and there they've worked. In this update I've added a little art to the collision maps...

On top of that I've added some more baddies to the later levels. The yellow bird is now joined my the blue bird and in the later levels, the pink bird. With a bit of planning and a soupson of luck, you won't run into them.

If you do, however, make sure you've picked up my little power-up. The armour is signified by the little robo-helmet and will give you one shot at barrelling straight through your assailants. Just try not to bounce them out of the way only to come down on top of them without your armour. That's happened to me a few times.

There's a few points to be had in bouncing birds around and once you've used your armour it'll randomly spawn somewhere else in the level. The real points are in the coins scattered throughout each level. There's ten per cave. Try to pick them up as you progress. It makes completing levels tougher but adds a heck of a bonus to your score.

And that's pretty much it for this version. Next time I'll tidy up the glitches, add an intro, an ending, some proper sound, etc, but there's almost a whole game here. Hope you enjoy the updates and keep me informed with any crippling bugs you run into, generally what you think, etc via the blog, facebook, twitter, email or whatever tickles your fancy.

http://www.hansoncreative.co.uk/shockwave/bugaboo.htm

enjoy

m

Bugaboo The Flea - Part 2

2011-04-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I decided this project would benefit from a little structural work, so with that in mind I added levels! A total of ten to be exact! They're in the design phase at the mo, so it's mostly just green collision detection to start with, but occasionally I've thrown in some art just to see how it might look.

There's still plenty of glitches to put up with and loads of placeholder material that doesn't really work as it should yet, but it'll give you an idea of what new directions this little remake-homage, whatever you wanna call it is sprouting off in.

Next up, I'll be adding some actual artistic detail to the levels. I won't be going nuts on it though. I'd still like to have a bit of spare time with my family. Along with that I'll do a scoring system too, and some pickups to compliment it.

To answer a request I've had, I might even add a little something to even the odds against that pesky dino-bird... though don't be surprized if he enenlists the help of some friends in the later levels.

Once that's all done, I'll do the game a proper ending (I hate those old games with no ending) and maybe a little intro too. Who knows, I might even have another attempt at some savedata!!

Without further ado, here's the link...

http://www.hansoncreative.co.uk/shockwave/bugaboo.htm

Hope you're enjoying the game as it progresses. See you next time for a possible update...

m

Bugaboo the Flea - 01

2011-03-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

A little something I drummed up this week end...

I wanted to have a go at this for ages. Bugaboo was a game I played a bit when I was lil' and over everything else, I loved its originality. It had a boss little character too. Here's a shot from the original.

Mine was a little different. My scrolling is smoother as I'm not device-limited, though this demanded a few revisions in how I did things regarding controls and design. I threw together a front end and a level, complete with all the basic requirements set out in the original Speccy version. Here's a few shots of it in action...

Rather than bore you with the particulars of how I coded and drew this one, (it's all pretty simple stuff really. In a nutshell, I used Director and Photoshop, grabbing the sounds from the original for now), I'll leave the proof of the pudding to the eating.

So, imagine this with a few more levels, original sound fx, maybe music, slightly better art, etc. Let me know what you think.

Here's the game. happy playing...

http://www.hansoncreative.co.uk/shockwave/bugaboo.htm

m

Sled on A Track - 3DS Max Test 01

2011-02-18T13:11:00.000-08:00

Here's my first go at putting together a racing track for a futuristic sled to fly around... you know, the sort of thing you might see on Wipeout.

It's very early days yet and this represents about an evening's work.

Starting with a quick top down design on paper, I flicked through a few basic tutorials in lofting a cross section around a spline and came up with the basic shape for a track.

Then I threw in the key building shapes, again, from the top down design, and populated the rest of the scene with basic building shapes and billboards intended to be textured with a few more further away features later.

I made the sled (currently just a mis-shapen box) follow a dummy, which in turn followed the spline over about 700 frames, then I had a target camera follow the sled.

Don't ask me the particulars of this one. I was learning as I went and it hasn't fuly gone in yet. Suffice to say that I expect the next attempt at a scene like this to be a little better. Stay tuned...

I composed the music in this movie last summer for the Astraware game "Jetpack Jack". You can play the game if you have a Samsung Bada phone.

Enjoy the movie...
m

A Damn Good Kicking - Part 02

2011-01-19T13:11:00.001-08:00

Now my laptop is back in working order, here's my progress on my little beat em up (that I'll clearly never finish)...

