I finished roughing out Molly’s run cycle and thought I’d share a few work in progress animated gifs. So here she is running south west.
The various guidlines help me keep the issometric perspective streight and her stride consistent. The numbers are for leg poses. Red 3 and Green 3 are the same pose but flipped so the left and right leg are in opposite positions. The running animation is using six frames per stride, twelve frames total.
The flat Out of this Worldstyle shading is temporary. Previously I’ve worked with rough shaded versions of the fully shaded character but I’m finding this method much faster, it also lets me concentrate on the movement without worrying about small details.
I usually also do a full rotation of the first pose. It helps ensure that when I start the animation for each direction I’m at least being roughly consistent. I like that it looks like pixel art bullet time.
Back in November we gave a live demo of the Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution prototype at the awesome Gamercamp v1.0 conference here in Toronto. Organizers Jaime Woo and Mark Rabo are now putting everything from the conference up online for anyone who missed the event. So here’s our demo:
The first bit is a basic intro to the game but around 8 minutes in we start demoing a level with new plants and features that haven’t been shown in any of the development videos so far. Hopefully this will tide you over till the next Dev vid is out.
We finished our game “The Night Balloonists” for the GAMMA4 competition and submitted it last night. I can’t say if it’ll be one of the winning selections, but Andrew and I feel we really nailed the gameplay and visual goals we set ourselves when we started so in that sense the game is already a success on a personal level. The game is a lot of fun and we’ve had a few really good marathon multiplayer sessions testing it with friends.
Apparently this year there were an staggering 154 entries to GAMMA (the most entries previously was something like 18) so competition will be fierce. 154 is also just a staggering number of one button games and I’m really looking forward to playing them and seeing how other teams approached the challenge. The TIGForums have a great series of threads where people have been giving cryptic sneak peeks. In the spirit of those I’m posting this little collage of images from our game:
hint: not all of these images are visible to the players
That and the image in my previus post will have to tide you over till after the GAMMA4 winners are announced and we put the game up online for general consumption.
I’m also going to be recording a making of video like we do for Guerrilla Gardening with some technical details, and discussion of design decisions when making a single button game that would be played at a large social event. Oh and we’re also planning on making sure the game is compliant with one switch gaming for people with disabilities, hopefully GAMMA4 is going to lead to a whole bunch of new games for that under served community of players.
Thought I’d post a little new year’s sneak peak from our work in progress Gamma 4 submission. It’s all about the semi-organic art nouveau steampunk balloons.
Been a bit slow on both the twitter and blog updates lately, we’re still trying to figure out balancing working on the small freeware games, the bloggy stuff and the contract work that keeps us afloat between grants. We’ll get the right mix eventually I’m sure!
2009 was fantastic, full of great people, great indie games, and a lot of hard, rewarding work. Here’s to another year full of strange, interesting, awesome games!
Despite the mysterious absence of the mighty Torontron, Gamercamp last weekend was a fantastic success. Andrew and I kicked things off with a short demo of Guerrilla Gardening and were followed by several hours of local indie hotness in the form of short demos and longer talks. Everything was caught on tape so videos of our demo should be up online soon. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the organizers: Mark Rabo and Jaime Woo take a well earned break before getting that stuff up online.
Andrew and Miguel address the United Nations regarding their resolution for the deification of molluscs with bilateral symmetry.
After the disappointing corporateness of this years Vortex Competition, Gamercamp was breath of fresh air, putting the artistry of games front and centre. I can’t wait to see how it grows and matures over the next few years. I may get my wish of a Toronto equivalent to Culver city’s Indiecade yet.
The event’s been well covered on local blogs, here’s a little round up:
BlogTO – I’m totally flashing the crowd gang signs in their photo.
Toronto Thumbs – Wisely choose to show an image from Guerrilla Gardening instead of our ugly mugs.
A Couple of Gamers – Kindly described me as “looking like a hot indie dj” rather then “wild haired and unkempt, eyes filled with madness”.
The Toronto indie game events for this month aren’t over yet! The next Hand Eye Society Social is this Thursday (Nov. 26). It’s open to the general public as always and hosted this time by musical shooter artisan Jonathan Mak of Queasy Games.
It’s been awhile since the last post. Sorry about that. We’ve been busy getting ready for production proper and putting together a grant proposal.
Night of the Cephalopods is now playable on the Torontron, an old retro videogame cabinet that was retrofitted by Jph Wacheski and some other folks in the Hand Eye Society to play a selection of Toronto indie games. It’s currently looking for a semi-permanent home, till then it’s making the rounds of various local indie media and game events. It already showed up at Canzine, and tomorrow (Sat Nov 20th) it will be part of the excellent looking Gamercamp event. Gamercamp is set to have lots of talks and demos about games by local independent developers, including Andrew and myself who’ll be demoing some new Guerrilla Gardening stuff. The day ends with a freeplay retro arcade so the Torontron won’t be lonely.
Here’s a gallery of photos of the Torontron in all its retro glory:
The game with the two birds is Albacross, by friend of Spooky Squid Games Rosemary Mosco. Since she wasn’t available I ended up rigging it to work on the cabinet.
I’ve been putting some time into improving Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence lately, adding more squidy things, more art, and sound effects. I’ll be putting a new build up at some point but I thought I’d share a recent screen shot for now.
Here’s the mock-up art for the final version of Guerrilla Gardening. I’ve put bits and pieces of these up previously but this is the first time I’m showing the full screens. As you can see these are no small improvement over the prototype!
To be clear these aren’t screenshots inside the game engine (at least not yet!), but they help Andrew and I figure out what features we’ll need in the final tile engine and it gives me a visual goal for the rest of the art. It’s also a damn good morale boost seeing how the final game should look!
Of course there will be changes and just how much variety we manage to pack in will depend on how much time I have to work on environmental art after the core animations and other essentials are finished. However, over all, this is what you can expect from the final game when it’s complete!
These thumbnails are significantly shrunk down, I really recommend clicking through and looking at the full size images.
No plants and no happy citizens
A few plants and some citizens are getting happy
Lots of plants and all the citizens are super happy and rebellious!
I mentioned this on twitter last week but I’ve also done a writeup on the fantastic Indiecade festival I attended last month for Abootplay.ca that you should check out.
Here’s yet another batch of Eric Kim’s character sketches for the game. As before: rough drafts, probably will be changes, no names yet and not giving too much info to avoid spoilers.
If you haven’t seen the previous character art I posted:
I’m posting two more of General Bauhaus’ ministers today and they’re pretty much polar opposites. In fact I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to get along very well…
The Minister of Truth and Entertainment
The Minister of Truth and Entertainment
This one’s a real favorite among us, I think it’s the sparkly military outfit. He’s in charge of both public surveillance (those obquitous CCTV cameras) and propaganda on state television. Every weekend he runs a popular variety show that combines the two. The things on his arms and shoulders are little camera bots.
The Minister of Trade and Contraband
The Minister of Trade and Contraband
This minister is in charge of policing the borders of the city and keeping ‘dangerous illegal contraband’ like plants and seeds from being smuggled in. To help him achieve this goal he’s been put in charge of the police K9 unit and in truth cares more about his dogs then he does about border security.
While the Minister of Entertainment is all glitz and glamor this Minister sees himself as a bit of a rebel and dresses the part.
Without color it’s difficult to tell, but each of the Ministers wears a variation of the same military jacket. We’re also planning on giving them some similar insignia and the same basic color scheme, this will help unify their diverse character designs. We could have given them all the exact same uniform and style but I think it’s much more fun to go this rout and let them really stand out from each other.
I’m not entirely happy with his official title, it’s not quite as amusing and self contradictory as most of the others so it’ll probably get changed at some point.
Here’s the next batch of Eric Kim’s character sketches for the game. As before: rough drafts, probably will be changes, no names yet and not giving too much info to avoid spoilers. If you haven’t seen the previous art I posted… click here… and here.
The Kid
The Kid
A street kid that the Guerrilla Gardener’s adopt. The version on the right is how he looks when they find him, on the left how he looks after Molly gives him a haircut and some hand-me-downs. His personal transformation nicely mirrors the in game transformation of citizens from depression to super happy citizens. I want to find a way to keep that little sticky up hair when he gets his mohawk in the final version. It’s a nice identifying mark and will help link the two designs.
The Minister of the Environment and Chemical Weapons
The Minister of the Environment & Chemical Weapons
General Bauhous has deligated various duities to his Ministers. Each of them have slightly weird contradictory titles. This particular minister is a grizzled vet with an obsession for spicy foods and tear gas (that’s a hot pepper in his mouth not a cigarette).
These would have been up earlier if I hadn’t been at the best indie games festival ever (aka IndieCade’ 09) in Culver City over the weekend. Twenty nine fantastic games were playable with a real emphasis on diversity along with a bunch of interesting and entertaining talks, but the real star of the conference was the laid back atmosphere. I easily made more friends at this one event then I have from attending the last three years of the GDC. If you’re an indie developer or working on becoming one I cannot recommend attending the next IndieCade enough. Adam over at Attract Mode has a nice little write up that sums it up with a photo of a bunch of us and Keita ‘Katamari’ Takahashi at the after party playing Tuning.
I finished roughing out Molly’s run cycle and thought I’d share a few work in progress animated gifs. So here she is running south west.
The flat Out of this World style shading is temporary. Previously I’ve worked with rough shaded versions of the fully shaded character but I’m finding this method much faster, it also lets me concentrate on the movement without worrying about small details.
