Now we have the code to start making the character work I have imported and animated the character design. But we have a problem, we have 2 designs. A high res version and an 8bit version. We need YOU to help us make the decision. Click the link below and play the two versions, then scroll down and let us know which one you like best! You never know your vote may change the way JailBreak looks!

http://matbush.com/jb/restest

Our next project at college is to make a 2D platformer game. We are working in groups and my job role is the coder. To make our game as a slick as possible I have been playing around with a few physics engines and flash libraries. One of the best so far is Flixel. The game below is a simple demo that I coded this afternoon of the movement controls and the fluid movements that come with using Flixel. The duck graphic is from a tutorial but the code is a mix match from a few different places and was quite difficult to implement. I was actually only coding for about an hour, the other 3 were spent on sifting through and fixing error codes.

What makes using this Flixel library so difficult is that you can only really use it well through a Flash coding environment like Flash Builder (formerly Flex) or FlashDevelop. This means that the game is created purely in code with no visual editor and no frames to mess around with. I kind of like the principal but it is quite difficult to get my head around.

Anyway have a play with the game below, it’s very simple. And don’t forget to let me know what you think! Cheers.

Well I have already had one attempt at rendering my project. I set it going on Monday night and it finished just around 10am on Wednesday, around 42 hours. Because I am rendering out as images I had to put them all into after effects to then make a video from them. After I had rendered that out (this render only took 2 minutes, few) I found that there were large blotches on certain textures and in the dark area of the hallways as you can see in the image below.

After a while of experimenting with changing a few render settings and then rendering a few test frames I found the culprit of the blotches. I had the Final Gather Option set to ‘Draft’ to save rendering time however this setting was too low. So after lowering some other settings and raising the Final Gather Option to ‘Medium’ I found that each frame would take around 12 minutes to render. So after some calculations I worked out that if I split the workload over 10 computers I could have the whole video rendered out overnight, so that is exactly what I did.

Now the main model is complete and has been fully textured it is time to light the model and make it look realistic, with some nice shadows and effects. The main light for my whole house will be the daylight system. By adding a daylight system a sky will be added so when you look out the windows you will be able to see a nice blue sky. It will also add a sun, which when rendered will add bright streams of light through the windows inside the house. Also the sun will really help show the detail of the textures and make them stand out.

For the night shots wall I will add some wall lights both outside and inside the downstairs bedroom as these are where the stills will be taken.

For the walkthrough I have added camera that can be animated to move around the house and then batch rendered. At first I was going to draw a spline or ‘path’ for the camera to track along through the house. But I found out that this lacked control over the camera and it was difficult to make the camera point where you wanted it too. So I am just going to manually animate it and position it using keyframes and 3DS Max’s timeline tools.