Qwertyuiopia

Candace and Joel’s Country Wedd’in is of course primarily an actual wedding, but then there’s the game.

The “32-bit-wedding” is a computer game that has been sent as an invitation for the wedding of Joel and Candace (who have asked me not to disclose their last names). It has been quite exciting working on this project for a number of reasons, like the fact that it was all manageable with a free software toolset, that the scale and requirements of the project made it just the kind of challenge I felt I could wrangle next and, last but not least, working with the couple (well, Candace was the mastermind behind it all, but Joel is the game’s star) has been really fun and gave the whole production a personal note, and a character-centered structure. So, without further ado:

The game is comprised of three cartoon sequences and two levels, one of which is side-scrolling and one fully three-dimensional, where Joel is sent by his spouse on a quest to find their engagement ring. It has been designed to be pretty straightforward, in order to not aggravate non-players, and also comes with an option to play itself. It runs on the blender 2.49b game engine (2.5 was a bit too young for production purposes when the project began), and all of its assets have been created with free software: namely inkscape, the gimp and makehuman.

For the two-dimensional artwork of the game, I have used inkscape and my graphics tablet, and the gimp for a bit of post-processing.

On the carets where we can see the characters’ faces, I’ve posterized the colors of some photos of the couple acting out the game’s story and used them as a base for the drawings. This was definitely one of the most fun parts, as I think this workflow preserved their expressions quite nicely and ended up fleshing out the characters to an extent that would be pretty hard to achieve if the characters had been imaginary and designed from scratch.

Yo Frankie! by the Apricot Open Game Project (and a number of publications and tutorials related to it) has been an amazing resource in structuring the game and gauging what was possible and what was not. It has also been very educational in terms of specific techniques in a variety of fields, ranging from modeling, texturing and animations to folder structure and asset management. Although I’m now much more confident in developing my own approaches, I’m sure there’s just as much stuff I can learn from it still.

On the game’s levels, most of the assets are original, except for a few such as the trees, the grass, the water and its special effects and a few tileable textures for rocks and dirt, that have been taken from Yo Frankie!.

The character’s model has been created with makehuman and then dressed and simplified quite a bit in blender for the game’s purposes. It has a walk cycle, a falling animation, and an idle cycle, which is about as simple as can be, action-wise. It also has a few different python modules that control input, actions and movement. I considered copying Frankie’s rigging, but concluded that it would had made the character much more demanding to build, as Frankie has tons of different animations (as required for a game of much bigger scope). Plus, I felt more comfortable having all of the character’s logic in python to begin with, instead of using blender’s logic bricks system and resorting to python only when things became too complex for it. This last thing is thankfully much easier to do from Blender 2.5 on.

“I bet this is some symbolic thing that’s happening and in the end, I’m going to learn a lesson!”

The voices were recorded by Joel and Candace, and this is definitely a part I found really fun, too. That is, drafting the initial script and then getting back the recording with a personal attitude added to it. The little post-processing that was needed (normalizing, denoising and trimming) has been done in audacity, by the way.

We picked the game’s music from Archive.org‘s collection of creative commons media (Grateful Dead, anyone?), which has a very nice selection of live bluegrass music (did I mention this is a country wedd’in?). The game includes live music by the Bluegrass Reflections (for whom I’ve found no place to link to) and the Southpaw Bluegrass Band.

The automatic playthrough works with a video texture, and recorded clips of the two levels. I can’t say I’m too happy with video textures in Blender 2.49b, but once again things are looking better in 2.5. The videos included are really small for filesize purposes (so play the game). The music, on the other hand, is in .wav, and that’s another grudge I have with the 2.49 game engine. Thankfully the game was distributed on CD.

Included in the downloadable file are binaries for linux (32 and 64 bit) and windows (32bit /works on 64bit systems). You can also build a binary for other systems blender 2.49b is compatible with (Mac OS X 10.2 and later, FreeBSD 6.2 i386, Irix 6.5 mips3 and Solaris 2.8 sparc) by opening 32bw.blend with blender and saving it “as Runtime” on that system. –By the way, if you do, I’d appreciate it if you sent me the binary so I can make it available here.

Overall, it’s been a fun and challenging project, and fun and challenging was exactly what I was looking for. There are tons of things I would do differently, and I could have taken just as much time to tweak it until I like it. There are parts of the code that I have no idea what I was thinking of when I wrote them, other stuff I’d rather throw out and rewrite, and the structuring of the game’s scripts is at best a fairly compromised attempt to circumvent blender’s logic brick system. And I do regret not adding a run action. It’s not about going fast; it is about the ability to press something and go faster! And if you fall through the ground, I’m oh so really sorry. I even thought I’d fixed it.

Also… wait for it… “No proprietary software has been used during the making of this game”. Well, except for some testing on windows. I find it really neat to be able to work with multimedia without touching the stuff. What a nice time to be in! See you in 2.5, blenderheads! I want to build something with some proper python classes where scene management will be done through the code. Oh, and a way to display a wiki in the blender game engine!

And of course, there could be no other ending to this post than to send my best wishes to Joel and Candace. Cheers, you guys!

Joel and Candace’s Country Wedd’in is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2011 at 7:44 and is filed under Creations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.