- Name: Brandon Eatfish
- Favourite food: Raw fish
- Weapon: Fish Bones
-
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Archives
Categories
Boss 01 : Brandon Eatfish
The enemies
We have been quiet over the past few months, well we have been busy partying during Christmas and New Year! We have also been busy making some big progress with Captain Skyro and things are looking promising. Here is a sneak peek of a frame from the intro:
You can see that we now have a bunch of baddies… and they will be in game bosses so that Captain Skyro can fight them!
There will be more entries about the art of each bosses, stay tuned.
Share a Coke with Skyro
With Coke’s new Summer campaign of can with names on them I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a free custom made ‘Skyro’ Coke can.
The custom cans are only allowed to have your name or your friend’s name on it. I was more than willing to claim Skyro was my friend from Mauritius!
A brilliant Skyro themed gift
A month or so back I received a surprise Skyro themed gift from Sionen.
The Skyro character was all hand made by Alexa, the owner of the Etsy shop “TheNerdsNest“.
Skyro Coverage
Just a quick round up of the various blogs that have helped seed the Captain Skyro trailer out there:
- Kotaku: (A pretty good show and tell feature)
- AppSpy (Some nice commentary on the game around 2:45)
- Tsumea
- PocketGamer
- Tapplayer (Unfortunately they cited the wrong dev team and platform!)
- Moblie.mobi (Repost of the AppSpy video)
- Appsjp (Japanese)
For those who haven’t seen the trailer yet, check it out here: Skyro Trailer
Video trailer
Ahoy! Happy International Talk Like a Pirate day!
To join in the celebration, we would like to share our little treasure by giving ye all a sneak peek first ever video preview of our mobile game, Captain Skyro. Arrrrr! Enjoy!
Aye! As you can see, this time round we’ve packed in all the features we wish we could have included in the first Skyro. We now have new graphics, greater movement and variation in the level design, enemies, treasure and level challenges to make this game a much more rounded production.
This is still work in progress but we are happy with the progress so far and couldn’t wait to share. Arrr and the Talk Like a Pirate day is a good excuse 
Why Dan inspires the artist
Here is the comparison of the graphics from Dan’s awesome “finger paintings” of the enemies for Captain Skyro. The so-called place holder graphics do the job of igniting the creative mind of the artist, especially when they move around smoothly driven by code which is an art by itself.
I can’t wait to see them move and attack in the game engine that we have running at the moment…
Why Dan isn’t the artist
Being involved in game design and even level design is one thing, but as most developers should know, there’s a large difference between being a game designer and being an artist.
The image below is some of my place-holder graphics, or as Brian likes to call them “finger paintings“.
I think I’ll stick to coding…
AIR for Android Blitting and Scaling
In the game-play of Skyro for the Android we have a ‘zoom out’ effect to give the player a better look of the world.
The Problem
In our first attempt to achieve this effect we scaled down the each sprite sheet before blitting to give the impression that the objects are further away. Unfortunately, this comes with some complications.
As the sprites are already bitmapData objects, the scaling of each sprite doesn’t produce a nice quality graphic, especially when we’ve turned off smoothing to keep frame rates up. The smooth curves become quite jagged.
The other obvious hit is the processing involved to scale every sprite object on screen. The scaling action caused a large frame drop as the view transitions from one zoom level to the next.
The solution:
Although it may seem counter intuitive, we tried storing a version of each sprite at each zoom level that’s necessary. It turned out that the processing power we saved far outweighed the added memory required.
Cheeky optimisation
If you’ve tried developing games using AIR for Android you’ll probably know that 80-90% of the time spent is for optimisation. With that in mind, here are some ‘cheeky’ techniques we’re using for optimising AIR for Android:
Changing Stage quality frequently:
So everyone has probably played with changing the stage quality for an AIR/ Android app. Maybe you’ve even considered lowering the stage quality for the game screen and keeping it high quality for the menus. We’re taking it one step further and changing the stage quality on the fly during game-play.