Cream City Media @creamcitymedia - Tumblr Blog

The Rebels #1: WiFi

What have those rascally rebels gotten up to this time?

#animation #scifi #unity #rebels #kratom #snivelly

Toot Witches Dev Blog #2

Okay, I’m gonna import some sprite assets into Unity. Let’s do it together!

We’ll start in Adobe Animate CC, that’s the only piece of software I have to do 2D animation. I prefer ToonBoom, but I don’t own a license for it, so we’ll be using Animate CC for this example.

Here’s the project for the witches eating their beans. I’ll use this animation for the main menu page. In my library I have copied the frames and pasted them into their own Movie Clip. It’s called “Witches_Eating.” I right click on that...

OOh look! Animate has a handy way of exporting frames of movie clips directly into a sprite sheet! That’s actually pretty handy.

Make sure you set the transparency in the settings. PNG or GIF will allow transparency, but I prefer PNG since it is of higher visual quality typically. I added a 5px padding to the edges and between the frames for no reason really. I also find that the “Image dimensions” setting can be left at Auto. It does a pretty good job. EXPORT!

Whoa! We’ve jumped into Unity now, and also onto a Mac laptop. It’s complicated. Anyway, right/Ctrl click and import that asset y’all!!!

There is it! IMPORT!

I like keeping my structure nice and neat, so I’ll create a folder for my sprite sheets.

SO CREATIVE! But honestly, do not be creative in the naming of your folder structure. Many years ago I would be cute and name things stupidly, like “Henry” was a folder of images or something. Trust me, when you go back after months of not working on that project, suddenly all the Henrys and Junes and Herman Melvilles are not helpful.

Select the sheet and choose “Multiple” from the drop-down menu called “sprite mode.” Obviously if it was just one big sprite, you would leave it as single. Don’t do that here.

Don’t do what Danny Don’t does, click APPLY before you jump into the Sprite Editor. Or else...

Click APPLY now, like a shamefaced buffoon. Then it will open the Sprite Editor.

And here we are in the Sprite Editor. You will spend a fair amount of time in here if you’re making a 2D game. The most important element is by far the slice button on the top left. Let’s go there now, shall we?

Here we are, having clicked merrily upon the slice button. It’s dropped us down a lovely little menu with options. For these purposes, because I didn’t author the sprite sheet myself but lazily allowed Adobe Animate to generate one for me, I will leave the Type as Automatic. It will create potential headaches for me later, but those headaches will most likely be unavoidable and small anyway, so it’s okay.

The pivot is where you want your sprites to spin around and move and such. These will be doing very little moving so I will leave it in the center, arbitrarily.

SLICE! Then click Apply and you can close the Sprite Editor.

And now when we clock on the lil’ arrow (thus opening up our sprite sheet) you can see it’s chopped them up nicely into individual sprites.

Next time I’ll be creating the main menu with these sprites and some background elements I will create in Animate, so maintain that illustrated feel.

Thanks!

#game dev #dev journal #toot witches #halloween #adobe animate #unity3d #sprite importing #sprite exporting #sprites #cartoon games #silly games #game development #one month game challenge

Toot Witches Dev Blog #1

I’m working on finishing the game Toot Witches by the end of the month! I’ll be posting updates here showing off my progress :)

So, what is Toot Witches?

The game was inspired by an evening in which my wife and I were especially...well...flatulent. It was October and Halloween was on our minds. I said I felt like a toot witch and thus the concept was born.

Mabel, Hazel and Grizelda are three little witches who take to the skies in search of lightning bugs, the primary source of their magical powers. You see, it’s a general misconception that witches fly by magical means. Though they may be able to turn people into frogs and commune with nature, the mechanic by which they achieve lift is less...fantastical.

You see, toot witches love beans. In truth, the humble bean is their favorite food. The consumption of these fibrous legumes gives the toot witches their famed ability to fly by providing powerful gastrointestinal thrust. Add a broom for maneuvering and voila! The power of flight!

In the game, it’s All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) and the toot witches are gearing up to collect this year’s collection of lightning bugs. By the light of the full moon they will soar far above the Earth, collecting fireflies, eating beans and casting magic spells to ward off would-be menaces, such as silly bats.

Help them achieve their goal, get a high score and see what secrets lie in store!

#witches #halloween #game #endless #cartoons #toots #flatulence #beans #hazel #mabel #grizelda #creamcitymedia #dev blog #development #dev journal

In honor of the day, I finally ported my Android Game, Pączki Day, to the web! it may or may not work on your mobile browser, depending on WebGL support.

Have Fun! --Click ME to Play--

#paczki day #paczki #cream city media #creamcitymedia #eat a paczki #paczek is the singular #paczki is the plural #its pronounced pontchkee #ogonek the eagle #web game #webgl

Ursula K. LeGuin

I’m still trying to process my reaction to her passing. She is my favorite author, but that doesn’t nearly encapsulate just how much her work means to me.

Her work on gender, sexuality, relationships, anarchism, non-violence, authority, identity and truth all helped shape me as a person. Better than any author I’ve ever read, she used the safety of science fiction and fantasy to study our societies and our constructs—to hold a lens up to our deepest held beliefs and our very human nature and imagine how different we might be if our circumstances were changed.

Her science fiction stories touched and changed me the most. The worlds and cultures she created are so rich and full and alive, and so fascinating in their historicity and truth. They’re not real, any of them—but they are so much more believable than most alien worlds or fantastic lands for their heart.

She populated the Ekumen with a host of planets and peoples that each shone a light on what makes us tick and what tears us apart. She was difficult to read at times, but the emotional effort it took to finish some of her books was always worthwhile, as it always meant a discovery of the self in the end.

Looking back on my small but cherished collection of LeGuin novels and collections, a few stand out as having made an easily traceable mark in my personal development:

The Left Hand of Darkness taught me so much about pride, social register, mores, folkways and of course the gender construct.

City of Illusions forced me to question fact and fiction while warning that the grandest lie is often more believable than any truth, and how dangerous that is.

The Eye of the Heron showed me violence and force pitted against passivity and peace, and made me ask who the victor was in that conflict.

Of all her books, none altered me more than The Dispossessed. It rocked my foundation so fundamentally, it felt like my protective chrysalis had cracked and a new, fragile me had emerged into a strange and terrible reality. If you haven’t read it, I can’t encourage you strongly enough to do so.

And that, maybe, is one of her greatest strengths—anyone can love her books. Whether or not the reader is a professed fan of sci-fi or fantasy, they can connect with her words. Yes, she employs magic and high technology and weird aliens and strange planets, but it’s all a beautiful framework, lovingly wrought to serve a purpose.

I argue that by crafting alien worlds and fantastic situations, she tells stories that are more human, more real, more important than even the most highly lauded literary fiction.

I’m so lucky and grateful that my mother introduced me to her so many years ago, and I’m so sad that she’s gone, but her voice will never fade away so long as there are her books in the world.