{"id":51,"date":"2014-10-19T00:20:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T00:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/?p=51"},"modified":"2014-10-19T00:21:42","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T00:21:42","slug":"upgraded-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/upgraded-graphics\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgraded Graphics!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is going to talk very briefly about the improvements I made to the basic graphics of the Third Tortoise Game, as opposed to the first two.<\/p>\n

(The first two tortoise games I made were Tortoise Trails<\/a> and Sixty Shells<\/a>. With the exception of a really bad flash game I made in high school, they were the first non-text games I ever made, and it shows.)<\/p>\n

So, when I began making my third game — Lettuce Walk, an interactive procedurally-designed puzzle game — I wanted to improve the graphics. However, since I lack artistic and Photoshop skills, I needed to think of easy ways to do it.<\/p>\n

This was how they looked when I started:<\/p>\n

\"t3-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And this was how it looked after the improvements I made:<\/p>\n

\"t3-2\"<\/p>\n

I think this is a huge improvement. What did I do?<\/p>\n

I found a picture of a rock on the Internet. I imported the rock into GIMP (a free Photoshop clone). I cranked up the brightness so that it was almost totally white, and then I made everything that wasn’t white transparent.<\/p>\n

Then, I overlaid this rock mask on top of the game board, creating the appearance of a well-worn game board.<\/p>\n

Then, I replaced the solid-black tortoise icon with a tortoise icon filled in with a picture of obsidian. Additionally, I added a small animation when you pick up the lettuce. Here’s a still of it:<\/p>\n

\"t3-3\"<\/p>\n

Basically, when your tortoise lands on a head of lettuce, it explodes in a burst of green leaves. Even though this doesn’t change or improve the mechanics of the game in any way, I think it makes it more visually stimulating and fun to play.<\/p>\n

I hope people will enjoy the game when it finally is released (hopefully sometime this month).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is going to talk very briefly about the improvements I made to the basic graphics of the Third Tortoise Game, as opposed to the first two. (The first two tortoise games I made were Tortoise Trails and Sixty Shells. With the exception of a really bad flash game I made in high school,… Read More<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}