Do the Locomotion

I felt my blog lacked some picture-based updates so here are some character iterations combined with motion images. Yay!

The different staff designs and feathers and such are easy enough to add in or take out. One thing that would be rather difficult to animate would be these agapanthus leaves hanging off his back that turn into wings as he boosts. They'd look bad-ass though...
Also I've been trying to program a cube to move in Stencyl and so far I've got it to jump, double-jump and not stick to walls but my biggest issue at the moment is  to get the boost to move horizontally.
Until I get a name for this guy he shall be referred to as the Voodude.

Feeling Emotional

Our new project looks pretty sweet. The initial ideas I've had about what emotions I may want to convey are fear, freedom, love and anxiety.

For fear I would try and use shadows to my advantage. I would try and make my shots dark where patches of the screen are completely swallowed by blackness. Any person in the shot would be depicted as small compared to their surroundings. I would use focus to make ominous shapes out of otherwise normal things.

Freedom would entail shots that infer pressure or stress building up through movement in the camera and quick cutting. This would have to be paired quite precisely with music that builds up to a climactic level. On this release there would be extreme slow motion shots of people leaping in the air (perhaps off the warf) and lot of shots flooded with light.

Love is difficult. There are so many layers to it that it would be hard to contain them all into one clip and do them all justice. I had images in my mind of a couple with focus primarily on the man with dream-like shots of the woman using rich, soft lighting and shadow. This would be complimented with slow motion shots of the two spraying each other with paint. The metaphor would be enhanced by the brightness of the colours used and the joy on the couple's faces.

I also found some pretty awesome tracks for it;

https://soundcloud.com/telepathicteddybear/this-is-love
https://soundcloud.com/geoffbennett/vacation
https://soundcloud.com/geoffbennett/with-progress

Anxiety is the one I think I will end up going for. I would use a minimalistic soundtrack and abuse extreme close-ups to allow for the growing intensity of the emotion to come through. The minimal music would allow me to enhance sound effects such as the ticking of a clock or heavy breathing. The narrative would be about a man getting stood up at a date. The anxiety comes from him starting to worry that his date isn't going to show and in his boredom he begins to notice things in painfully close detail. Imagery I want to use is the water he drinks could be tainted with dark ink or food colouring (non-mixed for the floating effect) and shots of lonely things such as a solo pawn on a chess board or a wilting flower could be shown. Only at the end of the clip would you see that there is no one on the other side of the table.
Some potential background tunes I've been looking at so far;
https://soundcloud.com/all-voices-aloud/wthout-you
https://soundcloud.com/heard-by-himself-alone/you-and-i

Dem Bones

It's time to flesh out this conceptual skeleton with some narrative context. So the player is a forest spirit. Mankind's disregard for the life of the planet has reduced the world's forests to an absolute minimum, taking your power with it. Before they destroy the planet from overconsumption you must save as many tree spirits as you can. With these spirits you can regrow the forests once mankind is forced to find more sustainable modes of living.
As you die in the game your spirit becomes more and more detached from the material world and moves into a limbo-style version of the world. There, you can see the world's soul slowly corrupting  and falling apart. In this world all would be dark silhouettes against a lighter but ultimately dull background. Each tier above this would be more and more saturated in colour.
As an incentive for the player to move forward there could be a gradually advancing abyss that threatens to suck the player away. As the world falls apart the forest spirit you play as is threatened from being wiped from existence so you need to outrun the nothingness. You're not just collecting tree spirits to save them but they also validate your very existence.
Deep...

Keeping the Flow

After the lecture today I talked over my concepts with my classmates and we tossed around some ideas. A couple I thought were particularly good that Mark suggested were the addition of a ground-based 'slide' move which has the same key as the aerial boost move. This relationship in execution of the two moves would connect their in-game function. Both are used to move quickly as a dodge or to keep speed up but both have a set motion which the player must commit to, meaning the won't be used willy-nilly.
The other idea I liked was a remapping of the controls on the keyboard. Mark suggested I use the space bar as the jumping key and the shift key for the boost/slide as both keys are commonly associated with such manoeuvres. This would mean both he player's left and right hands need to be used to control the character which is a fairly standard and comfortable set-up.
Another idea discussed was that in the third tier of the world the enemies shouldn't just disappear but broken versions of the should be hanging around, either for use by the player or as an obstruction. An example could be a piston-fist (as I so lovingly named those big grinning engines) that has fallen from its roof mount and is forlornly pumping upwards which a player could use to launch themselves into the air.
As far as camera goes I would not want it to move up or down at all, merely across. If there are plenty of pitfalls in the fourth tier it would become frustrating if players were unable to tell whether or not there is a platform below them to fall on because the camera is too high. For this reason the on-screen character would need to be relatively small so that several heights could be reached. Then again, if I wanted the difficulty to increase this idea could be disregarded entirely. I would need to implement a camera that knows when to move based on the player's height in the level.
In terms of animation I need to keep in mind the idea of 'how' the character moves the way they do. There needs to be some kind of game world reason on how they can slide, double-jump and boost they way I intend them to. Looking over my initial concepts, despite the tree man with the leaf-afro being my favourite I feel the black stag skull dude with the voodoo staffs is my best one to work with. His appearance is mysterious enough that players won't question as much how this character moves so athletically and the double-jump and aerial boost could be explained by the staffs on his back. He could even be holding them as he goes. With the addition of some hoodoo magic graphics he could look sweet as he traverses the map.
In fact the more I write about it the more my mind is making itself up.