As I said in part 1, I tried to get all my favourite beat-em-ups in. Here's the newly added punch-on-the-floor move that finishes off a floored enemy. This one came straight from the Renegade games... the first two Renegade games, that is. The third one was sh*t!

As the baddies take more damage, they become bloodied and bashed. A little touch which almost triples the ammount of sprites in the game, but will hopefully be well worth it for adding a bit of charm.

Got the blood glitches fixed. watch those lovely splatters fly... quite a lot of it sticks around in the background too, painting the scenery with a healthy red glow. Growing up in the city, I saw my fair share of street scuffles and blood on the pavement. This was always frustratingly missing from the classic Beat-em-ups. When I played the admittedly amateur "Franko" on the Amiga, I loved the addition of blood and gore which suggested that little extra love had gone into its production. I had to have a go at adding it here, however painstaking.

Yep, basically, there's currently loads of colour variants on the same bloke with a few additional variants in attack speed, movement speed, energy, etc. Once the first of any baddie type is in, it takes about two four hour sessions to get another in from his base code. Then there's another hour or so of making the baddies aware of each others presence for falling into each other and making the game keep a count of how many baddies are up and fighting. Once they're all classed as dead, the scroll kicks in and the player moves on. The trick here is keeping dead baddies overlapping from the previous area on the screen for a nice debris effect, which means not repeating the same baddie type in the next area, which means having plenty of alternate baddies to use.

As I produce more and more baddies I'll be populating the screens with them. At the moment it's all a bit easy as the player doesn't die, and these first baddies are a bit slow to attack. As more of them are done, I'm hoping to get quite big waves of them coming at the player like in Final Fight, as opposed to the extremely complex faking of AI when they dance around you looking for an open space to stand in. I think the control system for DGK should nicely accomodate plenty of baddies coming at you at once with one or two more intelligent ones hanging around to get their digs in on the sly.

So there's a few ideas of how I'm hoping it pans out in the long run. I started this game in 2004, that's why the graphics are a little old school. I'd just done a load of GBA and I wasn't really paying attention to the art I scribbled for this. Just making it up as I went along. This revival of interest in it is really just a rehash of the original idea. Eventually, I'll update all the art and do a lovely big soundtrack. I've got plenty of big ideas for it, but I'm sure very little of them will actually be realised.

Anyway, enjoy this early version of the game. Every time I post for this I'll try to update the upload of the game itself so if you're reading this as an old post it might not bear much resemblence to the screenshots here.

Here's the link: http://www.hansoncreative.co.uk/shockwave/dgk.htm

Have fun...
m

A Damn Good Kicking - Part One

2010-11-27T03:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a first little look into a game I've been making in director and may never finish. Still, it's pretty good so far...

Unfortunately, my cat flipped my laptop off the table and now it's broke!
So until I find the expendable income to get it fixed, I'm afraid you're stuck with screenshots from an out of date rough and buggy version of the game from a few weeks ago...

I'm trying to get all of the best bits of my favourite Beat-Em-Ups into this, and as the more observant of you will notice, I've got a little bit of Streets of Rage into the attacks so far.

In later versions I'm going to iron out the glitches in the blood letting system and add a load more moves, though this little project will be on hold until I get the laptop fixed.

Hope you enjoyed the screenshots in the meantime. Next time I bring this one up, if I think it's worth it, I might give you a link to play it...

m

Charlie Walk

2010-10-13T01:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a little animation test I did...

In a nutshell, the animation consists of 2 photos. One of my dog, Charlie, and one of a bit of the wall and floor in our hall. The idea was to make a quick animation which showed a bit of charlie as we see him. Trundling about like he owns the place with a naughty little tune on loop in his head.

The animation was created from the photos in Photoshop and in 3DS MAx for the animation, by first cutting the Charlie photo into pieces (head, body, legs and tail), then re-assembling him on flat planes in Max...

Each body part was accompanied by an opacity map for the transparency and each of the 3D planes were pivoted in the right place then parented to the body, to which I added a walk-bob movement.

he legs were animated in time to the walk-bob, then the head and tail were given a bit of a delay in order to give them a sense of weight. As I was pushed for time I couldn't do much more than that, but I knew that on a work to time balance, this would be enough to sell the animation to the viewer.

I then added a shadow to help ground charlie to the floor and moved the background to a loop which matched up with a few of loops of the walk so that the whole thing could be looped indefinitely if required.

As I didn't have access to a particularly sophisticated edit suite (I was limited to Movie Maker here), I wasn't able to tweak the speed of the animation or music to match perfectly. This would have allowed for an infinite loop of the anim and the music. I did, however, guess the length of the track well enough for it to run quite nicely once through.

The whole thing took about an hour to cut out in photoshop then rig and animate in Max with about twenty minutes of editing and tweaking in Movie maker.

Hope you enjoy the Charlie Walk anim.

Ford Mustang

2010-09-03T00:28:00.000-07:00

I've just had a go at modelling my first proper car in Max. For my first go, I fancied making a muscle car with plenty of big, obvious details, so I chose a very american Mustang.

First I got hold of a blueprint. This is kind of essential if you want any kind of consistency with an existing car. Even if you make up a car it would probably help to draw it out first. Finding blueprints on the net is easy. Laying them out in a helpful manner is too if you know how. I followed a rubbish tutorial to lay them out like this. I later discovered that a much better way is in billboard format. I'll be doing that in future...

Starting with basic shapes I began to simply follow the blueprints and build up the shape of the car, front end first. I used various photographs of the car to figure out the bits that weren't properly explained by the blueprints.

As I progressed, I started to realise that there are a lot of variants on the basic chassis and my reference material had drawn from more than one type, so I decided that this first attempt would be BASED on a mustang rather than any specific sub-model. I suppose that would be a handy way of getting around any rights issues in a game too.

I kept the early model to just one side. As cars are pretty much symetrical you can flip a copy later. I also placed in markers for the wheels. A can of worms I decided I'd open later.
Once the basics were in place, I looked for the parts that needed detail the most. I Identified those as the front and the back. It's probably worth pointing out at this point that as the car was for no particular project and no poly-count restraints were placed on it, I decided to use the MeshSmooth on the car when it was complete. This meant that throughout the process I would have to regularly switch on and off the MeshSmooth modifier and regularly check on the integrity of the model's edges.
Using reference images to help me get the car to feel right, (I think blueprints alone can feel a bit lacking in character and are hard to get at with all that model in front of them), I put in the basic shapes of the lights, grills, reflectors, badges, etc.

Exhausts pipes, wheel bullets, trims, etc came next. I was surprised with how these were relatively basic shapes. The area which seems to make cars a little easier is in the readily available primitive shapes for moulding the various parts. When modeling something more organic, like a person, I find you have to take into account and model in the subtleties of the anatomy, the way in which the limbs bend, finer facial and muscle detail, etc. With cars, there's a lot less of this.

I was tempted to leave the inside of the car off and simply throw in darkened windows. While I did darken the windows, I decided not to shirk the task of placing some basic detail inside the vehicle which might show up from certain angles.

Last but not least, I modelled in the lights. These are one of those areas which your eye picks up as a bit of a mess when you're looking at them on real cars. I decided to visually disect the lights in a few of my reference photos and make a general representation of what I saw there. Accuracy was not the most important factor here. Just basic believeability.

As the lights involved a lot of transparency, this was a good time to start refining the textures a little. Innitially, I'd just coloured the models themselves while I made the shapes. Now I put a bit more work into them, using a combination of standard textures with bump maps in the case of tyres, reflectors, etc, and architectural maps for things like paintwork, plastic, etc, within a MultisubObject.

Finally, I threw a few lights on the scene and called it a day.

The lessons learned were:

1. Start with a billboard blueprint, not a box one. This will keep all the images along the centre of the model making modelling much easier.

2. Start as low-poly as possible. Adding too many polys to the innitial primitives makes modelling much more difficult than it has to be and can cause problems when building for a MeshSmooth.

While the reflective qualities of the textures in the image at the top of this blog sesh don't really show off anything more than the car's own mirror reflecting on the car's bonnet, my intention is to create something of a garage/showroom at some point, to place all my attempts at car models into. Hopefully, the reflective properties of the texture will become a bit more apparent when it is surrounded with other cars and general set dressing.

Hope you've enjoyed this sesh. See you next time.

Overweight Superhero - Hi Poly Character Model

2010-07-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

This next character was intended to be rendered for a 2d game. I was given a brief for his look and worked in 3DS Max from that. (The images interspersed through today's blog will be more about the modelling process than the problems I had animating the model, which the blog also goes into).

He was created from primitives in a low poly model with the intention of using the MeshSmooth operation on him to soften him up later. To that end, I put extra visible edges where the folds of his clothes were to happen, supported by visible edges crossing them. It helps to think of those as struts of a sort. If they stay visible they'll hold up. I also seperated the model into its respective texture IDs so that I could keep track of these from the start. Though the character, being a cartoon was only to use plain colour for the textures, letting the lighting do most of the work, I still felt it good practice to keep organised so that the colours could be dragged straight into the multi sub-object.

