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.

I’m a big fan of flashy glow effects in games. I had a reputation where I used to work for going over the top with flashy effects. They’re kind of mind-numbing to make when you’re animating a little speck of flame flicking out and disappearing but the end result is usually awesome looking and worth all the trouble. For the dynamite I needed an explosion and decided to go with a smoke cloud and an old school “circle explosion” flash…lots of old video games and cartoons used this and I’ve always dug it… also drawing a circle is easy, haha YouTube compresses stuff kind of ugly, so here’s a frame from the explosion in good quality:

Bulletproof Outlaws - Explosion

And here’s a video of the explosion in motion:

I used a particle generator in 3d to make the cloud poofs, with a cell-shaded texture so they’d keep the style of the rest of the game with only 3 levels of shading. Then in Photoshop I made an Action to select the light and middle shades in the cloud and copy them, Guassian Blur them, and set their blending mode to Screen so the clouds have a slight glow to them. The circle flash was just done by hand afterward and has a bunch of glows applied to it as well.

I dig the end result and in the actual game I’d like to have the screen shake vertically slightly when the explosion happens. Also I just realized I need to add a spark and possibly a smoke trail to that dynamite haha

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Bulletproof Outlaws Diary