Just a quick post so you know we haven't disappeared and, despite the image, we're not hiding from the cops, we're just dead busy. I'm hoping to have the new development video up sometime this week. It's about half finished but I've been distracted by other random things that have to get done.
Eric Kim, who'll be doing the character portraits and other large illos for Guerrilla Gardening:SoR, recently posted his piece for the upcoming Darkstalkers' Tribute book from Udon.
I'm terrible at fighting games and can't really claim I'm a fan of the series, but everything I've seen for the book is looking fantastic. Eric's piece is no exception. I'm meeting up with Eric in the next month to prepare some character sketches for GG, and this only makes me more excited to start working with him again!
If you missed my previous post with Eric's portrait for Molly, you can find it here.
I've posted a few times about the current round of the Artsy Games Incubator and the co-operative game set in the world of Night of the Cephalopods I've been working on as part of it. Well all the games are now online and playable. Other then myself all the games are made by first time game makers, most with little or no experience programming. There's a real range, from simple reskins of existing games to small complete experiences built from scratch to promising works in progress that are just a taste of what will hopefully one day be a larger experience. Go check them out!
As for the NotC Co-op game it now has a name "Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence" while it isn't feature complete (it lacks sound and a few other features) it's still very playable. I've sat down with several testers over the last few weeks and we've always found ourselves playing 'just one more time' in an attempt to beat our last high score.
Cephalopods Co-Op Cottage Defence is a two player co-operative horror game with old school pixel art graphics that takes place in the same world as my previous game Night of The Cephalopods. Unlike NotC it's emphasis is on teamwork gameplay rather then narrative.
Lady Amber Pennyworth (scientist, suffragette, and researcher of the occult) and Winston Mainspring (her clockwork valet and lab assistant) have found their cottage lab besieged by foul eldrich octopi. Armed with only a hammer and a fowling shotgun filled with low grade birdshot they must defend the cottage for as long as they can.
It should be obvious at this point that the game isn't the same as Night of the Cephalopods it's a lot more about game play and a lot less about interesting narrative techniques. Don't worry it's not supposed to be a replacement for the new and improved NotC, it's its own thing. Though I'll be taking some of the stuff I learned making it and apply that knowledge to the new NotC.
Here's the description from the readme:
Lady Amber Pennyworth (scientist, suffragette, and researcher of the occult) and Winston Mainspring (her clockwork valet and lab assistant) have found their cottage lab besieged by foul eldrich octopi. Armed with only a hammer and a fowling shotgun filled with low grade birdshot they must defend the cottage for as long as they can.
Anyway grab a friend, download it from the AGI page and give it a spin. Let me know if you find bugs and feel free to comment with high scores if you think you've got an unbeatable score (once the game is feature complete I'll be adding online high scores)
This video has some quick info on the process and software used for creating the sprites in the game and then jumps right into a 10x speed time-lapse video of me drawing the new "Golden Bells" plant.
I was trying the time-lapse video thing for the first time with this video. Now that I know it works I'm definitely going to do it again with a more complicated sprite sometime. But the next video is going to be more about one of the new features we've added to the prototype since the last video.
If you're interested in trying out the Graphics Gale animation software I use there's an almost feature complete free version available for download on their site.
I spent some time tonight working on the background for the Still un-named Cephalopod's co-op game in preperation for having it playable (albeit in an early and rough form) at the Hand Eye Society Social this Thursday and thought I'd share. For those worried that there's been a lack of Guerrilla Gardening news, don't worry a new video goes up this weekend!
If you're in Toronto, near Toronto, or filthy rich and own your own private jet, you should come down to the Unit bar (1198 Queen Street W.) this Thursday for the Hand Eye Society Social a free and public event for game makers and enthusiasts!
"Why?" you ask, "After all I'm only interested in games about militant gardening, tentacled mollusks with bilateral symmetry, or Luddite potatoes."
"Because we have a line up of games catering to your exacting taste!" I respond while quietly slipping a half brick into a sock 'just in case'. "You'll be able to play the games from this round of the Artsy Games Incubator featuring not only squids and a tuber with an anti-tech agenda but also games with raccoons, criminally awkward breakfast conversation, stylish mountain climbing, and applying for arts grants!"
"I'm sold!" you respond while backing away ever so slowly "When does it start?"
"We'll introduce the games at 7:30, so show up a little before then so you don't miss it! " I responda little too enthusiastically, "if there's extra time I'll also be giving a quick demo of Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution".
"I'll totally be there!" you respond as you make a break for the door.
"If you can't make it the games will be available soon on the Artsy Games blog where you can play games from previous rounds right now!" I call out desperately... but it's too late... you're gone.
Check this out! My old housemate and friend Jen created this incredibly awesome 'tentacled monstrosity' amigurumi from my game Night of the Cephalopods! I love how she captured the heavy brow and creepy yellow eyes. If you want to see my own much less cool Plasticine version of the same critter check out this old post on the excellent abootplay.ca, a great game blog that covers gaming culture of all sorts (from indie videogames to LARPing) across Canada.
While you're no doubt slavishly clicking on links I provide, I also recommend you check out the Fishdog game development blog which covers games made by indie creator Angelo Yazar. I met him last GDC and he started his dev blog after checking out this one (neat!). He currently has a steampunk themed strategy game out called Zepilin Nations on Facebook. I avoid the dreaded Book of Faces so I haven't had a chance to try it out. But it has zeppelins so I figure it's got to be awesome.
I mentioned in the last post that things have been extra busy, along with Guerrilla Gardening, there's been TOJam and I've also been running a round of the Artsy Games Incubator for the last month or two. The AGI is a workshop started by Jim Munroe (creator of Everybody Dies) where artists, writers and other creative types learn how to make games. I was a participant in round 3, and learned how to make Night of the Cephalopods as part of it. Jim asked if I'd like to take on the task of running the next round which I happily accepted. This latest round has a great crop of new games including my small co-operative Cephalopod's spin off game (it needs a title, any ideas? It has shotguns, hammers and stars a lady scientist and her robotic manservant).
Work in progress for un-named NotC co-op game.
The games will be playable at a public indie game event in Toronto soon (announcement forthcoming) and the plan is to make them available on the AGI blog around the end of the month.
In terms of Guerrilla Gardening, I just finished a bunch of art for new plants that we're in the middle of implementing and I'll be posting a new dev video early next week. If the slower updates are getting you down, you can now follow us on the Twitters ! You can also see the latest twitter update in the little box on the left side of the blog.
Because of TOJam and the like it's been awhile since the last proper Development Video. This one is longer and more in depth then previous videos and covers some of the balancing and tweaking we've done to the perennial screamers in detail.
GG:SoR's game design is largely systems centred, it's about complex interrelating systems rather then pre-scripted solutions. So getting all the elements to balance and work correctly in concert as we add more plants and AI behaviour is our main challenge now that the basic gameplay is in. We need to make sure that solving levels is largely about coming up with solutions based on how the various elements, cops, citizens and plants interact and making those interactions as transparent to the player as possible.
In specific terms there's just no way for us to predict what a player is trying to do with a screamer and which way they want to scare a citizen, so we need to make the screamer's behaviour predictable enough that the player knows how to place them to get the result they want without them having to think about nitty gritty details we may have going on under the hood. If as the designers we do a bad job, and a seemingly perfectly placed screamer result in the citizen running off in the wrong direction for no clear reason the player will feel frustrated and betrayed.
As I mentioned in the video, I couldn't fit every aspect of tweaking the screamers into it. For those who are interested here are some of the other issues we faced:
Along with coming up with behaviour that would work we also had to balance individual variables such as the size of the trigger zone, the length of time it takes after a perennial is triggered before it screams and how long it remains dormant before turning red again. These factors are all interrelated and, as we discovered, none of them are trivial.
For instance one build we had with a slightly shorter dormant time resulted in a cop getting stuck, endlessly revisiting the same screamer surrounded by slowgrass. The slow movement speed meant he was still trying to escape its trigger zone when it turned back to red causing it to scream and attract him back in an endless loop.
One behaviour we added that I left out of the video was a system Andrew suggested where the screamer's trigger zone would slowly expand if left dormant for too long, ensuring it would eventually scream after a few minutes. However that messed with our ability to direct citizens since the delay before screaming was tuned specifically to how quickly a citizen could walk past the flower after hitting the trigger zone. Our solution was to delay the scream by the same factor that we expanded the trigger zone. Bigger zone.. longer delay and the civilian would still be scared foraward past the plant.
Hope you find this longer more detailed Dev Video interesting. If you did let us know and we'll do more, if you hated it and prefer them short and simple post a comment and we'll avoid them in the future.
Oh also we're switching to a one video a month schedule for the next little while so I can concentrate on hitting some production deadlines. But I'll be sure to keep posting interesting stuff on the blog in the meantime!
Title Screen for Steam Ponk
If you live in the Toronto area and want to check out a bunch of neat indie games the TOJam Arcade is tonight! As I've mentioned previously TOJam is an event where indie game developers, programmers, artists and musicians get together and try to make games in under three days. I made a short video about it earlier this month. The games are now finished (over 30 in total!) and the teams have had a chance to fix bugs and add a bit of polish and are presenting them to the public to play. I collaborated with a great team of indie folks under the name "Invisible Ninja Squid" and both of our games will be playable at the arcade:
Flip the Beach a flash game that uses a fancy physics engine to combine pinball and tanks.
Steam-Ponk! A 2-player steampunk themed variant of pong for the Nintendo DS.
Directions and other info on the TOJam Arcade can be found on the TOJam webpage.
I was up late last night with Andrew prepping a stand alone copy of the GG:SoR prototype and submitting it to IndieCade for consideration in this years show (I also submitted Cephalopods). Then I was up relatively early today for my first ever real life guerrilla gardening experience! Sort of practising 'method game design'. Here's a gallery of photos:
I love that the little corner plot my sister Mara and I planted with local plants ended up with some kid's Pikachu painting on its 'please water me' sign. A video game related sign really does seems appropriate. The whole thing was organized by the awesome folks at the Toronto Public Space Committee who are involved in a whole bunch of community projects in the city and as it turns out the spot they'd chosen to garden was conveniently at the end of my street! It was a lot of fun and a lot less hard work then I was expecting with so many people helping out, I'm hoping to get out a few more times over the spring and summer and do some more. Maybe also make some seedbombs if I have a chance. EDIT: there's a posting with more photos up on the Toronto Guerrilla Gardeners Blog.
For those who are interested in what the new version of the game we sent IndieCade looks like here's an in game screen-shot:
Screen-shot from current prototype (click to enlarge)
As you can see the new GUI I talked about last post is in. It not only looks better but also makes it much clearer what flower is selected, how many seeds you have and whether or not it's a plant type you can throw over an area (left corner), or have to dig in a single spot to plant (right corner). I'm looking forward to showing this version to some new testers and seeing how much this helps them learn the basic game play. We also added more of the sounds I recorded before GDC in. Unfortunately some of it isn't working for me... we have this idea that smell-so-goods smell like tasty food to civilians, however most of AI "barks" I wrote to convey that idea just react to the smell ("Mmm... who's baking pancakes?") without making it super explicit that they're reacting to a smell ("Mmmm... it smells like fresh pancakes!"). Unfortunately the sprites are too small to clearly convey that they're smelling the flower's pollen so it just seems like they have a random love of various foodstuffs. I'm going to add a visual 'smell' emote to help, but now I know that I need to be overly explicit when writing "barks" like these for the final version of the game. It would probably also help to add a custom "bark" when they arrive at the flower, something like "huh, where are my pancakes!?". On the flip side the audio for radioing in a tree drop worked like a charm:
Because the prototype is a pretty stripped down and doesn't have any sort of scripting system for tutorials, the current playable version uses a series of short levels with one page tutorials in between. Clumsy and a bit text heavy but I'm hoping they get across the info someone new to the game needs to play. I'm pretty happy with how they look given the constraints.
An example tutorial page (click to enlarge)
I've been busy working on redoing the game's GUI lately. One bit of feedback we got from testing and showing people the game at GDC was that the HUD elements weren't as clear as they could be. We've basically been relying on quick mock-up programmer art for the GUI so far, and from a purely aesthetic standpoint I haven't been very happy with it. So here is the first GUI element I've created to replace the placeholder art. This element goes in the upper left corner and shows citizen happiness (the flower face and bubbly yellow meter) and player health (the little heart/skull berries).
From early on in the design process I knew I wanted to work with two conflicting graphic design styles for GUI and other design elements. General Bauhaus and the military police would be represented by a 30's and 40's screen-print style with sharp angles and earth tones reminiscent of revolutionary propaganda art from the time. In stark contrast Molly and the guerrilla gardeners would have design elements with bright colours and round organic shapes borrowing from various 60's and 70's cartooning styles.