The game didn't happen but I continued to develop the character to find out what would happen if I went ahead and animated him. I modeled and boned up a cape. Not particularly well, admittedly, but it was early days, then I moved into the final touches of rigging the biped.

After tightening up the biped's envelopes I was suspicious that my more-than-adequate computer was feeling the weight of the hi-poly character... I had a go at animating him anyway.

...I was right. It seemed that just getting him into a starting stance was extremely
troublesome. The machine regularly hung up for 5 or 10 seconds per click while it worked out the logistics of the hi-poly mesh! not the way to work when animating.

Had the project been still active I would simply have reversed up to the low poly phase of the model, (an early lesson in 3D is to keep plenty of progress back-ups) recreating the biped there, producing all of the animations on the low poly version, then perfoming the mesh smooth as the very last step.

In order to successfully animate a character you really do need a fluid animation tool with a nice high framerate. Nothing spoils smooth movement like a juddery machine. I might very well go back and sort him out with animations later, making a new biped over the low poly model, doing his animations, then MeshSmoothing for the render. As it is, there's more important projects to tend to.

The lesson learned... If you're animating a rendered, hi-poly character, MeshSmooth comes last - AFTER the animations!!

My New Website! It's NEW!!

2010-06-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

I had this website...

It was for my portfolio. I'd hand-coded it in html, and as I'm not a natural programmer, I thought I'd done a particularly sterling job of it. It contained EVERYTHING I could get hold of that I'd done in the last ten years or so. It was a record of every little thought and creative whim that had passed through my head in that time. It was an online extension of my very self!

.....It was rubbish!!

Turns out, I'd been so determined that it was great and that all the art on it was in some way relevant for my career path that I'd had the blinkers on all along. After a few home truths from my nearest and dearest followed by a hypothetical 40 troubled days in the website-wilderness, I decided to get over myself and do it properly. There were two problems.

Problem 1. There was so much stuff to wade through. Well, easily solved. I had to get rid of the vast majority. This heart-rending culling was made somewhat easier when I promised myself that one day I'll start a blog and occasionally I'll find a place for that Zombie movie I directed in 1998, for that CD my band made in 2001, for that Batman picture I drew on the bus last Sunday.
(You've probably gathered that I've started a blog, and yes, No doubt I'll find occasion to throw up the odd golden oldie here once in a while).

Problem 2. I wasn't playing to my strengths. Hand coding in html?? What was I thinking?! Everything I typed was coming from my first ideas of html and I learned those in the nineties!!

I decided that as an artist, I'd build the whole thing in Photoshop layers and let Dreamweaver do the rest. Much better... See?

...But to be honest, these tiny little garbled screenshots don't do it justice. I think this time it's really actually quite good, so ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you my new portfolio website...

www.hansoncreative.co.uk

m

The Rogue - A Platform Game Tech Demo.

2010-05-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

I was playing on my Spectrum emulator and got the urge to have another go at making a 2D platform game. This time I created a collision map, seperate to the background image, then built the background around that. This was a trick I learned doing GBA games a few years ago, though back then I was just dealing with the art side of things, it was a voyage into the relatively unknown, but guess what... It worked.

I thought that to start with I'd try a remake of the classic Speccy game, Kings Keep. By the next evening, I had produced a fairly faithful and playable version of the game's first room, the Oubliette.

As I was in the mood for experimenting I decided to have a go at something of my own design. Using the code I'd written for collision and character movement, with a few tweaks here and there, I was able to produce the beginnings of my own enormous platform game, working title: "The Rogue". Here are some shots of it in production and in action...

As usual, it was about this point I realised there's no commercial value in making this a full Shockwave or .exe game. I might eventually do something with it, but for now I thought I'd just stick it here for posterity.

...And there's my first page of blogginess. Again, let me know if I'm doing it wrong.

Hello World.

2010-05-31T02:53:00.000-07:00

Hi. I'm Mike Hanson. I produce artork for video games, currently for iPhone, iPad and other mobile formats. Sometimes I make music for them, and occasionally I even try my hand at programming... though most wouldn't call making games in Director Lingo particularly relevant. Still, I might share some of it here with you. We'll see, eh.

So, I'll be having a go at blogging...

I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet but if I produce anything I consider to be worth sharing I'll blog it here. I'll link this blog to my portfolio website too. That seems like as good a place to start as any.

Do tell me if I'm doing it worng.
m