Septemberween spotlight: Five Nights at Freddy's

With Fall upon us, it is time to prepare for the best time of the year, Halloween. Lobotomizing pumpkins, crunching leaves, and all things spooky have their time in the sun. So, what should we look at to get in that Septemberween spirit? Scary video games of course!

                                               Meet Scott Cawthon's Five Night's at Freddy's

Taking place at a Chuck-E-Cheese Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, you play as the night watchman tasked with looking over the place from 12 to 6 am. But be warned! The animatronics don't take too kindly to you, and if they get you, well, you die.

Looks pretty good right? But what if I were to tell you that everything in the game was 2D?
Five Night's at Freddy's was made in an engine called Multimedia Fusion, which is a 2D game engine. The game itself is actually a 2D point and click, styled to look 3D. The graphical style is reminiscent of the point and click computer games of the 1990's

Darkseed II, 1995

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, 1995

Every possible action and outcome in Five Nights at Freddy's is pre-rendered. The fully animated parts (which tend to be the parts right before you die) are gifs, and not a character moving in real time. The textures and shading of the characters and environments make them look remarkably 3D.

If you see this in-game, you're good as dead.

Most of the character movement happens off screen, adding to the terror and subtlety of the game. Nothing moves so long as you watch it, but you can only watch one camera at once, and it eats up your limited power. 

Each of the animatronics has its own AI, resulting in each one having different tactics. For only 5 bucks on steam, even to just look through the game's files at the superb art, Five Night's at Freddy's is worth a look. If you don't feel up to the spooktacular challenge and would rather watch other people play it and freak out, there's plenty of that too. 

Happy Septemberween, everybody.

The Steam Machine

     The steam machine is a new gaming console coming out 2014. It developed by Valve Corporation, the creators of many popular games such as Half Life, Team Fortress, and Portal as well as the digital game distributor Steam. To understand the Steam Machine first we have to know what steam is. 

     

     Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer, and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses.As of January 2014, there are over 3000 games available through Steam and 75 million "active" users. In February 2014, it was announced that Steam had surpassed 7.5 million concurrent users.In October 2013, it was estimated that 75% of purchased games downloaded for the PC are through Steam.

     Now within the year valve will be releasing its Steam Machine. The machine is basically a computer that runs an open source Linux based operating system called Steam OS. The machines will come pre-built and vary in size and hardware depending on the price of the machine. Like PCs however most of the machines will allow the owner switch out the parts with higher end hardware later on. The device is also going to come with a new style of controller that will give the user the same high level of precision and accuracy that PC gamers are used to with keyboard and mouse controls

Smoke (Illuminating Particles)

After Wednesday's lesson in class on how to create smoke in After Effects with particles, I decided to research a little more and found a whole tutorial on Video Copilot that shows you how to create an entire smoke screen. It provides you with the project files and gives you a 20 minutes walk-through of how to create it.

The smoke he creates with particles looks really realistic, and can be used for anything that could involve steam, smoke, fog, or clouds. Considering at least one of these elements is in almost every scene I think it's a very useful tutorial, especially since the end product looks so good.

For my project in particular, I want steam to be moving when I show the streets of London. This tutorial is perfect for that and allows me to create the dirty image of industrial London. I don't know if anyone else is doing something similar for their project but I thought it looked really nice, so it's worth checking out.