Omg, is this really you? I've listened to Machines OST so many times during work. I'm also a music producer, for about 7 years now and I can say I'm a fan of your work.
My questions are: what DAWs did you work on for the original Machines and did you design sound fx and voices as well?
Just an idea I got for new units, and I hope it hasn't been discussed before.
What if there were few units that can act individually and also assemble together to create a more powerful single unit?
I have, few years ago when I was in college. I decided I have to finish what I started as a child when I couldn't get past Talontia 8. My mom first bought me the game for my birthday. Couldn't be happier at that time, as I played the demo over and over and over again! To me Machines is nostalgia on the highest level when it comes to games, and I hope to see it rise once more in the future with even more content <3
This would look so amazing with hi def 256x256 textures!
@Pisarz Try double clicking on the layer as it is now locked because it's set as background. Doing that will make it a normal layer which should unlock all edit options for you.
Wow, that looks really good! Would love to play this map one day.
Exactly what I thought! Though it should stay within originality of Machines. Looking forward for the sketches :)
Also, your trailer is awesome!
Thanks, unfinished though and the planetary textures didn't render in full quality and I couldn't figure out why.
This is the first frame I rendered while I was working on project and it looked much, much better:
The planet actually consisted 3 spheres. One is the planet itself, one is a transparent sphere for cloud textures and shadows and another is gassy atmosphere which difuses the light around it. All spining in different directions to give it more realistic feel.
If you want to make animations as above I'd recommend learning some 3D program, It would be way more convenient when making sketch animations. Textures and lightning/materials are very complex to learn and master, but simple modeling and animation isn't so you could make results quite quick and you could use the models later for the game as well.
The "draw over previous frame" is way better in flash. In photoshop for example if you have done like 50 frames and you want to change something in between you have to change it in every frame seperately - this is to my view a huge downfall. I assume you'd want to change a lot of things while doing the animation or maybe you'll miss something, that way you'll have this problem constantly.
For the gif you posted: yes but only if you have frames rendered already. The frames were exported from some 3D software like Maya or Blender and then put together as gif. Although I must warn you .gif only supports 256 colors so it's really hard to make it look good. There are ways to make it look better taken out of video format, but it will still be only 256 colors once in gif. I'd recommend exporing as something like .avi or .mp4 if you want to make animations like above.
Example of gif from motion picture format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaXnYRlAtks
GIF explained:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
There's another way to get around in having more than 256 colors in gif but I haven't tried it out, ever. Theoretically you could divide your (unprocessed) frame sequence into several squares and add 256 colors to each of them. So it would take as many colors in each section as possible (if there's not more than 256 then the algorithm would compress), and if you sum all together you could get around 2000.
I haven't tried this tehniqe though for at least two reasons: I haven't found a decent software to do so; it would't take seconds to download the gif but minutes. GIFs can take a long time to download even in 256 colors (up to 5mb) but we're talking easily of 10Mb+ here, so it's actually like preloading a short video before watching it.
My conclusion is that gif is an outdated format which should better be left alone. You could do much better with simple video format.
Also here's my first Maya animation I did few years back and it was all exported as still images (frames) and rendered with Sony Vegas:
https://youtu.be/ZRaXzUmC-Hk
@Pisarz Photoshop isn't meant for more complex animations believe me, you'll have a lot of trouble with it doing such concept animations. I recommend using Adobe Flash instead, you can export in .gif too I think, otherwise you could just upload an .avi on Youtube :)
@Pisarz I'd love to contribute but I'm really short on time at this moment as I have couple of gigs, work and just starting a new company. But things should settle down after July, so I'll be able to give you a hand then.
So the textures are overlayed with color in-game? I'm a graphic designer so if you need some skills let me know :)
Very interesting idea of force field generator. I imagine you have to first break through somehow (by destroying it and turrets protecting it) before you can face another player. By that time you should have at least medium tech to be able to break through. It would make it more interesting and giving you some time to evolve at the same time.
@Pisarz Yes I think that's an awesome idea! But once assembled it becomes a land unit?
I don't know, I personally would love to see another classic WFW circuit board menu. I think every little element adds to (or takes from) the original atmosphere of Machines.
Looks interesting. Is there a list of commands anywhere or what does it do?
@Pisarz Yes that's the one. Even though it's becoming obsolete you can export the file to movie format or .gif. It's still a good tool to make animations and one good thing for example is that you see a previous frame with transparency on current frame so you can easily draw over. The flash format is only meant for (obsolete) flash players which is uncompressed and all in vector graphics while other exports result in compression and pixelization - still the compression is not noticable by human eye.
I can tell you first hand because I'm working with Photoshop animations daily and there are A LOT of things that make the job frustrating. The concept animations you have in mind I think are even more complex though.