It took me awhile to come to the exact look for these elements and it's entirely possible they may change by the time we go into production. The GG:SoR logo you see at the top of the page in the title bar was my first attempt at what I wanted, and these new GUI elements are a further evolution of that style.
For those who are interested I have a short rambling post discussing the various influences that helped me arrive at this style under the cut.
The GG design style is the result of several influences, I can't really say that all of these made it into the final design, but these were the elements floating in my mind as I sketched out ideas.
An example of a black light poster. It took forever to to find a good one of flickr.
While incredibly tacky the psychedelic black light posters of the 60's and 70's (which really need a proper wikipedia entry) I liked the bright colors on a black background pallet and that lead to my design's thick black outlines. Like a lot of psychedelic poster art I wanted to borrow and adapt some art nouveau influences for the vines and other plant elements.
Ralph Bakshi's Wizards
The rounded shapes (eg. the teeth on the skull in the logo) were influenced by the 70's cartoon style of Wizards and similar art from that time. Though in truth probably more influenced by modern cartoonists who work in a similar style such as Brandon Graham (King City, Multiple Warheads) .
Photos I took of an Ippei Gyoubu billboard in Shibuya last year.
Another modern influence, Ippei Gyoubu is one of my favorite Japanese commercial artists. He has a bold style with bright colors that blends a 60's and 70's influence with graffiti street art elements. (some readers may recognise his style from the cult rhythm action game Cool Cool Toon on the Sega Dreamcast). His more rounded less angular stuff certainly contributed to the final look of the GG logo and GUI
Instead of the usual development video I decided to cut together this little mini-documentary of my experiences at the Toronto Indie Game Development Jam last weekend (May1-3rd 2009). It's about ten minutes long and gives a good overview of what it's like participating in a large game jam (hint: exhausting).
This TOJam I collaborated with a great bunch of indie game folks (some new some old) under the team name Invisible Ninja Squid (a mashup of our two team names from last year). We had a fantastic time and managed to create not one, but two games in the three day time limit!
The full team (with links to there respective sites) was:
Sadly while we had two Andrews, Andrew Pilkiw who's programming Guerrilla Gardening was unable to attend.
For more info on TOjam and to play games go to http://www.tojam.ca
I hope you enjoyed this departure from our usually scheduled dev videos. Don't worry if you didn't. In two weeks we'll return to the usual Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution development video format.
Here's the second video for the month. Continuing from last video I'm concentrating on citizens. This video shows how to use perennial-screamers and the new 'smell-so-goods' flower to direct citizens toward flower arrangements you've created. You'll also hear some very early sound implementation work we've done.
The level I'm playing in this video is actually a slightly modified version of one of the tutorial levels in the demo I was showing people at GDC.
As always, this video is of our prototype and has a lot of quick rough art, if you’re new to the blog you might want to check out my previous post, previewing what the final game should look like.
The next development video will be dropping soon. I just wanted to share this video fellow Artsy Games Incubator alumni Jason van Horne sent me in response to seeing Guerrilla Gardening's citizen happiness levels.
This was a neat street art project he was involved in a few years ago adding color to grey concrete areas in the city. I love the fact that the video also deals directly with the idea of cheering up sad guys in suits! Anyway I promise the next update will be more game related and also probably a video.
As predicted this month's first video is a little late due to my much needed post GDC vacation. I'll be putting a second one up next weekend and then we'll be back on track. The last few videos have concentrated on the stealth aspect of the game: tricking and evading the cops. This video switches focus to the citizens and making the best use of ornamental flowers to cheer them up so they'll rebel against General Bauhaus's fascist government.
As always, this video is of our prototype and has a lot of quick rough art, if you’re new to the blog you might want to check out my previous post, previewing what the final game should look like.
The Game Developers Conference is over. It was exhausting and fantastic, I met a bunch of new people, hung out with old ones, saw some inspiring talks and got some great feedback on the prototype. We're going to be a little late with content this month. I've been taking some time off for a little vacation seeing friends in the hills of Southern California. Monday I'm flying home and getting back to work, so you can expect new content sometime next week!
This month's second video is all about 'tactical tree drops' one of the first ideas I had when scribbling down the concept for the game in one of my sketchbooks. I think this feature really captures the over the top take on guerrilla gardening I want the game to have. Needless to say I've been looking forward to being able to demo it for awhile.
