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.

Back to working on the game’s art! I’m probably 3/4 of the way done the in-game art, and then I’ll just have to do the title/menu art. I figure by the end of the week I should be done the in-game art and I can contact some programmers and get some estimates. Hopefully I can get them started next week, then a couple weeks of dev/testing time and I can submit to Apple. I still have a lot to do, but it’s all small managable tasks. And considering I’m juggling all the side stuff (marketing, E-Mail, Twitter, blog updates with videos/charts, going to my weekly business class, etc.) I’d say I’m doing pretty decent! It feels like it’s been WAY longer than 22 days to me haha

Here’s another example of optimization. I had a 21 frame throwing star originally, plus a glow effect for each frame, which was for one full loop of the star turning. Once I grabbed those frames from Flash, I went through them to see where I could optimize. Logically in the case of a throwing-star you have 5 points that rotate in a 360, but since the star is all symmetrical, there should be frames that look similar. Turns out as the first point rotates to where the second point started, I can just loop it right there.

BAM! 21 frames down to 4, zapping 17 frames. Multiply it all by 2 for the normal frame and glow frame and that’s 8 frames instead of 42. A star is 6k, and a glow is 40k, so total art size for the star went from 966k down to 184k.

I could even strip it down further if I didn’t have specific artistic tastes… I’d make the glow just a generic fuzzy circular glow instead of 4 unique frames that follow the shape of the star. But I want that detail in there so I’m not gettin’ that crazy!

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Bulletproof Outlaws Diary