Finally,

Well I know we have kept you waiting for the ¾ part of the graphics revamp. Sorry for the delay. We hope you will find the results worth the wait.

The process of revamping the level art was fairly simple. Write a for loop that turns the level into one giant image. Give the image to Kobus with some direction. (For example telling him yes that is a boat and crashed space ship deep underground). Sit back and wait with baited breath.

The levels are big, fortunately Kobus works fast. We find he brings just the right style and interest to the levels. Expanding on the original without deviating too far and at the same time filling the levels with plenty eye candy. If you want to see some of his art take a look at http://kofab.deviantart.com/gallery/#_featured.

Anyway enough chatter here are the juicy bits.

Back to the Future

The new hand-drawn levels will deliver the visual richness that modern players expect from current games, whilst providing old fans with a fresh look at the Toxic Bunny world.

Eye Candy

A couple of small pics to show the attention to detail. A point to take note of is that these snippets are at a 1:1, meaning that this is how big it is going to be on the screen while playing.

In the next installment we will show you all the pieces coming together. Including the never seen before revamped Toxic Bunny himself.

We know we promised you a graphics update again this week. It will be here next week we are sure. We just wanted to get a little more done first. So for now a little update about the url toxicbunny.com

Well not all your domains. But one in particular. We purchased www.toxcibunny.com. So who did it belong to. To be honest we don't even know. Its all rather cloak a dagger where domain sitters go.

The domain was hosted at godaddy and on it was a web site of add for who knows what. Wasn't even one decent coffee advert (Toxic Bunny would be ashamed). Anyway we had it evaluated and it came back valued at $480.

Anyway after much haggling the company that had registered the domain (for who knows what reason.) Asked for $ 2,000. (We really need to get better at haggling). I took approximately 5 weeks to settle due to the value and the number of strange things that happen when you try spend that much money on-line.

For now we are just redirecting toxicbunny.com to toxicbunny.co.za.

Sprites! Any 2D game would be pong without them

So more about our approach to the Sprite redrawing. What we wanted was to keep the essence of the original sprites, whilst improving them. Essentially we have 16 times more pixels and 65536 more colours (Oh and additionally 8 bits of alpha allowing for smoother edges). Technology really has moved so far since the original release. So I guess that gives us appropriately 268,435,456:1 reasons to redraw the sprites.

One of the things we believed would help was a better outline to assist distinguishing Sprites from the background (In fact we wanted to outline them in the original but with so few pixels and no anti-aliased edges the original attempt was a complete failure). On top of this we wanted more recognisable emotion in the faces, this emotional context was in the original drawings but lost in the resolution. On top of that we really wanted them to have that hand drawn feeling. Well the list of things we wanted seamed longer then the list of sprites themselves. Ultimately we really wanted one thing. THEY HAD TO LOOK COOL.

For this task we found Paul Loubser. In fact we have already been working with Paul on some concept ideas for a sequel. We handed Paul some of the revamped graphics the pencil drawings and also spent some time with him going over original concept art we still have for the 2nd Toxic Bunny game. This with our tireless list of expectations. Then we left him alone to figure it all out (We suspect he drank a fair bit of coffee as he toiled away). Paul's other work can be seen at weaponlogic.daportfolio.com.

Not all the sprites are completed at this time. This is a fairly large task with over 30 mobs and each having various animations. For now we are focussed on the first level sprites. We are leaving Toxic Bunny until we are complete with all the other sprites for the first level. We really want to have the technique nailed down 110% before we go ahead and redraw the main character himself. (We also need to make sure Paul's caffeine tolerance is really high. Drawing Toxic Bunny does tend to create a substantial caffeine craving)

Paul's revamped graphics speak for themselves.

Goober


Rat

Things the bunny can collect.

Well with us deciding to redo all the graphics for Toxic Bunny we thought some eye candy would be appreciated.

With the Level been drawn as one large image. We still have to individually draw each of the items Toxic Bunny can collect. All edibles such as pizza, coffee and hamburgers, and of course all the various car parts spread around the level that Toxic Bunny can collect and sell to Crazy Eddy.

These graphics are been redrawn by Cobus Saunderson he is the artist that built the parallax levels. The process various from graphic to graphic, so it would be a little cumbersome to explain each and every process in through detail, we have decided to let the results speak for themselves.

Hub Cap - Tiny 2D - 3D


Lucky Human's Foot Key Chain - Tiny 2D - 3D


Molotov Cocktail - Tiny 2D - 3D

We have been considering our distribution plan for the Toxic Bunny Java port. Its been a difficult issue to resolve. Our goals for the port have been to recapture the game and expose it to a new generation. Our concerns are penetration of the product into that market segment and distribution of the files. Its a shame its not a little smaller. Current build zipped is about 130mb. For a single download its small, for a 1000 uploads its massive. Also 1000 uploads is a failure in terms of our distribution goals. We need to hit in the 100's of thousands.

