Jeff Hangartner – Revealing the Path Less Travelled in Video Game Industry
Jeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.
CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.
You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.
So there’s been some problems with the animation tool from the start. Something to do with the initial keyframe, it was basically requiring all the art to be unkeyframed (so everything at 100% Scale, 100% Opacity, etc.) on the first frame so that it has something to interpolate between from the first frame and the second frame (where the settings for the art would be 0% Opacities and weird Scales, etc.). We’ve been duct-taping around the problem and it was working for the most part, but we got it narrowed down to one impossible bug where if we didn’t show the first frame, it couldn’t interpolate, but if we showed the first frame, you get all the art blinking on-screen for a split second. So I bugged the original programmer of the tool to take a look at it and he was able to figure out the problem and miraculously fix it! Derek and I spent some time today testing out various keyframing setups to make sure everything was working and it looks like it’s working SWIMMINGLY. :)
The good news is now that the tool works, progress should speed up dramatically. We couldn’t make a lot of progress on the programming side so we’re a couple weeks behind where I’d hoped to be, but now that it works things should be as quick and “drag & drop” as I was hoping from the start. I expect to be able to put up videos and stuff more often now!
The bad news is that I have to undo all the duct-tape I put in the animation files haha I basically have to go through all of them for all systems and fix them up to work properly. Not a big deal, it’s just grunt-work and I know exactly what to do but it means I’ll be staring at keyframes and coordinates for a couple days haha It’ll be worth it in the end though!
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Bulletproof Outlaws Diary
- I’m back, and with a new project in production!
- Indie Game Marketing: ARTICLE IV – Psychology
- 50% Off “Back-To-School-Boredom” Sale for Elusive Ninja!
- Indie Game Marketing: ARTICLE III – Game Related & Maintenance
- Quick break from Marketing Articles to make my Touch Arcade banners!
- Indie Game Marketing: ARTICLE II – Traditional Advertising
- Indie Game Marketing: ARTICLE I – Social Marketing
- The trials & tribulations of marketing as an indie gamedev!
- Back to kickin’ ass & making games!
- Days 116 to 117 – Elusive Ninja officially launched! Final update before E3!
- Day 115 – Elusive Ninja approved! Plus E3 promotional stuff!
- Day 114 – Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief – official trailer!
- Days 109 to 113 – Elusive Ninja for the iPhone submitted to Apple!
- Days 106 to 108 – So close to submitting to Apple!
- Game1: Days 104 to 105 – Using basic human psychology to balance videogame difficulty curves!
- Game1, Day 103 – Stress management! I never expected to write this haha
- Game1, Days 100 to 102 – Big news! Elusive Ninja is in its final stages!
- Game1, Day 99 – All art/animations complete!
- Game1, Day 98 – Ahhh powers of two…you’re still around, eh?
- Game1, Day 97 – Just ’cause it’s bigger doesn’t mean it’s more powerful!
- Game1, Day 96 – Testing, testing, one two three!
- Game1, Day 95 – iPad art complete! Two versions down, one to go!
- Game1, Day 94 – My art is fat, time to put it on a .PNG reduction diet!
- Game1, Day 93 – Choppin’ and loadin’…sounds like the title of a bad NES game haha
- Game1, Days 72 – 92 – MegaUpdate Part 2, Music and SFX
Bulletproof Outlaws
News Letter
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