Cheese Media News » Pivot

April Update: Sound

Pete — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:54:34 +0000

As winter changes to spring on the Northern Hemisphere and summer changes to autumn on the southern, Pivot development proceeds. What we’ve been doing these last 4 weeks is the following:

Redesiging the Woods to make the gameplay less illogical, as well as adding an additional challenge
Adding some extra detailing and fixing a bunch of bugs
Replacing the sound engine with sinBass, since the old one wouldn’t work with our extensive saving system (which was covered in an old post)

In addition to this, we’ve started adding in various sound effects. Up ’til now the game has been quite bare of sound (apart from music), but now we’re bringing more life to the world by adding sounds. This includes rewarding jingles when you solve a puzzle, or small ambient noises like birds, rain and branches crunching as you walk through the forest. We really like adding a lot of detail to Pivot, and sound design is a big part of that. A cavern might look like a large, damp cavern but if it also sounds like a big, moist cavern, then you can suddenly feel the hugeness and moisture as well. Just my poetic thought of the day.

Keep your eyes open for more updates on the most anticipated platformer of 2010/2011/whenever it’s done!

March Update

Pete — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:51:01 +0000

I’m back, and not only from Africa but to blogging as well – turns out it’s been 3 months since my

last post! Tanzania was splendid, and climbing Kilimanjaro was a terrific although exhausting experience. I have added some photos to my rarely updated photo gallery in case you want to see some proof.

On the projects front things have naturally been standing a bit still these last few weeks – but not any more!

My friend and collaborator Nick ‘Lost’ O’er There is actively working on something new, a musical video of some sort but it’s still unknown exactly what this means. We – yes you heard right, we – also have a new musical piece in the works, with me arranging and Nick playing the violin. Hopefully it will please your ears when it’s ready.

Last but not the least; we’re back on track with Pivot development! The last major change was an upgrade to the latest version of Game Maker, GM8. Doing this cost us a couple of hours of work, but it paid off! One problem that we kept facing while working in GM7 was its sprite engine. All the sprites we drew in Flash and Photoshop would have jagged edges in Game Maker – it just wasn’t possible to make them look smooth. GM8 however comes with full PNG alpha transparency support, allowing all our sprites to be silky smooth. Apart from this feature the new version also fixes a heap of bugs and saves both CPU and memory.

Music update

Pete — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:31:42 +0000

For one of our latest levels in Pivot we felt we needed some creepy tunes to set the mood. I took inspiration from one of the best video games ever made, Beyond Good and Evil, which had a stunning sound track composed by Christophe Heral.

I asked Lost to record some violin strokes for me, seeing he plays the violin rather well, and added some sounds of water drops, some creepy ambiance sounds and a crescendoing piano melody. Here is the result:

Cavern

Lost and I have also gone in and replaced Game Maker’s built-in sound engine with an external dll one, which not only adds OGG support but also allows for much smoother looping.

Canyon 2.0

LostOverThere — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:05:14 +0000

Art style and consistency are two very important aspects we like to keep in mind while developing Pivot. The Canyon was one of the original stages we created, and in fact has barely changed, graphically, since the demo. Granted, the design had changed substantially, but the look and feel certainly hadn’t. This past week, we decided it was time for change.

As you can see in the image below, the old art style is very similar to what was in the equally old demo.

After playing around with a handful of colour schemes, we feel we managed to pull off a much more refined look to the stage thanks to the new coffee style colour palette. Check out the new Canyon below:

The keen reader may even notice some small changes like the people who now always face the player. But that’s not the only change that has happened within the Canyon. Make no mistake – this was not a mere cosmetic change. The new canyon has had many additions in terms of game play, making the stage more brutal and less forgiving.

But why should we tell you that? We’re both going to get back to working right this second so you can experience Pivot soon.

Bye, Bye, Beautiful

LostOverThere — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:02:08 +0000

As we’ve both been extremely busy lately, we’ve had little time to work on Pivot. That being said, we’ve still found the time to do some small things. One of the small changes we completed was finally redrawing the original animations. The original stick figure animations were drawn by Ryan Matejka in 2005. The animations themselves still hold up today, each walk cycle consists of 14 consecutive frames to make for a smooth animation, however, as time passed, and the look and feel of Pivot changed, the original sprites by Ryan Matejka become somewhat obsolete.

Using the original animations, we drew over the characters to create something that integrates smoothly into the game. Afterwards, we applied an alpha mask to each individual frame to obtain 24-Bit transparencies within the game. In the above screen-shot, you can see a comparison between the old (left) and new (right) animations.