Cristina's Blog

Exercise 2: Cut-out Animation Cut-out animation is the process of animating a subject frame by frame using paper or some other medium such as card, stiff fabric, etc. Although cut-out animation has now progressed to being done on computers using gif files and images, the forerunner of this was done by using paper. To perform a cut-out animation, the animator cut out several objects/characters and stitched these together using photography. Our task was to produce a short cut-out animation by using the animation rostrum as a team. Every team had been given a word, in which the letter of the word must perform the action of the word. Our word was "EAT" and we cut out a Pac-Man like character along with some food out of paper. The character had a few instances of mouth movement from mouth closed to mouth open and we took photographs of each stage from mouth opening to mouth wide open, then the food disappearing and finally mouth closing again. These photographs will now ...

There are many different types of application software which are being used in game development today. Although some of these were not originally intended for use as game development software, they have come to be known for this purpose. Take Photoshop for example, this was originally created to manipulate the early digital photographs and has evolved from this stage to be used for art in general and as such provides a good tool for 2D image processing. Photoshop is now part of Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Many other software vendors provide simple drawing and painting applications such as:  Alchemy, Painter, SketchBook pro, etc. These are used in the development of 2D art either for backgrounds, characters, sprites, etc. or for 3D games where textures are needed and any other art needed for the UI (user interface). Moving on from 2D, modern computers allow the use of shading and perspective to give a 3D experience. Obviously this requires different technologies and this b...

CURRENT HARDWARE TECHNOLOGIES Processor – all machines use a processor which can be likened to the brain of the machine. Processors come in many different sizes, speeds and prices with some of them costing thousands of pounds ( £ ). They started off with the Intel 8080 many years ago, running machine code and assembler and progressed through 80286, 80386 and Pentium before moving on to the current Intel i5, i7 and i9 architecture. Each new generation of microprocessors packs more into the same sized chip as its predecessor and this has been predicted by a well-known scientist Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel stating that the number of components per integrated circuit will double every year. Each new line of processors is more powerful than the last allowing such features as multi-threading, which is the ability for the processor to do more tasks at the same time dependent upon the number of cores available. For instance my computer is a Core 2 Quad which is a 64 bit f...

ARCADE - noun ar·cade \ är-ˈkād \ - an amusement centre having coin operated games. Derived from Arcade, a covered passage way, in the late 1960’s entrepreneurs changed this definition slightly when they installed their gaming machines in covered passage ways and buildings and thus coined (no pun intended) the new definition Arcade Game. An arcade game was a large coin operated video game intended to entertain people. The games were very limited at this stage due to the technology involved and each advance in technology at this time meant that machines had to be replaced with a complete new machine. The most well-known games of this era are Donkey Kong, Pack-man, Space invaders and Mario.   Features: Most arcade games are very similar in operation, consisting at that time of a glass CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screen, four or eight way joystick and several other buttons completed by a coin input slot to activate the games. 1.        CR...