15.05.10: Smashing Pumpkins

To make the most of the SketchUp map I have made three videos from animations in the program. These took a few goes to get right as its difficult to preview them as they will actually end up as well as tidying the environments up – finding a tree floating in mid air after exporting the video for 3 hours FOR EXAMPLE.

I then imported the raw avi files into Flash and tinkered the settings to get the best quality. The compression is amazing, bringing a 200mb file down to 8mb without too much of a drop in quality.

The first video is of the entire environment, slowly circling round to act as a background to the main menu. The orange glow of the morning fog helps to hide the edges of the map, so that first time users may think it goes on further and is part of a bigger world. I then created a smooth menu of 6 cards and help pointers to navigate through the entire project. To optimise loading times when online and with average computer performance in mind, when you press to view a piece of the content, it opens the file in a new tab of your web browser and changes to an empty frame with just a simple background in the main menu. This means the PC doesn’t have to process the menu video as well as any of the new content.

The second video is a slow sweep through the Stokesay Castle area, stopping at 5 locations where the player will be able to shoot at targets. While it may not be very challenging gameplay, it should hopefully be a bit of fun and a way to show the more detailed work on the buildings. I also filled the areas up with some barrels, sacks and crates to make them look less empty and provide more of an interesting target range. I was going to drop this game due to time limits, but if each stage is relatively brief and with a few varieties of target – it shouldn’t take too much time.

The final video is the most extensive, being a fly through all of the locations of the environment, ending up in the armoury at Stokesay. I have layered on the carrier pigeon from early on in the project and you can move it about the screen up to the edges. Again, with a few enemies and objects to avoid and items to pick up, it should make for a fun game that also shows off the map.