8 months agoOne more for the night. Lots more to come!
Huge props to the makers of Sword and Sworcery for refreshing the way I see pixel art.
Beginning Character Concepts
I began sketching character concepts, but as usual for me, I end up writing more than drawing. This comes from thinking about the concept behind the creature before the creature itself, which is apparently encouraged but it does result in less sketches. The environments I am toying with are ones in which symbiosis between organisms has been crucial to their mutual survival. I figure some kind of disaster brought about by humans is a good place to start, and an interesting way to get rapid evolution is through symbiosis. I also thought about how animals could adapt even further to living in urban environments, which could be interesting. I ended up arriving at cyborgs a bit too often though.
10 months ago
Tom Francis’ Epic Gal Civ 2
I mentioned this article in class, so thought I’d post it.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/161570/blog/galciv-2-war-report-final-en…
Tom is now a very well known name in games journalism, and for good reason. This is one of the first accounts I remember reading of someone playing a game, and recounting their adventures in story form.
As gripping as it is hilarious.
Dwarf Fortress also inspires the story treatment, as it is similarly large and open in scope. See “Boatmurdered”.
The Dune
Our great-grandfather who art in strategy heaven, Dune II be thy name. Thy House come, thy will be done, on Earth as it was on Arrakis.
Give us this day our daily spice, and forgive us our harvesting, as we forgive those who harvest against us.
And lead us not into sandworms’ mouths, but deliver to us Fremen.
For he who controls the spice controls the universe, for ever and ever, Westwood.
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Jonathan Blow - Farmville is farming people
Another lecture from Jonathan Blow, this one a more recent talk at Rice University.
He covers similar ground to the other lecture I posted, but packages it in a different (if slightly long-winded) way, ripping into Farmville and other “parasitic” games in general. I’m still not sure how to go about designing a game with inherent value, or where the balance is between good design and disrespectful manipulation, but I sure do want to find out. These talks are seeding some serious thoughts on game design for me, hopefully I’ll be able to arrange and present them here in the near future.
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Game Screenshots
Until I figure out how to upload a playable version of the game demo itself, here are some screenshots of it in action.
Sprited Away
Joules’ walk cycle is now sprited and coloured!
Much work looms, but I do not fear it.
Creative Commons Resources
As requested, here are some good creative commons resources for media.
An excellent source for audio, focused on sound effects. Ambient background noise tracks for various environments, samples of specific machinery, synthetic pops and clicks, it’s all here. Really easy to use too. All the foley audio for a 3D animation I made last trimester was from here (shameless plug).
Massive amounts of media on here, video and audio and everything in between. This site is better if you want to find radio broadcasts from 1947, or samples of TV ads, or weird things like that. Quite a massive site with many aspects, harder to use than Freesound.
Specifically for Creative Commons music. This is a community of remixers and authors who put up everything from drum loops to finished tracks. A lot of high quality stuff on here, and I’ve used it for projects before.
Character Walk Cycle
(download)
This is Joules. He is cute and savvy and has enormous goggles. This 8 frame walk cycle was drawn in Illustrator, imported into After Effects for previewing the animation, and then iterated through between the two for refinement. The goggles are supposed to look a bit loose for cuteness.
I am now going to down-sample this and make a sprite version for importing into flash. Wish me luck!
Character Brainstorm
I started just sketching weird stuff, mostly without any direction apart from trying to be a little odd or provocative.
Then I had my space junk idea. Space junk is a quirky, quasi-environmental issue, which let me use the interesting setting of space. The spacemen fit well into this environment, so they were my first characters. However, they lacked anything interesting to differentiate them from just normal astronauts, and did not embody any aspect of the spacejunk theme. I started exploring personifications of other space-worthy things, like rockets and space stations, with the idea that they would be hurt by spacejunk (they are the actual victims of spacejunk).
As I tried to refine the theme and setting, I kept running into the same problems. How can I make this issue convincing? Who is my audience? Spacejunk doesn’t really affect anyone, and raising awareness of it is pointless. So I decided to try branching out. That’s when this idea came to me: use an everyday environmental issue but use a weird setting. Ironically I went back to my very first sketch - a cute goggle-wearing alien engineer - and gave him a problem. There is only a finite amount of energy on his spaceship, and he needs to speed up his ship. How to do this? Turn things off! The theme is now energy conservation/efficiency, similar to government ‘Switch Off’ campaigns. But with a way more interesting setting.
I set about refining the character. The key points are:
- He needs to be likeable. Likeable = people want to emulate him, and his positive behaviour. This makes him persuasive.
- He needs to look intelligent. This is for the same reasons as above, plus he owns and operates a spaceship so it’s also logical.
- He needs to look alien. This also fits the setting, but is subtley persuasive as well. It says, “hey, the aliens know about energy efficiency, and look at their awesome technology. Maybe we should be like them.”
