Got Wood?

This one took a long time. So far each of the other sprites I've been doing have been only one or two bits moving but this had so many, and the perspective wasn't playing nice.

Hopefully it looks good in Stencyl. The saw dust... rrrrgh the sawdust. Well at least now I get to focus on a giant steampunk spider. And I'm totally okay with that.

Surprise! Bonus Frames

Just an addition to my storyboard;

With these additions, I would consider my storyboard to be a good map of my ideas. I can tell a lot of shots I get on the day will be improvised based on the situations and environments we are placed in, but some sequences like the photography one I will definitely try to capture.

The Chopping Block

It was the interim today for 243 and based on feedback from the tutor our game needs to get intimate with a blade of sorts and cut down to something achievable within the time frame we have left. Talking individually with them post-presentation indicated that it would be better if we were able to produce a shorter and far more polished game with one level and everything functioning, rather than a longer game with numerous moderate quality levels. Personally I prefer the suggested path as it means we can bring in one of the bosses. Given we have three weeks until the beta is required then I should have plenty of time to get the boss illustrated and animated and if Andrew nails the code for the obstacles then it would only be a short step to get the boss's AI functioning. The specifications of our game have been cut down to the following;
One level; Deforestation
Obstacles:
- buzz saws
- log
- hole
- single arm boss cameo
- double arm boss cameo
Environment:
- background panes
- lanes
Boss: Spider
- tracking saw arm
- piston stomp
- projectile saw
- heat up lane
Mask:
- earth style (temporary invulnerability)
Music:
- war drums remix
Sound Effects:
- lots
Menu:
- cut-down stage map (start game and settings)
Cheers facebook.
Yes, it's disappointing we won't be able to incorporate all our original ideas into the final game but we were told this was going to happen so here we are.

An Interview With Rosie

Here are frames to my storyboard for my interview with Rosie;

Considering my style of interview is going to be a "day in the life of..." it's quite hard to plan exactly what is going to happen. These more or less show techniques I plan on using. The technique that comes to mind the most often when I visualise this project is a lot of B-roll with voice-overs. I like the idea that the interview may give the audience a glimpse into Rosie's mind and having her disembodied voice talking to them directly could suggest they are being presented with her thoughts directly.

Bring the Beat

Well I've found a kickass potential soundtrack for our game;
https://soundcloud.com/achmadfauzisahri1/logaritmo-war-drums-phunk
Something like this has the pacing as well as tribal war drums we envisioned with some awesome techno thrown in there as well.
I've also managed to embed a couple of images into the stained glass aesthetic since Chris was able to put up some environment art.

It will be cool to see some of this stuff implemented in Stencyl.

A Proposal I Suppose

I intend to interview my high school friend Rosie Remmerswaal who studies design at Toi Whakaari. She is a very creative person and I find the work that she produces and the lifestyle she leads to be very interesting. He studies at Toi Whakaari have given her some unique experience and the communities she is part of help build a creative world around her.

The style of the interview would be like a video diary with the occasional studio based sequence. I will employ a lot of on-site shooting and make no attempts to hide the presence of the camera. I may even go so far as to allow my voice to be heard asking questions to get dynamic real-time reactions from Rosie. As the interview is a peek into her life as a Design Student and a resident of Wellington I want to employ close-ups and focus pulls to emphasise this. Most of the shots will take place during the day but the last shots would be either near dusk or at night. I will use After Effects to alter some shots (specifically the credits and any introductory screens/shots I choose to employ). I also intend on utilizing stop motion for some B-roll sequences from design models she has made.

Its video diary style would mean that there is no definitive end for the interview’s narrative. Instead the structure would be as follows; exposition of the threads I want to interview Rosie about, the development of these threads, followed by the staggered conclusions. I hope to be able to weave these threads together throughout the interview but if this seems too sporadic I’ll make sure to have back-up footage that links the threads through interview questions.

My Wrist is Trying to Tell Me Something

It keeps clicking. An injury I sustained in the weekend has prevented me from accomplishing as much as I'd hoped I would by today so I only have some refined hole obstacle sprites to show tonight.

