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!

So there’s been some problems with the animation tool from the start. Something to do with the initial keyframe, it was basically requiring all the art to be unkeyframed (so everything at 100% Scale, 100% Opacity, etc.) on the first frame so that it has something to interpolate between from the first frame and the second frame (where the settings for the art would be 0% Opacities and weird Scales, etc.). We’ve been duct-taping around the problem and it was working for the most part, but we got it narrowed down to one impossible bug where if we didn’t show the first frame, it couldn’t interpolate, but if we showed the first frame, you get all the art blinking on-screen for a split second.

All the iPad animation files are fixed! I start with the iPad files, then scale the animations down to the iPhone 3′s screen and the iPhone 4′s retina screen, but we’re working on the iPhone 3 version first so I have to scale it down before we’ll know if the new changes will work out. Our custom animation tool allows us to add commands to the animation timeline, so when the animation reaches the end I can tack on a “gotoAnim:2″ to change animations or loop, or a “stopAnim” to freeze it on the frame, etc. We use this for checkDamage to run the function that detects if objects are colliding or not.

Still working on the iPhone-scaled animations. It’s kind of a pain because some of them convert nicely, but some of them I have to go in and tweak a bunch of Scales and Positions by hand. One day I’d like to have an animation tool where I can just go “convert animation from iPad to iPhone” and have it automatically do everything haha Maybe after this project I’ll look into that. For this game, however, slow and steady wins the race!

Today I’ve got a video of the new art actually in-game on the iPhone! I wish I had a better way of recording it besides using another iPhone but hey, you can see what’s going on haha The throwing-stars are just automatically deflecting right now to test the animation out. I’m digging how the parallax scrolling came out but we’ll probably have to tweak some speeds down the road. The animation tool has been fixed so the rain is falling vertically like it’s supposed to versus the last video where it was raining sideways haha:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JQmoHN34Bo8

Next up is redoing the HUD. No idea what I’m going to do with it exactly, I’m kind of winging it haha I want to have something that’ll be consistent throughout the HUD, menus, loading screens, etc. And, of course, it’s gotta’ have a bunch of stuff that glows!

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Revamping the HUD is going to be a pain in the butt. I don’t really have any ideas yet, so I’m just throwing down a ton of random stuff and messing around. The final HUD may not look anything like the mockups below, but I always think back to my college Graphic Design classes where for each assignment the first step was fill up like 4 giant pages of paper with thumbnail sketch ideas trying anything and everything…then you take some of those and develop them further until you end up with something you dig. So this is the first slap-down of ideas:

Bulletproof Outlaws Diary