March Update - Ho ho ho, Green Giant!

Don't sweat it if you don't get the title, just means you didn't watch enough American commercials in the 90's. 

My Game:
There's 3 stages of poison severity in my game.  You'd have to try really hard to get past the first stage in the current release, but most of the basic mechanics for all three are there.  There's a section in Act 3 where the 2nd & 3rd poison levels are much more likely to occur.  I wanted a more visual cue to help distinguish between the three.  So I've been playing with adding a green tint to the hero's skin.  As you might imagine, this had some comical results until I got it right:

Supposed to be poisoned, instead she came out kinda hot.  Well, if you're into green chics anyway.  haha.  Anyway, after an afternoon of mucking around, I realized two very important things.  Crankin the green up gives ya bright green skin (like above).  If you want a darker/sickly green color, you really want a green in the middle of the spectrum. 

The other thing is that you don't so much want to amp the green.  What you want is to mute the other colors.  Muting blue seems to be more important than muting red BTW, although I'm not quite clear why.  I'm still using my preschool knowledge, which says blue + yellow should get me green, but here I already have green.... bah, whatever.  Anyway, tone down red a little & tone down blue a lot & you get some really nice dark greens.  Probably obvious to anyone who's looked at a RGB color palate, but the obvious isn't always so obvious when you're working.  heh.


When I left off last month I said I'd be working on drawing backgrounds.  All true, and making progress there too.  Backgrounds aren't terribly exciting imo, but here's a sample of one of them:

I've got most of the trees & grass built, so from this point making the backgrounds should just be a matter of plopping down vegetation until I'm happy.  The water's not so great though.  Probably needs more than just a single solid color.  Simple gradients aren't cutting it though, and I don't want to add much more detail.  I want to keep the backgrounds simple - especially for something that you can barely see.  So I dunno, something for me to play with some more.


Around the Interwebs:
Okay, there really wan't much to catch my attention last month, so going to talk about something slightly different.  One of my fantasies is quitting my day job to do this full time.  Don't get too excited about that, it really is just a fantasy to me.  I actually kinda like my day job.  Anyway, a more realistic dream might be to get good enough at making games to make it a second source of income.  Might even motivate me to work on my games on a regular basis.  ha!

I'm not much on setting up stores, begging for sales, and I downright detest DRM.  So the idea of selling finished games has always been a no-go for me.  But recently there's been this new push from sites like Kickstarter.  If for some reason you haven't heard of Kickstarter, the idea is you pitch your games when they're still ideas or demos.  If folks like it, they donate a few bucks.  Mutiply this by every bored person on the web, and you have the potential for a fully funded game.  I think it's a fascinating idea, although not without it's own set of flaws mind you.

In my case, the biggest flaw is that Kickstarter prohibits adult content.  Naturally, there's another site out there to specifically fill that gap.  That one's named Offbeatr, and seems to offer what any aspiring adult game maker would need.  So I started browsing though the details.  I have to say it looks really sketchy from the artist side.  Because it's adult content, many companies won't touch them.  So they're having to do a lot of work-arounds to make payments happen.  And they're passing that charge on to the artist.  They get a 25% cut (vs. 5% for Kickstarter), and all the payments get processed through some 3rd party Paypal knockoff I'd never heard of.  I supsect it's all above board, but man, it sure raises a bunch of warning flags.

Anyway, not looking to make that plunge anytime soon.  Don't worry, I'm not going to suddenly put LotTO up on a donation site & beg for funding.  I might cite it as an example of what I can do however, which means I need to get back to work.  hah!

DirtyC101