These were originally just black trapeziums but I went around their edges with some smoky photoshop brushes to give them this 'ink-well' look that is universal enough that they could be used in any of the levels. Chris and I also discussed today the potential to drop the engine/gas level from the game entirely (cutting it down to four levels) and bringing the electricity level to the sky in a storm cloud. We want the game to be polished and looking good so shaving of bits from the game, although disappointing, seems like a necessary step if we are going to complete this in the time we have.

I Can See a Rainbow

Skittles are the best...

Sounds Good to Me

Here is the list of Sound Effects we hope to have, courtesy of Mark Lindsay's ability to type:
-Menu Soundtrack
- Option select effect
- Back to menu effect


-Per level Soundtrack- Level start effect- Level completed effect- Each obstacle effect (sawblade, logs, glass etc)
-Mask Soundtrack- Soul collection effect- Mask creation effect- Mask collection effect- Mask leaving effect (Aku-Aku "OH MY GOLLY GOSH!!!")
-Boss Fight Soundtrack- Boss sound effects
Character Sound Effects:-Jump-Land-Step-Lane Slide-Character collision

Clear Aesthetics

In today's place after the progress check the team discussed general progress. We looked at sound design and made an extensive list of the sound effects we needed. We also researched music for the boss battles, drawing inspiration from games like Shatter and Intrusion 2. Chris and I also reconsidered our aesthetic for the game. So far he's been pushing this idea of stained glass mosaics as a visual theme, and I feel this has a lot of potential. In all honesty I hadn't put much thought into the game's visual style beyond "it needs to be abstracted from literal tunnels" and having a distinctive and consistent aesthetic will bring an overall quality to the game that it otherwise would have been lacking.
What this means in terms of character and object sprites is we will use far more flat colour and posterise everything. Detail will be sacrificed but this is not necessarily a bad thing. If the sprites are able to be produced faster then I can focus on making the motion fluid and believable.
The other thing this aesthetic focus will bring to the game is give a kind of fable-like quality, as if the game was a story told to small children to make them recycle or something... Anyway, I recently did a render of the water power-up mask which conveniently fit the style (huzzah!).

This kind of singular undertones and highlights will make shading everything so much easier. I've also had plenty of practice with it in the past as it was the style in which I presented my first 243 project. How cute.

Good Thing We Didn't Do a Corporate Boss

"Request Resume" would have been a lame attack. What I do have for the interwebs this morning is some delicious boss refinements. These sketches are based off the feedback the rest of the team gave on my original concepts so once we crank out some levels that work and feel we could get away with adding two or three then all we have to do is pick up from here.

As much fun as these have been to design I have more pressing matters to attend to. Like cutting virtual logs in half with more buzzsaws :)

I Saw What You Did There

Tehe

I apologise for the smaller posts recently but since we made the facebook group for our team I post things on that and this simultaneously so they guys have access to everything as soon as it's ready. Anyway, buzz-saw sprites. The originals had no blur on them but Chris pointed out they would look far less pasted on if they were less crisp.

Cute

Soul sprites

Cool.

MDDN211 Experience Final Submission

My final video for Anxiety.

Go Team

Today's session brought with it an intense discussion on the direction we were taking Soul Furnace as a group. Chris had received some excellent feedback regarding the demo I produced for the last assignment. Pretty much what he'd come across is that the gimmick of having the screen rotate as you played was too overpowering and became nauseating for players who wanted to play the game for a long time. They also found that the rotation of the world made controls confusing when the character had moved to the opposite side of the circle. We considered making the game a side-scroller for the sake of programming and art ease but this form lost a lot of the original game's charm. We settled for maintaining the circle aesthetic but removed the automatic rotation of the world as well as took a more abstracted approach to the environments.
Having made a final decision on what we want to change we now know how to approach each of the different aspects of the game. Our goal by this coming Thursday is to have a tweaked demo that displays an obstacle/collectable colliding with the player (code provided by Andrew, sprites by myself), as well as have a new alternative environment design (Chris) and the beginnings of a menu set-up (Mark).
Additionally I intend to produce refined boss concepts for each of the levels, based of the responses the team made to the concepts I showed them today. More on that as I get it done...

Like a Cliche

Although the Boss encounters in our game are at the priority stage of 'could be,' there is little I can do for our game until we get the basic code down for collisions so I didn't want my weekend to go to waste. I drew up some conceptual sketches for boss characters for each of the resource focussed levels, trying to stick as much as possible to the theme each level carries. So far what I have are these;

These may very well never surface again but if we find ourselves with enough time to implement them then at least we have a good place to start.

