The Night Balloonists - GAMMA4

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We've just released our entry for the GAMMA 4 One Button Games competition: The Night Balloonists. It's for 2-4 players so you'll need to grab a friend or three to play. While it wasn't one of the six winners we're pretty pleased with how it came out and have been booting it up to play a match whenever we have enough players for a three or four player match. Also Andrew's wife Maryna is thoroughly addicted and vicious with the ink shots. Download is here

This video gives a nice preview of a four player match and has the dubious bonus of including my annotated commentary discussing various aspects of the game.

Final Running Animation for Molly

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molly-run-sw-shaded.gif

I posted some work in progress animations for Molly running earlier this month.  Now that she's done I'm posting up the final version.  As you can see, in addition to all the shading, I've added some secondary animations, her bouncing hair and bag. For anyone curious how much time goes into something like this I've put some numbers under the cut.

Number of Frames per Run: 12

Number of Directions: 5  (we mirror her for the north east, east and south west, you'll see why in a moment)

Total Number of Individual Frames: 60! (Now you know why we just mirrored her!)

Total Time Spent: Roughly two weeks (I lost a good chunk of a day due to a dumb perspective error)

That seems acceptable to me for Molly since she's the player character.  I've noticed animation makes a really big difference to how a character feels to control, even if the code is identical.  Going the extra mile for her will pay off.

Still I have cops, male and female civilians and a few other units to animate, so I'm going to need to find some savings when I start doing more final animations. I'm pretty sure I can trim 2-4 frames per animation without loosing too much vitality.  If so I'll be able to do a characters full set of  run animations in around a week and half or less.

When I get to them I'll check back and we'll see how good that estimate was.

General Bauhaus - Colour Portrait

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I just finished colouring this portrait of General Bauhaus, Guerrilla Gardening's 'big bad' responsible for outlawing all plants within the city limits.  Like the previousportraits it's drawn by the talented Eric Kim.

It's always a treat getting to work with his inks, and was nice and relaxing to just sit and colour after a week of animating.  I'm without a tablet at the moment so this was all done with a mouse, not the most efficient way to colour but hey it works!

This portrait is a reworked version of his earlier pencil sketch, I've put that under the cut for comparison. You can see we tweaked his design a quite a bit between versions.

Molly Run Animation WIP

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molly run sw - on 6s

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.

molly running rotate

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.

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.

Gamma 4 Game Complete.

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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

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.

Happy New Year! (Gamma 4 sneak peak)

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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!

Gamercamp Success!

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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.

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.

Photo courtesy of the talented  Ryan Couldrey.

Torontron at Gamercamp.ca this weekend.

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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.

Mock-up of Final Screens!

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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.

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 & EntertainmentThe Minister of Trade & Contraband

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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

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

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

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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

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 & 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 BauhausThe Scientist

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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

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

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!

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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.

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

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sad-citizens-to-happy-citizens

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 Peek

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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

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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.

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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:

Another little art preview...

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It's been awhile since I showed any of the preview 'final art' I've been mocking up for Guerrilla Gardening so I thought I'd post another little bit online.  The game runs at 1024x768 minimum so this is just a tiny sliver a of a full screen.  It's still a work in progress of course but it gives you a better idea of what the game will look like then the current prototype screens.