New ‘Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence’ Screen

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.

click for big chunky pixels

Mock-up of Final Screens!

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.

Character Concepts: The Minister of Truth and Entertainment and The Minister of Trade and Contraband

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:

• Molly’s portrait
• General Bauhaus and The Scientist
• The Kid and The Minister of the Environment and Chemical Weapons

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.

Character Concepts: The Kid – The Minister of the Environment and Chemical Weapons

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.

Character Concepts: General Bauhaus – The Scientist

As promised I’m going to start posting some of Eric Kim’s excellent concept work for the cast of Guerrilla Gardening. All of these will eventually get the inks and full colour treatment you see in Molly’s portrait. Since these are concepts, some of them will probably change and a few may get scrapped or replaced as I work on the story and Andrew and I flesh out the game proper.  I’m also going to keep the info on each minimal since I don’t want to spoil anything.  My  plan is to post one or two of these every weekend for the next month or so.

The Scientist The Scientist An important member of the Guerrilla Gardeners she develops the fast growing plants Molly uses.  I’m thinking of changing her hair to differentiate her a bit more from Molly, it’s a different style but still a little too close, since they both have their hair up.  On the other hand once it’s coloured she may look different enough.  She doesn’t have a proper name yet and I’m happy to keep it that way till I’m farther along in the writing.  I’ll probably give her a name that references a famous woman scientist or two.

General Bauhaus General Bauhaus The game’s ‘big bad’, his military dictatorship banned all plants from the city. His design is close to final, although Eric and I discussed giving his uniform a bit more decoration, after Eric drew Bauhaus’ rather eccentric group of ministers the General started looking a little plain in comparison.  His name  comes from the European architectural movement with it’s sparse functional approach.   Tangent! I’m actually leaning toward Brutalism for most of the government buildings in the game, but General Brualist has a very different connotation and Bauhaus just sounds right.

That’s it for now.  I’ll post another sketch or two next weekend.  I’m off to L.A. for Indiecade at the end of the week, but I’m going to try to post another, more pixel art filled, update before I leave.

The Prototyping is Finished!

But at what cost?

Scary facts: these weren't all the coffee cups lying around my house when we finished. Also Andrew doesn't drink coffee, only I do.

Last week we finished the prototype, and a truckload of support docs  (updated design doc, sound lists, character and story stuff etc.) and submitted everything to the OMDC, who provided us with a significant funding grant for the pre-production phase.   It was an exhausting experience, but feels good to be finished.

The prototype is still rough around the edges, but ended up providing a much meatier gameplay experience then expected.  It has 19 levels:  14 of which are small tutorial levels to introduce the basic mechanics of the game and the plants available to the player, 5 of which are slightly larger levels that introduce more complex puzzles and challenges.   The whole thing takes Andrew or myself around 45 minutes to speed run through and takes a new player who doesn’t know the fastest solution to each level closer to two hours.   When we started this I guessed we’d have maybe, maybe 20 minutes of gameplay.

Downside to this is that every time a significant change was made to the code we’d lose 45 minutes + playing through and looking for bugs.   To make it even more fun, we had one bug that would only occur if we played through two specific levels in sequence!

Now that we’re done I’m taking some time off, doing a bit of contract artwork and slowly planning and budgeting for the production version of the game.  I’m also going to try to get more updates and videos up here soon.  There’s a real backlog of neat stuff to show.

It’s also time to polish up the Cephalopod games.  The plan is to first finish off Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence since it’s closest to completion and smaller in scope, then fix some issues with the sound engine in Night of the Cephalopods so that it will be able to gracefully handle the huge amount of audio the final version needs.    If all goes well I’ll be putting out Cottage Defence in the next month or two, with Night of the Cephalopods following after a similar period.    We’ll see how it goes, if luck holds both will be released before production starts on Guerrilla Gardening and I have to switch my focus back .

New Super Happy Citizen Art

Just finished off mocking up some new sad and happy citizens.  Unlike the previous version super happy citizens are now dramatically different and hold up cheerful protest signs.  My hope is that we can pack a whole range of clothing and hairstyles in the final game so you really get the sense of happy citizens becoming individuals after Molly has filled them full of cheerful insurrection with her illicit flower planting.

Invaluable references for me when working on designs like these involving urban street fashion are the excellent Fruits and Fresh Fruits photography books by Shoichi Aoki which document the crazy Harajuku fasion scene from mid to late 90’s Tokyo.   Along with a lot of crazy and bizare outfits are some perfect examples of classic counter culture garb from punks and goths to beats and hippies.  Great stuff bursting with weird creativity that have  been a minor obsession of mine since long before it all  got co-opted by a certain pop star’s fashion label.

Eric’s Character Sketches – sneak peak.

Eric Kim came by yesterday to do up some character portrait sketches for Guerrilla Gardening and exceeded our already high expectations.  They really look fantastic!  I’ll be putting proper cleaned up scans of each of these online over September but I thought I’d give a little peak today.

A few of these are Molly’s fellow guerrilla gardeners but most of them are General Bauhaus’ ministers who help run the dictatorship.

If you haven’t seen Eric’s fully inked and coloured portrait of Molly it’ll give you an idea of how the final portrait art will look.

Development Video #9 – CCTV Cameras

A bit of a longer video, it’s about the CCTV Cameras in the game, and since that connects to some of the themes and inspiration behind the game I took the opportunity to talk a bit about them.  Each of the last few videos has been a bit of a different take on what the GG:SoR dev vid’s are about, I’m probably going to continue along that vain.  Making a game (any game) involves so many different processes, activities and ways of thinking and I hope that by taking this approach I can build up a broad and detailed view of what’s going into making this one.

All footage is from our prototype, the final game will look more like these: 1, 2, 3.

Thanks to Emma Byrne for letting me use her fantastic photography of CCTV cameras  in this video. You can see all the photos and read the accompanying essay by Cory Doctorow  in her photo essay “Snitchtown” at http://snitchbook.notlong.com/

The Torontoist article on CCTV cameras that I briefly showed in the video is here.  They do a great job of covering local public space issues.

The photos of plants were from my first time guerrilla gardening that I posted about a few months ago.

I mentioned that Shenzhen China is being used as a testbed for networked cameras employing facial recognition and software that alerts the police when an unusual number of people gather in one place.  I’m unsure of how much of that has actually been rolled out so far but  if you’re interested in more info, here’s a pretty thorough article on China’s Golden Shield.

On the other hand if you’re all like ‘Whatever, F*@k privacy!’, and you’d rather glory in the abundance of ubiquitous surveillance cameras available for your voyeuristic pleasure SurveillanceSaver lets you see through over a 1000 unprotected CCTV cameras around the world. You may not want to run it all the time, but I found it fascinating to view so many random places around the world in real time…. also kind of creepy when you realize how many of these things are listed on google without any sort of password protection.

More arts and a general update.

Well developement video 9 is pretty much finished, I’ll be uploading it sometime tonight.  To make up for the long wait here’s another little slice of the production quality art mockup I’ve been working on.  Yes we’re totally teasing you with these,  I’ll eventually upload the full screen, but only after I’ve had a chance to add some final polish.

Also  the Game Developer Fall 2009 Career Guide came out a few weeks ago. It has a huge amount of cool indie games how-to info.   Both myself and my buddy Ben Rivers (who made the excellent Snow and The Accent) contributed to an article on low budget game engines and there’s a little side column I wrote on the process of recording on the cheap for Night of The Cephalopods (complete with a photo of actor Scott Moyle talking into my lamp during the recording).  It also has Jim “Everybody Dies“  Munro’s excellent guide to running your own Artsy Games Incubator and whole bunch of other good stuff.

Dead tree versions are available at a range of locations but you can also download a  PDF copy for free.

You may remember my video dairy from the last Toronto Indie Game Jam, well the last of the TOJam games finally went online recently which means you can now play both games I contributed to as well as 34 other strange little games:

Flip the Beach - Pinball with a tank!

Steam Ponk - 2 player Steampunky pong for DS