Wednesday 12 December 2007

Procrastinative diversions

Whilst trying to avoid starting work on the pre-alpha Slipslide demo, I've been messing around with other things like art and music. The main theme to Slipslide 1 was reasonably good, but it was done with MIDI and therefore sounded horrendously fake. So I redid it with better instruments in Psycle (which I recommend you try, it's the best open-source music creator I know of). It's now sounding much better in my opinion, and it's far less repetitive as instead of playing the whole tune twice it now has a second section which it plays in between the two (plus I souped up the second instance of the main melody and added an ending). I'll probably post the tune here once it's completely finished, but for now you'll have to take my word for it - it's awesome.
I also did a little advert using the game's new official fonts (the names of which shall not yet be disclosed...):

Why is it using new fonts? Well, I generally prefer to use fonts that are very uncommon so that the games we make look unique. Unfortunately, recently I've been seeing the main font from Slipslide 1 (Curlz MT) all over the place - I even saw it used in a company's logo. I'd never noticed how well-used it was before I made the game as it's not very recognisable; but as I used it everywhere in Slipslide, by the time it was finished I could recognise Curlz MT from 50 miles away. And I have, many times. Therefore I decided that as the game's art style is being heavily improved I should change to a less tacky-looking font as well.
Oh, and the main character's sprite is now in production. It's probably going to take ages as I'm new to drawing on 24*24 pixel canvases; it's really nowhere near as easy as you might think it is. I found a really helpful tutorial on doing just that though.

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