“Elderly Platforming”

I’ve already mentioned that for this project I will be using Matt Thorson’s Grandma Engine for Game Maker, to give the game code a head-start. I’ve listed some of the advantages to working this way below.

Character Sprite Testing
The engine provides a default character sprite, which is a 16x16px red square. This can be swapped for any sprite of any size, although in my case I don’t need to make too many changes to the sprite size! All movement codes and physics are pre-determined, which presents a great opportunity to test character sprites and animations etc. without having to provide basic code before hand. I don’t currently have any sprite animations ready enough for testing, but I swapped the red square with my Hana sprite in order to get a feel for size and proportions. You may notice in the video that I’ve edited the sprite slightly again, because I felt that the sprite’s colour scheme should match the scheme used by the flowers more closely. I don’t know if this will stick yet.

Physics Testing
The grandma engine has cleverly listed all physics-defining code as one list of custom variables, which can be easily changed by anyone who isn’t familiar with GML or game coding. This is useful for defining your own game-specific physics, and can be swiftly changed and tested in the Grandma Engine before being applied elsewhere!
From playing around with the default settings, I think it’s fair to say that the movement is perhaps a little too fast and the jump distance probably unnecessarily high. This is good for initially experimenting with the engine, but I will eventually slow everything down a little.

Level Design Testing
The engine comes with essential default level design assets, in the form of blocks and slopes which join together to make the platforms of platform games! As well as the standard solid blocks which prevent the player from an infinite drop, the engine provides jump-through platforms, which the player can access by jumping up from underneath but will not drop back through. This is useful for a range of platform types, and something I regret not using in previous developments. I placed flowers around the preset level build to get a sense of how the size of the flowers felt in comparison to the block sizes, and to my surprise they don’t look bad at 16×16. This may all change when the blocks become actual tiles.

Extra Functions Test
There are a couple of nice but unnecessary things that the Grandma Engine provides for you. Things like an optional double jump, which can be turned on and off easily. A more useful function is a warp square, which transports the character from the square to a specific location in any room in any part of the game. This is useful for doors between rooms, rather than using the default scroll room transition.

Exploring Colour

It’s been a difficult task trying to figure out the exact shade of a typical Cherry Blossom, because there just isn’t one. I’ve had to come to the conclusion that most shades of pink work.

I picked this close-up photo (believe it or not it’s from an old myspace layout!) to be my official blossom reference. I can’t guarantee its authenticity, but it does show a promising contrast in colour from its very pale pastel tips to its desaturated centre. And the colours aren’t affected by any other sources, such as vibrant lights or contrasting backgrounds. I found a really great site called Color Explorer which rips colours straight from images and creates a colour palette for you, complete with RGB values. Here’s what it made of this photo:

It’s just as I was hoping really, you’ve almost got a completely smooth gradient from light to dark, without too many anomalous colours in between! I won’t need all of these colours for one very low-res flower, but the full colour palette can now be used for anything to create some consistency. I haven’t put much thought into my User Interface yet, but I would assume this would be a good application of this particular palette!

I made myself a little colour card to reference the flower colours, from the dark centre to the light petals. For each colour, I picked a slightly darker shade and a slightly lighter shade to act as shadows and highlights:

This is the result when applied to a 16×16 Cherry Blossom:

The shape of the flower was fairly difficult to apply to such a small image, however I’ve tried to give the impression of some depth as the original flower is far from 2D. Obviously at this stage, the flower is roughly the same size as the character, throwing away any hope of proportion! The flower object will work at half this size, although a lot of the detail is lost.

The size I use will have to depend on which looks better in the game. The flowers needs to be conspicuous enough to stand out as collectable objects, but subtle enough to add an aspect of challenge. As it’s an important part of the game, I don’t think its colossal size will seem out of place, but aesthetics may prove otherwise.

To make the game a little less samey, I’ve been considering varying shapes and shades of flowers. This example is a very “standard” flower, with no irregularities. I was particular inspired to do a little palette-swapping by this image, which I included in my previous mood board:

This photo shows the Sakura Blossom in a completely different light (I’m being serious, no pun intended!) Color Explorer mainly picked out shades of blue from this example of the same flower (although it could be argued that this image had a lot more background influence…)

I especially like the silhouette in this image, which is kind of recognised as the official shape of the flower. It inspired me to recreate it in simplified vector form in Illustrator, which may well be transformed into a game asset later.

Sakura Mood Board

It’s not a real mood board, but this was easier than cutting and sticking! These are some of my favourite Google image search results from the keywords Sakura Blossom (Japanese name for Cherry Blossom.) The results are interesting because, although you’d generally associate the blossoms with the colour pink, the shades seem to vary infinitely throughout every image. This could partly be down to varying camera settings, but at times they are definitely represented as a very pale, fragile mass against a blue sky, and other times they are shown as a vibrant, luscious blossom.

The main point of this selection of images is to get a feel for the colour schemes of the flowers. They seem to have a huge impact on the areas around them, as if they emit their own colours against any background. I especially like the high contrast between the trees and the blue sky, although I similarly like the combination of browns and traditional Japanese reds.

In Hanami, I will probably be using tree sprites as background imagery, but most importantly, I must create a flower object which is collectable by the player!