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265 - 2D Camera Effects

Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2015 10:44 am
by matt
In a 2D game, there are a number of camera tricks that you can't do because of the way the art was drawn. In this video, I talk about the effects we did in Neverending Nightmares and the effects we'd like to do.


Re: 265 - 2D Camera Effects

Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2015 3:24 pm
by RightClickSaveAs
Most of the technical details were lost on me, but I do appreciate how well the camera worked in NeN, especially having followed the development and seeing some of what went into it. It's sort of a backhanded compliment, but it works so well you really don't notice or think about it as a player, because it does what it's supposed to so smoothly.

I feel like I asked this already during development of the first, sorry, but my memory is bad; what's the engine NeN runs on, did you build it from scratch? And are you just going to build onto that for NeN 2?

Re: 265 - 2D Camera Effects

Posted: Wed Apr 22, 2015 5:49 pm
by matt
We built an engine for scratch for the terrible F2P game Dino Park (released on Android but not in the US). We used it on the even more terrible National Geographic's Dino Land on iOS. Both of which seem like they are no longer available, which is probably a good thing because they were unfinished and had terrible pricing. (Not my fault! We worked with a publisher) Chris did the art and Joe did the animation, which were both awesome.
Image

The tech we made was solid, and the Neverending Nightmares engine is an evolution of that. As we continue to develop games, less and less of the original remains. For Neverending Nightmares, we wrote a sound engine, a World Builder, added a ton of AnimationTool features, switched to SDL, so there isn't THAT much that still remains.

We are definitely continuing to build on our current tech because we were happy with it. Post NN, we have added more Animation Tool features for Joe, improved the World Builder, etc. We are making significant changes on the gameplay side too.

Writing a new engine from scratch is a lot of work, and there aren't often better ways to solve problems, so I think even most people going from PS3->PS4 aren't starting over.

Assuming we are making games that are mostly 2D, I think we'd stick with our engine. If we wanted to go full 3D, then we might use Unreal or something just because there are a ton of solved problems that wouldn't be worth doing our own way. We might consider Ogre or some open source 3D engine, but it'd probably be a lot of headaches especially for porting.