So yes, you can radio in air support to drop a tree nearby, perfect for hiding from the cops.
This video is of our prototype and has a lot of quick rough art, if you're new to the blog you might want to check out my previous post, previewing what the final game should look like.
The next video may be a little late since I'm going to the Game Developers Conference next week. On that note, if you're an online distributor, publisher, press or the like and would like to meet, send me an email. I'd be happy to demo the prototype for you! (Same goes for fellow indie game folks of course!)
I've been working with comic artist Eric Kim on a final character design for Molly and here is the result! The pencils and inks are all his and I just went in and did some cleanup and the colouring. Eric is going to be creating portraits and possibly even some comic book style cut scenes for important story scenes when we create the final version of the game. So like the previous screen mockup this is a little sneak peak of what we're hoping to achieve in the final version.
I've been keeping all the sketches that lead up to this final design, and I'll post them up sometime in the future.
Back in the day Eric and I were both 3D artists at a visual effects studio working on some not so great films and doing mini-comics on the side, so it was fun to get to work with him again. If you dig this you should check out his blog and portfolio there's some fantastic stuff in both. When he's not doing art for Guerrilla Gardening he's busy at work on the upcoming Billy Smoke graphic novel written by B. Clay Moore.
Last Monday Scott Moyle (voice of Night of the Cephalopods) and I took a train to the depths of darkest Hamilton to do a recording session for Guerrilla Gardening at the Decoder Ring Theatre studio. For those of you who aren't familiar with Decoder Ring Theatre, it's a present day podcast done in the style of old pulp radio plays from the early days of radio. The writing is sharp and funny and the performances are quick and full of wry wit. I've been a fan of the show long before I'd met Scott or any of the other cast members so it was a treat to see where it all gets made.
Those who are familiar with Decoder Ring Theatre will recognize the voice in the following clip as none other then Clarissa Der Nederlanden the 'Flying Squirrel' from The Red Panda Adventures and now the voice of Molly in our prototype:
Molly critiques a statue of General Bauhaus.
Allow me a little fanboy moment, but how frickin cool is that!?
Since this is all temporary audio for the prototype she's also voicing the female civilians:
A happy citizen is a rebellious citizen.
While Scott is voicing all the cops:
A cop finds something unexpected in his path.
...and male civilians:
A civilian admiring a flower.
We got through a ton of audio, much more then I thought we could, thanks to the help of Decoder Ring creator Gregg Taylor who manned the recording equipment. A heroic effort given he'd recently thrown his back.
There is now so much audio that it will be impossible for us to get it all in before I leave for the Game Developers Conference. However we easily have our vocal needs covered for the rest of the prototyping period, including stuff like interactive tutorials if we have time (a bit of an extravagance for a prototype, but good for testing with people new to the game).
I have a bunch of thoughts on the recording and writing process for the prototype but I'm going to keep this short and save that for another post.
Note: Wordpress seems to have added some crackle and pop to the playback, rest assured the originals are nice and clean.
I've been busy creating a mockup of what we want the final artwork in the game to look like and I thought I'd share a small section.
I decided to make the city grey and a little run down, this gives us a believable excuse for adding chunks of plantable ground anywhere on the map, and also provides solid contrast between the dull city environment and bright colourful plants. It was important to give some visual impact to Molly's guerrilla gardening efforts. If the city was already very colourful there wouldn't be much difference between a level before and after Molly has run through throwing seeds. This way you know you've made a real difference to the mood of the city when you play.
We're planning on using a similar approach for the citizens of the city. Here's an image I mocked up for the design document and grant proposal earlier this year:It shows the slow progression from dull desaturated citizen hunched from the monotony of life under General Bauhaus to happy citizen cheered by his revitalized city into taking on the state. This was a first take on the idea, rather then final artwork so it probably will go through some changes but it gets across the idea nicely.
Carefully crafted independent games mixing old school presentation with modern design. A fine blend of super cute pixels and dark occult secrets. Creators of
Night of the Cephalopods, They Bleed Pixels and others.
SPOOKY SQUID GAMES
Carefully crafted independent games mixing old school presentation with modern design. A fine blend of super cute pixels and dark occult secrets. Creators of
Night of the Cephalopods,
They Bleed Pixels and others.
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