Joel Esler

Hey there, I just released a new game!  Sorry, it's not Flagstaff Chapter 5.  It's Mabel and the Alphamites!  Sort of a mash up of Bubble Bobble and Bookworm.  You can play it over at Kongregate.

The flash version of Dinosaurs and Meteors in now available to play for free on Kongregate.

Yesterday my first iOS game Dinosaurs and Meteors became available on the app store for 99c.  If that's too pricey, then keep an eye out for the browser version, which should be out in a couple of days.

The game is a sort of a mix of Missile Command and tower defense, where you control a bunch of dinosaur sporting a variety of weapons and trying to defend themselves against the incoming waves of meteors.

All the characters and non-procedural environment graphics in Flagstaff are created in Blender, which you can download for free.  Because I like to live dangerously, I use Blender 2.5 beta.  If you're a chicken, I guess you can use the stable 2.4 version.  Bok bok.

When figuring out the lighting and rendering settings for the characters, I started with a pretty basic setup of one sunlight, and ambient occlusion enabled.

This setup looked alright but the direction of the light source seemed too obvious, and I figured it would look strange in any environment that wasn't outdoors.  I needed something a bit more neutral.

I played around with toon shaders to no success, then eventually settled on a solution using Blender's compositing nodes system to combine certain render passes and exclude those I didn't want.  The final composite is a combination of the colour pass, and the shadow and environment passes at 20 and 25 percent opacity, respectively.

The shadow layer gives some basic definition to the shapes.  The environment layer provides distinction between adjacent shapes of similar colour, and also shows details like the fingers and toes.

And here's the entire cast for chapter one: