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 - Game 1 - A Diary of a video game studio!

Today we talked about something I didn’t actually think would be interesting… financial investing. Specifically what to do with your money when you DO have it. I’ve got a bit of a savings but it’s not doing much (it’s in a GIC earning like 0.5% interest). Our business coach has a decent amount of experience messing with the stock market and explained the jist of how it works. I think my favorite quote was something like “Being able to stretch a dollar isn’t impressive…being able to use that dollar to make ANOTHER dollar, THAT’S impressive.”

I’m not really a gambling man, but I’ve played with a stock market simulator before (where they track the real stock market and give you play money to use) and it doesn’t seem like something too impossible to get into. Our coach said his KIDS use it. He gives them X amount of money and let’s them choose which stocks to buy and when to sell, etc. with that money.

Alright so I’ve got the structure of the backgrounds down, but now it comes down to choosing a color scheme. I’m also thinking about breaking the background up into multiple layers of houses so that we can add some extra parallax scrolling in. I think this means I’ll have to widen the roof to account for more layers sliding at various speeds, but the effect would look pretty cool. The other problem is it means more layers and I don’t know how much the iPhone can handle yet. But I figure if I do it up as separate layers I can always flatten it down the road if we run into speed issues.

Definately digging having red rooftops on the background roofs. I’m trying combining various window colors and roof colors. I’ve also added a bit of a purple hue to the shadows. I’m digging number 9, but I like the glow right behind the ninja’s legs on number 10, he pops out against the background a little more on that one. So I’ll probably try some combo of the two. Unfortunately the new background makes the foreground look pretty horrible haha so I’ll be redoing the foreground after I get this nailed. I’m definately going to break it apart into parallax layers, and there’s actually even MORE layers because some of the parallax layers will have a glow on top of their actual art, and because that glow has to be drawn with Additive blending, it has to be a separate .PNG file from the actual houses and laid on top. Will THIS blow up the iPhone? We shall see!

Chosen the final colors. The foreground windows look a little yellow because of the glow but I’m pretty sure that’s going to get covered up by the foreground roof when I revamp that, so I’m not concerned right now. All in all the background is looking pretty cool. I like the cel-shaded feel and being done in 3d if I need to make adjustments I can just change the camera angle and re-render out another shot, if I wanted to make a cutscene or whatever. I have to break this down into multiple layers for the parallax stuff, and then lay it all out in animation files in place of the old single-image ugly background art.

Here are the 3 layers that make up the background. The background will either stay motionless or move VERY slightly, and the middle layer of houses will move more, with the foreground layer of houses moving the most (but still less than the tree and roof in the foreground). This should look pretty cool in action, but I still have to lay these out so Derek can get them layered right in-game. I didn’t include the glow layers because those are boring to look at, haha

Bulletproof Outlaws Diary