With that in mind we hope you understand that we are now investigating the possibility of distribution via a retail channel such as Steam. Obviously in the Indy/Platinum categories. This would put a small price on the re-release but we think it will help us reach the most people and additionally wont bankrupt us in terms of bandwidth costs.

Of course with this possibility in mind we are willing to do more work on the product to make it worth purchasing the revamped version. Truth be told we really want to make these improvements, but could not justify the expense, now we can and its an exciting prospect. Essentially we are talking about a complete graphics revamp. Not loosing the original art directly that would be shameful. However every level graphic some 7676 of them in total will be redrawn and almost every cell of animation, some 1282 of them will be redrawn. Clearly this will have a cost implication. Additionally the release will be an executable not a Java application. More on that in a latter Blog.

In essence we are no longer thinking of this as a Java port but rather as a rewrite, remaster or revamp. The game play has not dated and the new engine is capable of been pushed even further to deliver a great deal more. Many of these things are things we were considering for a 2nd Toxic Bunny game. We will follow this Blog up with some additional features and aspects you can expect, for now a few highlights include.

1.Complete redrawing of every frame of bunny and monster animation.
2.Complete redrawing of every level. Away with the repetitive tiles and hello to massive hand drawn images. Each part of the level will be drawn.
3.Additional plot and adventure scripting.
4.Redone sound effects.

So pretty much 100% of the media and all of the code redone. We are also tweaking the game play a little, we believe in a positive manner.

So to sum up. I hope this doesn't disappoint too many of you (re. Making the release completely free). It will be worth the low price tag we assure you.

-Travis Bulford

Game Engine Status

Update.

A great deal of progress has been made on the Graphics revamping side. As you can see from the last two blogs some of the new graphics and the reworking of the Manual. However what you don't see is the changes to the sprites and the actual level itself.

New Resolutions.

We really wanted to bring Toxic Bunny to a higher resolution. It was clear the engine could handle the performance side. What we needed to do was come up with a way to scale the graphics getting more detail without loosing quality or having to redraw everything from scratch. To that effect we started playing with some image filter effects. It might sound imposable to get more out of the images but fortunately these are cartoon style images and originally drawn with only 256 colours. So with extra pixels we were hoping extra colour would help. Also keep in mind we had a single bit mask now we are using a 256 alpha range so we were looking for more anti-aliasing.

Our first Attempt.

Well simply scaling the image gave us the following results. (Blow up here so you can more clearly see what we get. This approach clearly just made everything blurry and did not really help in fact it made the images worse.

Before	Filters Scale with Best Quality

Our 2nd Attempt.

Paint.net to the rescue, well almost. We discovered that using the oil paint filter in paint.net we could in fact gain a lot of detail out of the original lines by sizing to 4x on the height and width of the image then applying the Oil filter then resizing back down to 1/2 and 1/4 size giving us new improved graphics for the higher resolution and the original resolution. We did find that the oil filter removed a little of the contrast so we also did a small adjustment to contrast and brightness. We were left with the problem of how to process all our images more or less 5000 doing this by hand was going to drive us mad. We looked for a script plug-in for paint.net but could not find anything that would work. Additionally paint.net did some improvements to the oil filter whilst it improved there idea of what an oil filter should do on an image it ruined our technique and the new paint.net no longer gave us the same results.

Our 3rd Attempt.

We then looked for some java filter libraries for images. We found a treasure trove at http://www.jhlabs.com/ one little snag the Oil filter whilst working perfectly for the colours simply ignored alpha channel so we got some nasty black specs on the edges where pixels were removed by the filter. Fortunately the code for all the filters in included and we quickly added Alpha to the filter ourselves. (I would point out that since there is in fact no invisible oil paint this is a little bit of a hack and does still create a few anomalies, however by the time we re-size back down they are really trivial.)

Tiles and Sprites

Before Filters	After Filters (Including bump for tiles)

Separation from the far background.

We found that the characters and the background were too flush with the far background using the same filters we added a small drop shadow simply downwards on all graphics. This did give us the lift off the far background we needed. The effect is in fact very subtle but without it you can feel that something is wrong. It seams a lot of polishing things are like they are not really noticed by users but they are felt.

More cartoony. (is that a word!?)

The poster edges filter on the background's really gave them a nice cartoon feeling something we were missing from the original attempt at a new background but we were left with one problem they didn't gel that well with the mid-ground and for-ground tiles. At first we kept trying modifications to the background but eventually realised that we could in fact rather modify the mid and for-ground and so we did. Adjusting the contrast on the tiles further and adding a bump filter from the JavaImage library we found we in fact really improved the middle and for-ground graphics further. This same adjustment on the sprites proved a failure. We will keep our eyes open since its possible some of the tiles are a little broken from this change. We will manually fix any when we find them.

New Screen resolutions.

We don't really want Toxic to be played at any resolution the game and scale is partially balanced to the size. So we have picked 4 resolutions for the game to run in. t2 Wide screen ones and 2 normal screen ones. Below is a list of the current resolutions supported. We will look into others should a need arise.

• Low Normal 640x480


• Low Wide 640x480


• High Normal 1280x960


• High Wide 1600x1024