Giant Monsters and Map Editors

Hey hey everyone!

Just saw Cloverfield last night and thought it was pretty good. Definetly an awesome new take on giant monster movies. Since elementary school, I've been a big fan of gigantic monster movies. I've seen most of the 85-early 90's Godzilla movies (in my opinion the good generation). Hell I even have the soundtrack to those films (no one does big monster music like the japanese). After finishing the movie I can definetly say that Cloverfield ranks amongst my favorite. I have a few dissapointments but on the whole it was great. I don't think that all big monster movies should be done in this fashion from now but this dies provides some new inspiration (like The Office for TV).

My only major dissapointment was the Monster itself. All I'll say is that it is too limber for its size. Outside of that, extremely well done. Oh and do yourself a favor and stay for the music at the end of the film (only music in the whole movie). Its an excellent take on american and japanese big monster movie scores (if your into that whole thing).

On another note, I am working on updating the crap out of the Blobula Map Editor. First off, I am switching to XML as the file format for non-binary files coming from the map editor. This is going to allow the Map Editor to take in old map files and save them out in the newest format for the actual game. The game itself will require the newest version of maps but all you'll have to do for your maps is load them in then save them back out. I'll probably make some kind of batch tool in the editor for doing several maps at once.

Outside of the file junk, I'm adding some new features. I've just added copy/pasting for single shapes, a universal grid that will stay on the screen no matter where you go, and several camera controls in a "View" option (you can set the zoom, go back to origin, or just reset it). Some features coming up are group selected (moving, scaling, rotating, deleting, copy/paste) and also the ability to make "Palettes" out of groups of shapes. These will be saved so all you have to do is drag a palette on to the grid and it will appear there. I'll also make sure the pallette is saved externally to the editor so you can reuse it every time.

So now some big news: I didn't win the contest I submitted Blobula for at Full Sail but I am going to GDC anyhoos (in case I didn't mention the prize was a full badge to GDC). Pretty dang excited and looking forward to meeting a lot of industry folk. Got to get Blobula into tip/top shape before I go!