Aku-Akus and Ooga-Boogas

Depending on what you called them when you were a kid. Personally it got to me when people would refer to wumpa fruit as "apples". Anyway, here are some mask concepts I've drawn for the different power-ups:

There is a level of simplicity that needs to come with the designs as the size of Voodude doesn't allow for too much detail. I feel we can afford to make the masks large by comparison so they are distinctive enough, also making it clear when the player has one on. Before I develop any further I want to see what the others come up with and we can take the best features from them to make some bastard offspring that looks awesome. In the meantime I'll be working on some boss/character concepts so that by Monday we can collaborate and decide what to start making and animating in photoshop.

There is No "I" in "Team", or "Management" For That Matter

So today was our big post-holiday pow-wow. As our group was only able to keep in contact over the holidays via online updates it was good to see the guys again in person where we could discuss and plan efficiently. A progress overview to date shows that everything we plan on doing is still highly conceptual. The movement controls and core concepts at the moment are locked down, which is comforting to know. Having a solid base to build on makes things seem more stable. There is still lots to do of course, which can be generally labelled as such: obstacles/collectables/power-ups (all summed up delightfully by "colliding stuff"), boss battles, level design, sound design, menu screens, cutscenes, unlockables. These are all features. It goes without saying that testing and debugging will also consume a lot of time but that will be a consistent process opposed to a slot in the pipeline.
In our meeting today I wanted to widen the production pipeline as much as possible by divvying out individual and manageable tasks for everyone to have done by Monday. The most important task is under Andrew's care in solving the code for a collision with an obstacle and the player. With this code working we can essentially build the entire obstacle/soul/power-up features on top of it.
The rest of the team is more art focussed which suits the stage we are at at the moment. The three of us have until Monday to get as many conceptual sketches of characters, obstacles, bosses and environments as we can. Ideally, with a huge range of imagery to choose from we will be able to pick the best concepts and begin implementing them within photoshop to produce sprites for Stencyl to work with.
We also sorted out a lot of things that were originally rather vague, such as how tough the game was going to be on the player; whether they would have only one life and have to be highly reactive like in Super Hexagon, or if it will be more life-focussed where the player has a number of chances/opportunities to beat each level. Pretty much what we decided on after an excellent idea by Chris is that the player would be collecting souls so the level's fuel gauge decreases. Based on certain percentages the gauge has left the difficulty of the game changes e.g. the less the gauge has left the more chaotic things are for the player. Difficulty in Soul Furnace would be determined by how rapidly the screen is rotating, how fast obstacles are being spawned, how restrictive these obstacles ore of the player's movement, and how difficultly the souls are placed apart from one another. The less fuel the level has left, the higher percentage there is for more difficult obstacle combos to appear. Getting hit by an obstacle reduces the amount of souls you have, knocking them into the furnace and refuelling the level. This will cause everything to slow down again and become easier but costs the player progress. The only way for a player to die is to collide with an obstacle while holding no souls, which could end in a game over.
Another thing we settled in today's meeting was the method by which power-ups are made. If a player collects a fixed number of souls consecutively then the power-up appears and they are able to reap the benefits as long as they continuously collect souls. These power-ups would manifest as masks that the player's avatar puts on. Each mask would visually represent the power-up it provides. So far the power-ups are looking to be as follows;
- Forest level exclusive: Player channels the power of Earth to provide themselves with a shield that blocks one obstacle (player much recharge from beginning once expended)
- Oil refinery level exclusive: Player channels the power of Water to thin the level's fuel and deplete the gauge at an increased rate
- Engine level exclusive: Player channels the power of Air to keep himself afloat for an increased amount of time when jumping
- Power grid level exclusive: Player channels the power of Electricity to detect oncoming obstacles before they arrive, giving themselves plenty of warning before they are put in danger
The final level would contain each of these power-ups generated semi-randomly.
We set a deadline for our group to have a completed game to show for the critical interim. This gives us two weeks of "faffing about" where we can add all the bonus stuff we've been thinking of as well as give what we have some extra polish. It also means we have set deadlines to meet which will make work more consistent.