It’s finally time for some details on the next game, Jennifer.
Here’s a little recap for those of you who aren’t familiar with Jennifer’s history :
I’ve been working on trying to do a fully animated game for about 18 months now. While the idea of doing a fully animated game is appealing to me, there have been a long list of issues with doing one, including but not limited to…
– the amount of time it takes to render something
– the amount of time it takes to build an animated scene
– finding a way to display the videos so that everyone can use them
i think I would have given up on trying to do an animated game a while ago if it weren’t for the fact that I paid someone to do the voice acting (and deliver the lines) back when I started planning it. I have over 300 voiced Jennifer lines on a folder on my desktop.
So, in order to finally get the Jennifer game made, I think I’ve finally decided on a good system. Here are the details…
Jennifer will mainly use images, not animated movies. I still want to use some movies though, so there will be flv videos for certain parts of the game. These will be completely optional though. There will be an option at the start asking whether you want to view the videos or not. If you choose no, instead a sequence of images will appear which you click through to see what happens.
So, basically, I’m replacing when you would usually see something like a moving gif in the games with a 30 second or so movie, but with the option of just viewing regular images instead if you wish.
Each image will also play the corresponding mp3, though there will also be a similar option to the video, where you can have no sound playing at all.
Overall, I’m happy with this way of doing it. It means everyone can play, and those who want to turn off the new features can do so.
Since so much on this game has already been done, i’m expecting production to be a little quicker than normal. Monday, August 26th seems about right for a release date, but I’ll announce something more official closer to the time.
will this game has it’s PC (player character) customizable? like choosing the gender?
Why not make those movies .gif files and insert them as animated pictures instead of using .flv?
A gif file would be a much larger file size, and wouldn’t looks as nice as a flv.
mp4. This is the format you need. flv… flash! is deprecated. Horrible consuming, and it is not supported by all the systems.
Instead mp4 videos can be played with any modern navigation, through html5…
This sample url:
http://www.html5tuts.co.uk/demos/video/
Can be reproduced by explorer, firefox, chrome, safari and tablet and phones navigators! with this small correction for iphone and ipad:
Regarding gif. Gif is a horrible format, for movies. Gif is a format though for small animations. It only allows 256 colors (this affect quality) and the way it encode/decode the video means that when the animation is longer it took more and more and more system resources. This doesn’t happens with good video formats.
You want to kill a tablet? a page filled with gifs.
I did some extensive tests with users a few weeks ago using mp4s.
I worked out that flv was supported by a lot more browsers that mp4. It was something like 50% of players could use mp4 files, whereas 85% could use flv.
Some good games on your site that I have been playing on and off I was just wondering about animation. I found a mini game on xxelfxx website that wasn’t a virtual date game, just a animated interactive sex one. It is very fluid between scenes but ran on flash player.
Is that the sort of animation/ controls that you are able to do? It works very well in the mini game. Just suggesting 🙂
Keep up the good work! ta