I’ve taken the 26 minute long video I previously recorded and condensed everything down to just a minute and a half.
Tag Archives: Video
Let’s Play Hanami
This video shows a complete run-through of the game, and every item collected. Details are explained with game dialogue style commentary on the way.
While the game is currently in a state where it can be played from beginning to end, it’s not necessarily a finished piece. You will notice a couple of glitches and problems, including:
at 10:33: The man who could walk through walls…
But didn’t get too far. I’m still unsure as to the cause of this problem. The character object is used in all of the first three levels, but only encounters this problem here. I’ve put plenty of measures in place to stop the problem from happening, but haven’t found the solution yet. If I can’t work it out before next week, then I will try to relocate the character and hope that this solves everything.
at 14:24: Some fairly poor level design.
The solution to this problem is to take away some of the walls and ceiling to simply provide the player with enough room to actually jump into the space, without loosing a whole lot of health along the way.
at 23:13: A positioning problem
Probably related to bad maths or bad coding. The kokeshi doll should appear in the centre of the screen like every other item when it is collected, but I may have accidentally programmed it to appear above the player. This just doesn’t look right at all, but is an easy problem to fix.
at 24:49: A score positioning problem
Again, not entirely sure about the cause of this problem. When the new game+ begins, the score shifts slightly to the left. You can hardly see it above the blossom icon, but it’s there. It slyly moves back to its proper place when the inventory is opened, it seems. Not sure how I’m going to solve this one.
Please leave comments/suggestions on anything else you notice, and I will fix everything up for a beta release.
Estimated Time Remaining:
One week.
It took a few practice runs to get a get a good play-through video of Hanami, but I’ve got a pretty decent run to show. It took me 26 minutes to play from beginning to end, and the original compressed file size was 45GB! Even at this size, the capture lacked a lot of pixelated sharpness, and the smoothness of the light gradients. However, recording an uncompressed file was completely out of the question. I’ve reduced the file size to just 376MB, and the quality is more or less unchanged.
To accompany the video, I’ve worked out a subtitle system to provide a running commentary of my thoughts whilst watching the video back. This commentary contains technical info, inspiration and a few pointless facts about the game that pretty much sum up its development. The subtitles take the form of a typical JRPG dialogue. I’ve drawn several self-portraits of myself pulling various facial expressions to sit next to the subtitle text box:
These portraits sit in the bottom left corner of the video, as this seems to be the place where there is least important content. Text is then written in the box to the right of the portrait.
I’ve used the typewriter animation preset in After Effects to make the text scroll in letter by letter, as it tends to do in video game dialogue. This makes it easier and quicker to read than a huge block of text that appears all at once. I’ve added each portrait image to the video’s timeline individually, and used the opacity settings to define which image is shown at which point in the video.
The actual text is contained in just a few rows on the timeline. I downloaded a script which allows you to import large chunks of text into After Effects and break it up into single lines based on where the line has been dropped. This expression goes in the source text parameter of the text layer:
type = text.sourceText;
m = thisLayer.marker.nearestKey(time);
sentences = type.split(“\r”);
n = m.index;
if (time =sentences.length){n=sentences.length-1}if (n<1){n=1}
line = sentences[n];line
You can find details on how it works here. Layer markers act as keyframes to switch between each line. I’ve then set and reset the typewriter start value to type in each line.
I’ve currently added about 15 minutes of commentary, with an appropriate facial expression for each line.
Hanami Devlog 