A Necessary Sequel to Avatars

Between Stencyl tutorials I did some more drawing over the weekend. Here we have some more player avatars as well as some enemy concepts. The enemies are exaggerated icons of industry and deforestation that would attack on set motion paths or rhythms. They would appear mostly on the first and second tiers to make traversal not the only obstacle (considering the world would be whole or mostly whole is these worlds and too easy otherwise).

I was considering having some kind of super stomp ability that could remove enemies from the world but I feel making the player defenceless would mean the game's difficulty could be maintained. Also considering the players traversal abilities would be quite effective, dodging enemies would be more efficient than trying to eliminate them (also this would make it comparable to passive protests against deforestation yadayadayada). Speaking of which, the traversal of the platform world could be broken down into five commands;

- Run (arrow key)

- Jump (up or space key)

- Double-Jump (up or space key again)

- Wall Hike (up or space key when next to a wall)

- Aerial Boost (up or space key, whichever isn't jump, while in the air)

The Jump/Double-Jump would function simply enough, Wall Hike would need some kind of switch or state for the game to recognise when a character is against a wall to give them the free jump (which would only be usable once, no Super Meat Boy wall hopping), and the Aerial Boost would be a move the player commits to. Once it is initiated the player would be launched in the direction they're facing at a set speed and distance before they gain control of their character again. I'm tempted to allow the Wall Hike to reset the player's Aerial Boost ability so they can Jump, Aerial Boost, Wall Hike, Aerial Boost, Double-Jump to reach particularly difficult platforms in the lower tiers or to dodge enemies.

Space Smirfs and Other Avatars

Of the three mechanic concepts I discussed in my presentation the one I want to focus on in my prototype is the changing environment. Discussing this with some classmates I came to the decision that the player would have infinite lives but there would be about four tiers of the world that the player could exist on. Dying in one tier would drop the player to the tier below. Borrowing the idea of conservation of resources the player would have some kind of token/limited power that they could sacrifice to move up a tier but are stuck on whatever tier they are on if they run out. Checkpoints could be available that boost characters up for free, depending on how difficult the game should be.
Since the idea of sustainability needs to be prominent in the game the upper tiers would have the world be whole, or close to it, and the lower tiers would be far more corrupt and falling apart. Navigating the terrain in the lower tiers would be more difficult than the upper tiers but the upper ones could hold enemies (creatures that want to harm the environment) that try to kill the player and send them to lower tiers.
The player would be some kind of forest spirit that is trying to get through each platform level to some kind of goal (yet to be decided) so they can save that segment of the planet from the industrial world; sort of nature fighting back. These are the character designs I've come up with so far:

My favourite at the moment is probably the tree because he has an afro of leaves but the stag-skull dude looks pretty cool as well. I was going to crank out some more concepts between Stencyl tutorials as well as some sketches on how the traversal in the game would work. At the moment I'm thinking of a jump, double-jump, horizontal air-boost, wall hike sort of deal.

MDDN 211 "Iterate" - Post-submission Reflection

Well my video compilation is all done and dusted. As far as my original proposal goes I made some changes to my editing techniques. Nothing drastic, but enough that I felt I should mention it here. The first iteration of "Pill Popping" (as I decided to call the compilation) has a "Fun" atmosphere, representing the pills as uppers. The primary editing technique in this clip is adjusting the pace of the footage. I also used pacing to emphasize it is the pills that have the acceleration effect. The second iteration is "Calming", where the primary technique I used was slow fade transitions to white space and cross-dissolves. Whether or not this is just the computer's speakers the heartbeat I put into this clip wasn't audible, despite it being loud in the video file. Headphones seem to pick up on it okay. The final iteration is about "Addiction," where the primary technique was repetition combined with intense pacing.

P.S. In no way do I support drugs :)