Various Points Of Progress

ID:99498
 
Jul 30 2010, 9:15 pm (Edited on Jul 31 2010, 9:34 am)
Behold: a blog facelift. It started when I was introduced to the text-shadow CSS from Shadow813's blog and then I decided to do something fancy with the background. Of course, if you've a background like that, putting some transparency on the content boxes is only natural. (Still need to do something about that title... not only does it not particularly look good, but it'll break if you try to reduce your x resolution below about 1024x.)

The good news is that I'm wholly back on the wagon in game development. I've even found a couple of cool resources I may incorporate into my project.
  • On Sleep Is Death's website, Shannon Galvin provides an excellent tutorial for creating a tileset. This advice should work just fine in BYOND, too. (Although note that an isometric tileset is actually an option here!)
  • I found Roguebasin, an awesome wiki that includes a number of articles related to building Roguelike games. It's an great resource for building in BYOND because it includes stuff like various map generation code methods that work fine with any tile-based engine.
  • Shoot First screenshot
  • Speaking of roguelikes, Rock Paper Shotgun introduced me to a rather cool one: Shoot First. Give it in a spin, it's proof positive you don't need great graphics to have an awesome game. Significantly better than Gauntlet, it's remarkable how many surprises this game throws at you (although sometimes those boulder traps are flat out unfair.)
The bad news is that I'm still trying to make up my mind just which direction Project Cryoship will go. Some ideas that have come off the top of my head:
  1. Perhaps the player characters could be forced to jump through hoops at the command of an artificial intelligence. Think Paranoia.
  2. Perhaps the cryoship itself will undergo expansion based off of the players' efforts. There will be no fixed equipment and only one default race, but as the players explore new planets and bring back more artifacts, new equipment can be invented and new alien races unlocked.
  3. The Cryoship itself may be in a state of perpetual emergency which the players have to defuse. It could be a massive behemoth that the players slowly explore.
I certainly have a hard time making up my mind. Unfortunately, experience has taught me that having a relatively complete design is important, I shouldn't even put down a single line of code until I have a relatively good idea exactly what I'm going to be making.

It's a bit of a catch22, I might just have to start doing some rough guesses, perhaps designate times of day set aside for design and coding and force myself to experiment, because I can't quite visualize what would be best without seeing in action.

I suppose as long as I'm continuing my efforts, something will come to fruition soon, right? If nothing else, it's practice.
Jul 30 2010, 11:30 pm
The CSS looks pretty sexy in Chrome, thought naturally IE8 decided to fuck with it: interestingly, it's only displaying transparency in the title content box.
Jul 31 2010, 1:25 am
I am on Chrome
Jul 31 2010, 8:13 am
The style looks okay, but when trying to read whole paragraphs I find I have to awkwardly strain my eyes. Fonts with shadows are my least favorite because of this. BYOND blogs tend to do best with a minimalistic style....
Jul 31 2010, 9:18 am (Edited on Jul 31 2010, 9:53 am)
There, I fixed it. Text-shadow was kept, but I reduced the contrast - the reason why it was causing eye strain is because it was straight up black against white. Now, it's imperceptibly darker than the background box.

I want to keep that text-shadow because, without, the text is harder to make out against the background picture. You won't see the text-shadow on IE8 (Microsoft has yet to get around to CSS3 compatibility for the most part) and it looks much more washed out.

I also tried switching to a less sharp, meatier font to see if that would help with eye strain.

Box transparency seems to work on all the boxes now, even under IE8, although the title's transparency is a bit hard to see.
Jul 31 2010, 10:14 am
It's a lot better now :)

Edit: but you know, it actually looks pretty good on my IE. I think I like it better, but if you feel it's washed out then it must be a matter of taste... or different PCs.
Jul 31 2010, 12:01 pm
You're going to have the same problem I had where pictures and videos have the background showing through. I ended up using full opacity with a transparent pixel as the background.

The colors don't really look bad, but you might want to try finding the base color of the background picture and then using it to select the others. I generally use Inkscape's color picker and then either swap the values around or adjust the brightness while keeping the ratios.
Jul 31 2010, 1:31 pm
The base colors I haven't played with for awhile, but you could be on to something about the elements with content showing through. At the moment, I could probably get away with what I'm doing on account of how a 90% opacity picture isn't going to be all that fundamentally altered by whatever is behind it during mental processing. However, another nice advantage about using a background image of transparency instead of actual transparency is that it has a greater level of browser compatibility.