Be sure to check out the new Resistor review by XBLA & XBLIG Ratings Top 50 Reviewer joebal.
Also, Resistor has been submitted to the IndieCade International Festival for Independent Games to be held in Los Angeles from October 3 through 6.
With Resistor now on the XBox Live Indie Marketplace, I decided to start a new project. I created the design a few weeks ago of a game where the player defeats enemies by shooting them in binary code.
Tonight I brushed up on my Blender skills, since I want to use rendered models for the game. For now, I still plan on it being a 2D game using sprites, but I’ll use rendered sprites instead of a making the graphics with a sprite editor.
The Wikibooks site has a really great tutorial for creating a simple model, which I worked through a long time ago. It was helpful to do this again, especially since the last version of Blender I used was before 2.5.
In a small amount of time, I was able to create a simple humanoid figure.
Now I’m getting into new territory with bones. I’ve tried moving models before in previous games without using bones, but it was a huge headache and didn’t look very good. After working through the one page tutorial on Wikibooks, my model was moving with the bones pretty well.
I used Blender to render three models for the attract screens. I decided to drop the first screen, so there are three total screens which display for 5 seconds each before the title screen is displayed.
I used my existing image of the B.A.N.G. logo as a guide to create the first model. I rotated the camera slightly on the Z axis to give it more of a 3D appearance. Then I rendered the image and exported it to a PNG file. Eventually, I plan to use the actual model in the game. I created a new background image in Gimp, using Script-Fu Lava as the background. Using Colorize and Brightness-Contrast, I made the background image a light green color. Then I pasted the rendered model image into a new layer, and entered the text on another layer. Creating the raised text effect is sort of a pain. First I entered the text in black. Then I used the color chooser to select the text, and then I copy and paste the selection into a new layer. With the new text still selected in the new layer, I fill the selection with the light green color. Finally, I slightly move the new text selection up and to the left 2 pixels. I may end up rendering the text in real time using the ResistorKit drawRaisedString method, but it’s much easier to place the text in Gimp than placing it programmatically.
For the mass-to-binary converter screen, I just used a cylinder and extruded two wider cylinders on the top and bottom. Also, I removed all the vertices in the inner cylinder to give it an open appearance. I also placed a light green light source in the inner cylinder.
For the final digital world screen, I am just using a Blender ico-sphere with a texture mapped to it. The texture is a bunch of 1’s and 0’s on a green background. The wrapping didn’t turn out exactly right, so that’s something I will probably want to fix later.
