Tag: CBNA

Boobie Teeth 0.17, CBNA SmartLight, and Google Translation

I’ve spent the last few days getting back into the Boobie Teeth project, trying to figure out how to do a couple things that have had me stuck for longer than I’d care to admit. I’m far from giving up, but I have come to the conclusion that hacking away at the problem isn’t going to be as fruitful as reading up on the problem.

At any rate, here’s a video of what I managed to pack in to today’s release, 0.17:

The major accomplishment for this release was the addition of a transparent gradient in the foreground, which enhances the background gradient that gives the illusion of diminishing sunlight at depth. For now this is just a cosmetic feature, although I already have ideas for tying it into the gameplay.

The other thing I worked with in this release, but dropped for now, is to implement some basic AI. I want the fish to get hungry and start chasing down prey. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be, owing to limitations of GameMaker’s instance handling. My usual approach of coding a little bit and seeing what I get, then coding a bit more once I’m sure what I already have done is working hasn’t gotten me very far. I’ll be researching and studying until I figure out an approach that works.

While researching, I came across a beautiful video of some lighting effects done in GameMaker which blow my simple foreground gradient away completely:

I noticed of course that the video appeared to come from French-speaking authors, but that didn’t dissuade me from tracking down the package that enables these effects and downloading it.

Let me just take a moment to say that I am absolutely amazed by the quality of google’s translation service from French to English. Seriously, click this link and you’d hardly even know that you’re on a French site. This impresses me even more than the lighting effects. If you happen to spot a mistake in translation you can hover over text and see the original, and provide feedback to google directly through the site that they’re translating for you. The translation is extremely fast, almost real-time, too.

It’s going to take me some time to work my way through the examples and tutorials and translating the documentation, but if I can get this SmartLight to work with my game project, it’s going to be well worth it, and make the game look way better than I had originally planned. I really want to get some AI going in my game though, so it’ll probably be a while before I get into re-doing the lighting effects.