Opteragame.com

The past couple of days I have taken a break from animation and have been focusing on trying to learn more web development type stuff. I’m currently redesigning the website in Dreamweaver (more learning required of course). The new site wont be all that much different than the current one. Hopefully just a little cleaner, links you can actually read, that kind of stuff.

As well as the new website, which should be live very soon, I have begun to set up some forums for Optera. The forums are technically live http://www.opteragame.com/Forum/index.php although not completely set up. Ill send out a newsletter shortly to announce the forums to Optera’s miniature but awesome community as well as have a link from the main website’s menu. In the meantime if someone reads this and is feeling particularly “ant”sy then by all means sign up and introduce yourself or something. Ill have the appropriate categories and such all figured out soon enough.

Yeah dog

I changed the working dimensions of the sprites to compensate for the foreshortening from the viewing angle of 45 degrees. They are now 1000 in width by 800 in height rather than 800 by 800. If you go a few posts back you can see the red ant biting doesn’t look like its getting into a full lunge compared to the two black and white sketches in the post before that. The extra width of the sprites should now allow for those side view sprites to bite and spray to their hearts content.

This ice storm is screwing everything up. Trees are falling all over the place, we lost power, house is dark, lost another day of work. I’m not really into sitting in a dark house doing nothing so I’m sitting in the truck, with the cell and laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter drawing ants in Flash. Oh boy.

The snow was coming down pretty hard this morning and I ended up losing of day of work and gaining a day of Optera time. The office is feeling pretty cozy.

I’m still in animation mode and starting to play with the sting/spray action.

Now even though this is only the sketch that the real animation will go over top of I cant help but wonder if its its too cartoonish. I bet there are a few ant enthusiasts out there that might not think its realistic enough with the whole bulging gaster exploding butt thing but I have a feeling when it comes down to gameplay, the more expressive animations will help create that positive feedback for the players actions. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Let me know what you think! For now I’ll just get some more hot chocolate going and get back to work…

Testing her out with some real body parts: