Jeff Hangartner – Revealing the Path Less Travelled in Video Game Industry

Jeff HangartnerJeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.

CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.

You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.

Bulletproof Outlaws - A Diary of a video game studio!

Now that the background is taken care of I can move on to the foreground stuff: The rooftop and the tree. The original roof was done really quickly in Flash… I basically drew one column of bamboo and used the Skew tool to angle it a bunch of times to make some ghetto perspective. This, obviously, won’t do for the final art. I figured this’d be quicker to make in 3d than by hand because I can just make one column of bamboo, cut and paste it to the sides, and the perspective will be handled accurately for me.

Ya, so I actually decided to Google Image Search for Japanese rooftops. Turns out they don’t look ANYTHING AT ALL LIKE I THOUGHT haha I considered sticking with the bamboo columns thing because 1) I’m lazy, 2) I figure no one will notice or care, and 3) It’s dooooone damnit, I don’t want to start over from scratch!! But I just KNOW someone reviewing it will go “the roof is inaccurate! 1 STAR!!!” and I’ll cry. So I started over from scratch, modelling a roof that’s much closer to what an actual Japanese rooftop looks like.

The roof is coming together! I’m messing with the lighting and colors a lot. I don’t know if I want to keep the middle highlight like it is, or keep the shadow contrast so high because it might compete with other stuff…but at the same time, a darker area toward the sides/bottom will make the glows on the thrown objects stand out a lot more awesomely haha Going to have to mess with the colors a lot…I’m going to rip the colors and shades directly off the new background houses to keep the color scheme consistent.

Got the lighting and extra stuff done for the rooftop. I’m totally happy with how it’s come out and I’m psyched to see it actually in-game. I added a bunch of glows to the tiles and the ninja in this image has a reflection because I wanted to see how it’d look…once the rain effects are in there it’ll make sense that he has a reflection haha This took a lot more work than I was originally planning, but I’m digging the end result. Got to scale the art down to the different phone sizes to see how it looks. Next up I gotta’ revamp the tree, but I don’t think I’ll do too much to it, just add more to the leafy part and some glows, because I want to keep it looking cel-shaded.

Bulletproof Outlaws - TreeThis was a pretty quick revamp. I just had to add more leafy-stuff to the tree top, add a bit more to the trunk on the left side, and then make everything glowy to match the rest of the glowy background stuff. I have a feeling I’m going to need to thin the outline around the tree a bit because as I revamped the background I was using pretty thin lines and I want the tree to blend in right.

Bulletproof Outlaws Diary