BURNIN' RUBBER 5 CONTEST

See this image?

Will these guys reward you with a special BR5 prize?

It's hidden somewhere in Burnin' Rubber 4.

1. Go find it and make a screenshot.

2. Post your screenshot on the Xform Facebook page. Post it BEFORE friday February 8 of this year.

3. Our panel of judges will pick a winner.

4. The winner will get a special reward in BURNIN RUBBER 5!!!


HINT:


Search everywhere...

So, what are you waiting for?

Go, go... GO!!!

Play Burnin' Rubber 4 now: http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/burnin-rubber-4.jsp

This one's for the fans!

For all those fans that are yearning for the release of Burnin' Rubber 5:
Don't worry! We did NOT stop the development.

In fact, the guys here are still working on it, like crazy.
And I can tell you: the game is going to be great! But great is just not good enough for this final episode in our trilogy. BR5 simply needs to be epic! And more.
So that's why we're still busy with tweaking.
And tweaking.
And some more tweaking.
And balancing.
And adding special content.

But in the meantime we will arrange something special for you.
Something that did never ever happened before in the Burnin' Rubber history...

Xform proudly presents: 

THE BIG BURNIN' RUBBER CONTEST!!!














A contest for the biggest BR5 fans.
A contest in which you can win an epic price.

We will SOON reveal the rules, how to participate and the price you can win!
Sounds awesome? It is!

So please keep checking our Facebook fanpage for more info: https://www.facebook.com/Xform

Cheers,
Shirley

Trick trails

Dear readers,

First of all we're happy to inform you that Traffic Slam 3 has just been released! You can play it here. I really enjoyed working on Traffic Slam 3 and think it's absolutely a worthy successor of Traffic Slam 2.

In the meantime I've been working on a snowboard game, which is nearing completion. In this game you'll be going through the city and completing challenges. Some challenges are completed by getting a certain score, others by doing certain kind of tricks. With every kind of trick you score points. Needless to say, doing tricks is the main goal of the game. As such, tricks should look cool and be fun to do. Besides making the animations cool, we've also added trails when doing tricks. The trails are added to the hands and the board and only show when a trick is being done. An example is shown below:

Player doing a trick with trails showing the movement of the board and hands.

So how do we create these trails? The trail is a mesh (a strip of triangles) that is updated each frame: whenever the object that the trail is following moves the trail is updated. It generates new vertices on the position where the followed object is now and updates old vertices (setting vertex colors for a fading trail and eventually removing them). It is also important that the generated trail does not create its vertices on one plane but rather banks with the followed object as can be seen below:

A trial is made out of a mesh as shown by the blue lines.

And of course for any kind of feature you create, you should ask yourself: could it be useful in future games as well? If so: can the feature be made generic (to a certain extent and without using too much time) so that parameters can be tweaked. For the trails the answer is yes: trails are pretty common in games. Parameters for the trail can be the trail width, fade speed, color, etc.

-- Stijn

Who's the boss?

A few weeks back we playtested one of our games currently in development, although the game already is pretty awesome we felt it didn't end good. It was ok but not the awesome ending you expect from an awesome epic game :). That's why we sat around the table with a few beers and discussed how it should end. After the vodka bottles, we ended up with lots of crazy ideas and, finally picked one....the craziest one of course! I don't want to spoil it for you and give away too much details about the boss, but I can tell you it's a huge vehicle which the player has to enter and work it's way to the top.

We needed to test this idea as soon as possible before creating the final art and realizing it wasn't such a good idea after all. I quickly blocked out a prototype of the boss in 3ds Max, imported it into an existing level. Once in the game, it's much easier for instance to determine the objects scale and internal tunnel and room sizes.



Mockup of the boss

Once that was done, it was time to think about how split the whole thing up into boss 'building blocks'. In the image above, you can see two building blocks: a tunnel-segment and a door. When I was satisfied with that, I created an initial version of the texture. First collected some style reference though! It's imperative that you unwrap all segments first before copying them. That's what I'm doing now. When that's done, I can weld them all together and do some final modeling and texturing of stuff I can't do with the building blocks. Then we test it some more, and then we can do the lighting for the whole thing!

Building blocks

Lucky for me, I have 2 other guys working on some other neat stuff going on in the boss fight (can't tell too much about it right now ;)). Awesome!!!

Matt

Happy Holidays!

2012 was a great year for us with lots of games released. We all look forward to 2013, because we know it'll be another year packed with awesome Xform games. Best wishes to all of you and remember...

Keep on playing!

Cheers,

Xform

Xform prevails 12-21

Hey everyone!

If we have to believe the Mayan calendar this should be the last blog of Xform ever!! So they gave me the honour to create the last blog!
But Xform will prevail anyway! Hahaha...

This week is all about the menu and interface of the new race game and no not of Burning Rubber 5, but a race game way cooler than that one!! Ha! I already created some mockup screens a couple of weeks ago. So after the mockup we going to replace the placeholder objects with some self created stuff.




Before

After

As you can see some small things were replaced. For example the background, when I'm creating a mockup screen I use pictures of games/movies, to create a style so I can see what colours I will use. The title of the game in both screens is a working title and will be replaced after the title is final. Here another example.

Before



After

In the mockup screen you can see I used some random pictures as icons and replaced later with our own stuff. A thing we always do, is placing the back button left and the next/continue button right. It’s a thing everyone does, you want to move forward. Same with reading, you read from left to right. So left --> right! Check our previous games and you will see. ;)

Back Button on the left. Next button on the right.

Or in some cases there are no next buttons, for instance if you need to check the How to Play screen.

Back Button on the left.

So, that was it for today!
Now back to work!

Hails!
Eugène

Character Animation II

Hello all!

Today I want to tell you guys something about 3D character animation in our games. Most of our games are vehicle or car based, what has the advantage of not having 3D characters walking around on the screen. I call this an advantage because making games which feature 3D characters, or bone based animations takes more time and effort than games without them.

For the character rigs we use biped and / or CAT-rigs. One has several advantages over the other as well as the other way around. The character in the image below uses a biped skeleton. Each vertex of the character mesh is linked to a bone, or several bones in the skeleton. By transforming (moving and rotating) the bones in 3D space we are able to pose the character.

The animations are done by setting different poses of a character in a sequence, called keyframes. The computer figures out most of the motion between these poses, so we don't have to set every animation frame manually.

When we use 3D animated characters in our games there are usually more than just one character walking around. Think of enemies, friendly's or even maybe another player character. The skeletons ( biped or CAT) we use, have the same structure and names for all of the characters. This allows us to use all of our created animations on every 3D character in the game. A walk animation on one skeleton can work on a slightly different skeleton too. I say slightly different.. Big changes in size of the character or difference in the length of the limbs can affect the motion of the animation. So as long as all characters are roughly the same shape it is possible to use the same animations for them. This reduces the download size a lot, we don't have to export all the animations for each unique character doing so.

Greetings,

Joep