Archive for the 'Power-up Media' Category

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Game tiles experiment

justGREAT! I start off designing some tiles just for practice and one day later I end up with a neat experiment :D

I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:

game tiles

Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://www.powerupmedia.nl/#/exp080302

The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.

Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).

Jolly jellyfish

At the moment I’m trying to learn how to make timeline animations in Flash and yet somehow I end up animation which is 80% coded, isn’t that just great!?

Just fooling around I came up with this result:
If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it's missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.
Jolly jellyfish - vector animation | download

The movement and generation of the jellyfish is all actionscript (2.0), the “squezing” is timeline-animation…

My first pixel scenes

Did some pixel art again in a long time and the result turned out just great (if I say so myself). These are actually my first finished pixel scenes ever…

pixel owl
owl on branch – pixel – fireworks | download

pixel fishtank
fishtank – pixel – fireworks | download

(Click download for a better view)

Cartoon style experiments

justGREAT! I was experimenting a little with new cartoon/vector styles in Flash and now here we are with some nice (widescreen) wallpapers for your ass:

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air critters – vector – flash cs3 | download

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HOOT… – vector – flash cs3 | download

critters
critters – vector – flash cs3 | download

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no name - vector – flash cs3 | download

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face – vector – flash cs3 | download

Hope you like ‘em. Feel free to use and/or distribute…

WordPress update & plugin troubles…

Just great! Recently I updated my blog to wordpress 2.3.3 (because of a major security leak) and all of a sudden almost my entire blog crashed :( .
Without any proper warning on the wordpress site when downloading the new blog version, I assumed there should be no problem to update, but that turned out to be a big mistake…
my entire blog crashed!

It turned out the (old) plugins were the root of the problem and I had to delete them all in order to get my blog up and running again.

Mad as I could be I tried to reinstall new versions of plugins, but since most of the plugins were not yet updated and compatible with the new WordPress version it was still drama and I decided to let it be and leave my blog a big mess (no syntax highlighting, broken tags, etc.).

After a week of snowboard fun I regained the courage to look for new plugins to replace the old ones. And whaddayaknow; I found just the right plugins for my blog. I’m not sure if it was the time plugin-developers needed to update their plugins or the time I needed to cooldown and start a fresh new search but I did it :D .

SWF and Youtube embedding
To show swf files, youtube videos and other mash-up stuff I now use xhtml-video-embed. This plugin lets you embed different content using a simple [tag] ... [/tag]-markup…
No more fucked-up embedcode in your post editor!

Syntax highlighting
To display my codesnipets in proper format without screwing up the layout of my theme I now use WP-Codebox. It turned out this plugin is even better than my old syntaxhighlighter-plugin!
This plugin uses a <pre lang="LANGUAGE"> ... <pre>-markup and supports a lot of languages (including actionscript). Very nice. :D

Tagging
For the tags of my post I now use the new tag-feature of WordPress. Since it doesn’t display tags with posts by default I had to find a way to show them anyway and I found the answer right here: http://richgilchrest.com/how-to-add-wordpress-23-tags-to-your-current-theme/
In short; you just have to add a line like the one below into the index.php, archive.php,  and/or single.php file of your theme:
<?php the_tags("<b>Tags:</b> ", ", ", ""); ?>
How easy…

In the end it turned out to be all worth the stress and nail nibbling… justGREAT!

PS: With my blog back in business I decided to change the header and footer of my theme as well. Hope you appreciate it :mrgreen: