Saturday, April 20, 2019

Building the Rooms

The idea behind this episode of the game is that the player is dreaming that they are in a maze of rooms being chased by something. The rooms are connected in a non-linear fashion, but the rooms each have their own color. Thinking about this, all the rooms in the game will look the same except for their color. This means that all we have to do is create a single room and then duplicate it five times changing the colors in the duplicates! There, however, is an even better way of handling the creation of the rooms. Tinting!

To make tinting work the best, it is best to create the non-tinted image using gray-scale. I am going to keep the game in third person perspective so that we don't have all the work required to move an animated figure around. This means that the room needs to be drawn to look three dimensional. To better add to the three dimensional look, I created a tiled floor. This was done by drawing receding lines, then by drawing lines in the distance and angling them so that there is a larger distance between the closer points than the further points. Had I been really ambitious I could have created a far off point (a vanishing point) and having all the horizontal lines coming from that point. I then filled in the squares and finally removed the lines.

The ceiling I wanted to be stuccoed. This would have required a huge amount of work to accomplish using vectors, so I opted to use a texture for this image. The texture was generated in fireworks, but all high-end paint programs (and many low end ones as well) have texture creation support.

The three doors that are in the scene are actually all the same. I drew the far door and then used the distort command to alter the other two doors. While I could have been picky and tried to get the doors to look perfect, to keep the dream motif, I wanted the doors to be a bit distorted.



There are a number of ways of dealing with the room once you have the gray-scale done and want to apply tinting. This could be done within the program. Though tinting is a very costly operation, you would only have to do it once when you entered the room. Another option, which is the approach I took, is to create copies of the gray-scale image and individually tint those symbols. The advantage of doing this is you can get a bit better result from the tinting by tinting different parts of the room with different shades of the room color. The floors and ceiling were tinted a slightly different shade then the walls and doors, resulting in nicer looking rooms from the original flash version of this game.



Now that we have the rooms ready, we need to link them together which is what we will be doing next fortnight.

No comments: