Tuesday 12 May 2009

Menu / Controls / Tutorial Level / Preloader

The following are screenshots of a couple of things I've added to the game.


Menu Screen - I added a more appealing background than just black, plus the animation for the title has been fixed. Also, I've added some navigational aids.


Options Screen / Controls - The controls for the 360 controller (made it in Illustrator), hmm I should put the keyboard controls in as well, not everyone will get to play it with a 360 controller, plus, its only a demo on how it would play on the 360, being designed for it and all.


In-Game Tutorials - They are instructional aids in-game on what controls the player needs to press to jump, attack, open item boxes etc.




Preloader - This preloader is used before each level opens.

Saturday 9 May 2009

Level: Progress 2



I have amended some of the problems brought up in the user testing. The screenshot above shows the platforms in the forground that are now blue than the same colour as the trees as before, which made it difficult for the user to find the platforms to jump on. I have also added some other things such as a cinematic mode. The mode is triggered when diologue, titles of levels and cut scened events occur. For most of these cinematic events the player is free to move through the level. Another thing that a fellow game designer mentioned was that the game had significant slowdowns, I think this was because of the particles system. The particles in the setting have now been decreased to up the performance. Things that need to be done:

1. In-game tutorial [part of the 1st level, needs visual feedbacks / controls]
2. The 2nd Level! [still editing the platforms for this level, but will be done very soon, bet you're getting sick of seeing the same forest level?!]
3. For some reason I can only get one enemy working on each level, the enemies are not dynamically attached to the level, they are placed inside the level so each enemy has their own instance names (argh, I know there is a easier way of doing this, but no time to learn nows), so they must be the problem with instances conflicting with each enemy.
4. Dexterity-based platforms and a boss encounter in the 2nd level.

so yaah, deadline is slowly creeping up, and I still haven't started with the design doc! urrrrhh, need to start now, byes.

Sunday 3 May 2009

Xbox 360 Controller Layout

The basic controls of DH are assigned to a Xbox 360 controller. I've been looking around for some free programs that assign key pressed on a keyboard to buttons on a 360 controller (the game is designed as a XBLA game, so it would be awesome to make it act like one). I found this program called Xmapper, It uses an on-screen keyboard to assign the key strokes that I set up in Flash to the controller elements, but I first let the program detect for my 360 controller that was plugged into a USB port, and required the latest 360 drivers. It was pretty easy to configure with a wired controller, but if I wanted it be set up with a wireless 360 controller, I would need to buy a wireless gaming reciever, but I'll sticking to a wired pad, its less of a pain and doesn't hurt my wallet.



As you can see my keys assigned in Flash were all over the place, the reason being was that some of the keycodes (the numerical values of keys in actionscript) were inactive or they were not processing the triggered actions events, but some keycode were working fine so I used them instead. In the end, the placement of keys on the keyboard didn't matter now that the controls are set to the 360 controller.

The Control Layout for the Xobox 360 Controller:

Directional & analogue Left/Right - Character Left/Right Movements
A Button - Character Jump
B Button - Deploy Special
X Button - Primary Attack/Weapon/Item Pick-up
Y Button - Secondary Attack
Right Trigger (Cycle) - Specials
Right Button - (Timed) - Orb Collection



This is sample of when the player encounters a new weapon. The player presses the X button on the 360 controller to pick up weapons and items, but the button is also used as the character's primary attack when in contact with any of the above things. These controls are completely "pick-up-and-play" and the visual feedback for buttons pressed will be used for the tutorial level.

Saturday 2 May 2009

Level 1: Progress


The first level has changed a lot since the last time I demonstrated a prototype. the setting has changed to fit an in-game tutorial level, but the next level will carry on within the same level. The intro / tutorial level is set in a parallaxing forest, which as I have explined in previous posts that the forest background layers move at different speeds and distances such as the foreground moving faster than the background to give a pseudo-3d illusion of depth.

The level is fairly consistent and predicable at this stage, allowing simple movement and a small selection of combat moves. The level gives the player time to get a sense of the controls until they can perform actions and instantly know what to expect from the new game machanics. It is designed so that the player can familiarise themselves wiith the new visual style and the platforms that lead two different pathways. The platforms are a part of the forest in the level, which allows the player to move across branches or on the ground, but there will be some instances that require the player to move to the platforms because of certain obsticles.

The amount of enemies present are very minimal and function at their easiest AI configurations. The player should find oppitunities to play around in the environment until they have a firm grasp of the health particles setting. They will also be visual cues such as arrow directions for platforms,weapons, achievements etc, everything that is needed to progress to the next level. New gameplay mechanics will be introduced slowly and built on the existing controls so that it will be easier for players to effectively approach and use their new abilities.

Friday 1 May 2009

HPS: Progress

In the previous post about the the Health Particle Setting I mentioned that they were some performance issues when using pngs for each frame of animation in Flash. Testing with a sequence of PNGs prove to be a problem if I went with exporting all 200 pngs and sequencing them in order of the animation created in ParticlesIllusion 3 (This application allows for the particles effects to be exported in a sequence of PNG files with the option of alphering out the background). The animation would significantly slow down the animation in Flash, So after deciding not to use ParticlesIllusion, the only way to have a particle system work without having massive slowdowns is to generate it with code. I didn't see it at first but Flash's actionscript would be awesome in implementing a particles system with a low memory usage.

Flash is very efficient in generating a dynamic particle system that can easily be controlled and adaptable in the way I want it to act within the game's environment(particles that change from good to bad health), but I was worried that it would involve using particle physics equations in actionscript (I only know the basics of actionscript 2 and 3, I don't want to venture into more head aches than I already got with code). Luckily James, our games tutor was working on generating a snow particle system that was entirely done in actionscript. He was nice enough to let me experiemnt with the code to make it act the way I wanted it to.

So here how it works, the particles fall the same way as how rain or snow falls from the sky, which involves some sort of gravity and friction, but these forces are cheated to give the illusion of realistic rain/snow by making particles fall at different speeds and distances in Flash. The particles are also drifting across one side of the screen, representing a wind force on the particles. The last and most important thing the particles show is the player's health through a harminous sequence of colours that seemlessly change from green to red if the player takes damage. This is done by calling upon the player's current health, if the character takes a certain number of hits from enemies, the colour of the particles start to change after every 20 health points. If the player reaches zero health, the particles fade and the character dies.

Full/Medium Health Setting



Medium/Low Health Setting



Low Health Setting



The rotation of the particles also speed up everytime the health particle's colour change, where green is a very calm rotating speed and red is full chaotic spins. This adds stress towards the player, which makes them act more quickly and gives them the challenge of finding health to restore the particles setting.

Thursday 30 April 2009

Feedback / User Testing Post!

I asked a couple of dudes to test the game out so far, awesome thanks to those that gave it a shot. Anyways, Dream Hunter has been in the hands of some merciless game designers I know and I've noticed a trend coming from them:

1. It is unclear where the platforms are located in the level because they are the same colour as the foreground trees.

2. The platforms in the middleground are nearly the same tone as the platforms in the foreground. They percieve to be on the same layer, confusing the platforms that do react with player in the foreground (1. might fix this).

3. Not enough visual feedback on the objective in the levels and the controls.

4. The health particle setting doesn't not reset to full green particle health when the player dies and restarts. Also, The character's position doesn't not reset back to the beginning of the level when the player falls into a pit.

5. lack of animation and gameplay (gameplay I'm still working on, a majority of my time was spent in building the game engine in Flash,now that Ive done most of that I'll be concentrating more on this)

I will try fix these problems asap, but The GDD is in need of a phoenix down.

Health Particle Setting/System

These are the instances when the feedback changes according to the characters health, this gives the possibility of having a connection between the hero and the environment (and also other things, but I'll stick to only showing a more sophisticated health display for the prototype.

full health: 100%



70%



50%



30%



10%

Monday 13 April 2009

DH Menu



...the menu interface with the logo. I will probabily redo this because I've had some user feedback on it and there were a few problems of the title being unclear such as the glow on the title makes it harder to read, the animation embedding into the title is too slow and there is no visual feedback when hovering over the start and options button. These will be sorted when I have the other higher priority things out of the way. I had a thought of sutley placing a much clearer version of the title inside of the background in the first level, where letters would appear in and amongst the parallaxing trees.

Menu Interface Designs & HUD redesign



...I've been designing the menu interface, and experimenting with some cool gradient shading in Flash. These are some of the different variations I was thinking on using, but I've chosen to use the interface design uderneath the start game and options text. I have also redesigned the in-game interface because I was having some problems with it (see previous post), but now I think it works well within the levels (urh, except from geting lost in the 2nd level, argh).



This is a sample of the orb collection and inventory interface. The orb collection presents the new feedback of upgraded abilities. As for my initial design of the inventory was going to be include as a seperate interface outside of the game, but this would break up the flow, so I changed it to an in-game inventory interface. The HUD presents these new abilities by extending its link to include another guage. Each link added to the orginal guage increases the level and power of a special ability, but this special requires more orbs to execute on harder enemies.
The inventory can be selected by holding down the left trigger on the 360 controller and items inside the inventory can be scrolled by using the dirctional keys while holding down the left trigger and pressing A to use the item.

Thursday 9 April 2009

HUD - Progress





Hey... this is what the interface looks like in game, but im still not 100% satisfied with it yet, there are some problems with its clarity and it not standing out from the background, anyways it was suppose to look like a dreamcatcher thing but it evolved into a cog thing instead. The small squeares are the visual feedback for the orb collection, the colour of the orb in the interface gets stronger until it is placed in the front of the cube, this means that the power-up is ready to deploy (again, this might be hard to see, so I might go back to the progression of a circle shaped visual feedback for the orb collection that gradually fills up the gauge), I also think that the circular interface breaks apart from the background so that it is easier to see by the player, but the colour needs to change because it merges into the dark areas of the background.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

Level 2: ParticlesIllusion Rendering Test



...experimenting in ParticlesIllusion 3, I'm trying to represent abstract leaves that fall from the trees as an alternative visual feedback for the player's health. The Health Particle Setting (HPS) is one of the selling points of my game. It harminously changes from green to red (green being good health and red is critica low health), I have explained it in a previous post in more depth, so if you want more info, go back to the older posts to find out more. I have made the particle's die off when they hit the ground and added some parameters that create different variations of size and velocity of particles, such as making bigger particles move slower than the smaller ones, add motion random and a wind force so that they simulate leaves falling.

I'm still having some minor problems with setting the particles so that they loop continuously, also each frame sequence of particles have to be saved out as PNG.files because ParticlesIllusion doesnt support AVIs with an alpha channel or 32 bit AVIs, so I've stuck to rendering the sequence of particles as PNGs with alpha, but this leads to even more problems of file sizes. For each frame of particles saved as PNG it is about 30kb, so if it as a sequence of 300 frames, this could slow down the processing of the flash game, argh trying to find ways of lowering this size. I have tested this out in Flash with a sequence of 10 frames, they are no slowdowns with this amount, but with a constant loop of 300 frames plus another 300 for the bad health feedback of the HPS will dramatically slow down the performance in flash. I now really need to consider the memory usage and if the game is feasible in running it without having lag and freeze problems that will detract the player from the experience of the game, especially in a fast-paced game like this one.

This is what the Health Particles Setting looks like with the character having full health. I will get back to you with any solutions to this problem.

Level 3: Progress



...just finished vectorizing the 3rd level, urhh, this time I vectorized it straight into Flash because I was having problems with Illustator. well, the problem wasn't Illustrator, but how it was exporting the ai.files, for some reason I would have massive slowdowns in the parallax scrolling background when importing the Illustrator files from the previous levels I did. I think when Flash converts an ai. file into one movie clip it would have more movie clips inside of that one. I tried breaking them apart, but it would sometimes get rid of the art entirely, argh. So I opted to do it in Flash, I could possibly get the same desired effect I want from Illustrator, without the big file size and lag...so yays, now I need to incorporate some atmospheric effects such as mist and dark clouds. I need to make the particle health setting a part of the atmosphere for this level, it will be done in ParticlesIllusion, but that is for another post so see ya then.

Thursday 2 April 2009

Level Designs - Level 3



...hey ya'll, sorry, long time no post, just finishing some concepts for the 3 levels and some character designs that need vectorising in Illustrator, and then importing into Flash. For the 3rd level I was trying to get the right conceptualisation of the game environment, looking at its design and visualisation.

Garath Sleightholme is a tutor that has been teaching us the production elements of creating environments and identifying their cultural influences and the visual research required to make a functional concept design. He has been very helpful in the researching and why things look like they do. I am also aware of how the aesthetics of the game can be procedural in depicting gameplay elements.

I've added a collapsed bridge, this creates more depth and atmosphere into the level. I think I'll be using some of the concepts for prologue scenes at the begginning of the level, but wont go into too much backstory as I want the player to start brawling as soon as possible, but because some things have an higher prioriety on the load to do things list and certain time constraints I might not have time to do these things. I could try do something in-game that illustrates the story). The next step is to finalise the 3 levels in Flash (I have been doing this, but not quite finished, still need to put them inside the parallax). I also need to start with the design document over easter. Kay...lots to do and post, I'll be back with more.



Saturday 14 March 2009

Level 2: Test



Argh, sorry again about the quality, for some reason the video is only showing two of the three layers, it looks like theres is quite a lot of foreground, but there is another layer. I can't get Fraps to work so I'm using crappy CamStudio. The parallax works nicely with the layers, but I still have to sort the layer's colours and their speeds relative to their distance, which shouldn't be too much of a problem. Really need to finish the 1st level before moving on to this one, I think I'll stop at level 3, cos making the art assets as vector takes ages (plus, I'm not too good with illustrator, hmm I could just do it within Flash? dammit, oh well already done now). Soo...aiming for 3 complete levels, the rest I will be concepts. kay, tis 7, sleep time.

...this is the finished vectorized level looks like, its really dark in the video clip :(, must differentiate the tones more for each parallax layer that gradually fades further into the background...or it just might be the crap quality of the video, meh.

Level Designs: World 2 Progress


In the previous post I included a redesign of the 1st level in the game, but under that image was the 2nd level that I didn't mention, anyways, this level has an entirely differnt style compared to the 1st, it has a strong silhouette style set in a vivid, dreamlike forest with surreal rectangle shapes for leaves falling from the abstract trees. This level is broken up into 4 layers: landscape, background, middleground and foreground. These layers will be moving at different speeds as a parallax to increase the illusion of depth. The leaves will be a particles effect done in ParticlesIllusion. This particles effect will also be the characters health that slowly turns green to red if the player loses health in the game. Kays, the next step is to vectorize this concept, I tried just using this pixel art in Flash, but it seems to glitch when its moving through the parallax, so vector it is, It shouldn't be too hard to vector this up.

Thursday 12 March 2009

Level Re-designs


...I redesigned the first level. It was too dark, so as you can see it is much brighter and surreal now. I think having an interesting high detail background with vector might not work together, plus they might be issues with mem constraints, I might use these for the game's concept art instead.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

Game Plans for Levels 2 & 3



...forgot to post the plans for the 2nd and 3rd level that was hiding in my sketchbook. Talking about sketchbooks, I've got tons of drawings of characters, creatures, environments and random stufffor this game, but cant be arsed to scan all of them in at the mo, soo will probabily be exhibiting it into the degree show. I'm making a portfolio website for this degree show, most of the sketchbook work will be in it...so until then.

Tuesday 10 March 2009

Game Plans

These are some of rough plans and mockups for parts of the game such as UI designs, actionscript, game engine, parallaxing levels and a list of the art assets. I have also got some storyboards describing the game mechanics. I also might do some design animatics, which are storyboards that move. This might help me with structuring designs into gameplay. Need to be fast in designing gameplay elements and not get too stuck down with ideas that end up being impractical, mostly thinking modularly. I believe it gives you less problems in the long run...so im always open to change and everyone who is designing should be too.

These and some other rough designs of features will not be in the deisgn document (they MIGHT be in the appendix, but not sure yet, argh must start writing it), also some rough drawings and mockup art done in flash will not be in there either because only I can decepher them to be any use to anybody, but they essentially have helped me with creating a simple game mechanic, and defining rewards and and penalties in the game, that has evolved into a simple concept centered around some potentially innovative game mechanics.









Sunday 8 March 2009

GDD Structure

So, this is the structure for the Game Design Document. I will be using some of the sections from Chris Taylor's document template and coming up with an overview that fits this type of game. I will also be adding some sections from the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) game called Shred Nebula, I think that this doc is well designed with it mostly comprised of actual production examples and gameplay diagrams, which might work better for implementing my game to visually communicate its ideas to the player.


Game Overview

* Philosophy
* Core Concept
* Common Questions

Gameplay Overview

* General Features
* Basic Control Layout - Advanced CL
* SP Special Attacks and Power-Ups
* Basic / Enhanced Soul Absorbtion
* Enemy gameplay overview

The Game Worlds

* Overview
* Level Structure Overview
* World Features
* The Physical World
* Rendering System
* Perspective
* Game Engine

The World Layout

* Overview
* World Layout Details

Game Characters

* Overview
* Characters
* Enemies and Nightmares

User Interface -

* Overview
* HUD / Inventory Details
* EXP / Leveling System

Single Player Game

* Overview
* Details
* Story
* Length
* Victory Condition

Game Concept Art

* Character / Enemy Art and Design
* Environment Art and Design
* Visual FX

Key Art Tech and Engine Features

* Rendering
* Gameplay Tech

Misc Stuff - Downloadable Content, Game Modes [Multiplayer], Online PvP battles

Appendix - XBL Leaderboards, Inspirations, etc.

Thursday 26 February 2009

Abs-orbing...



Yays, dissertation finished! now back to final major. I have been experimenting with different fun ways to collect the types of orbs within the game. Here is a demonstration of the character harvesting orbs by holding down a key, but to make it more of a challenge within itself, the orbs will move at different speeds as the and the player can't attack while absorbing the orbs. It works similar to Resident Evil's 'Run and Gun' feature that only lets the player do one or the other, the player can start to absorb but they will be vulnerable to attacks if they are. Orbs such as the ones that recharge magic and health will move slower, but experience orbs will absorb a lot faster.

There will be some enemies that require you to block or evade their attacks while you absorb, but when the orbs are dropped they will disappear if they are not collected in time, which will create some challenge for players not to lose any of the orbs gained. From the clip the orbs are collected and presented in the HUD, when enough orbs are collected to fill the circle guages(types of orbs are differentiated by colour, the player will be notified on what they are at the start of the game), they will be able to execute more powerful attacks or level up if their experience gauge is filled. so yeahh, I hope this game mechanic will make the game more of a crazy-ass fun experience.



I have created the animations for the red, green and blue orbs in ParticlesIllusion 3. The orb is exported as PNGs and imported into flash. I've only included a small amount of frames to be exported as PNGs because pngs are more performance intensive if they all the frames have alphas. The frames will be placed in sequence of the animation within a movieclip. I was having problems with looping a seemless particles effect in ParticlesIllusion, I have found it easier to make a looping animation for the orbs by reversing the sequence of pngs in the movie clip but not to include the 1st and last frames of animation when reversing back the animation.

Tuesday 24 February 2009

Some design re-thinks...

I've been wondering where I'm going with this game, more than half way through and it seems to not do the things in the proposal design document. I think it doesn't do these things because I care too much about it. It sounds wierd, but I think that the less you care about the game, the more awesome it becomes because you're not afraid of failing, it you do its easy just to start again. It is also good for the type of game I want to make, which introduces one new concept to the world of gaming as fast and as clear as possible, but doing this requires a lot of experimenting and iterations on game prototypes.

At the moment my game is going the epic route, which just isn't practical with the time constraints I have. The game needs to have a low barrier of entry, having 1 concept will be most effective in designing new gameplay mechanics. I also want the player to experience or feel something entirly different and make it about other thanwhat it looks like it is about. I guess its a balancing act to make things work in harmony, but achieving it economically could create a deep experience as well. argh audio, haven't really thought about this yet in the game and its half of the experience! All I know is that it has to inspire the game's emotional target that reacts insome way that connects with the gameplay and environment. So a lot to rethink about.

Sunday 25 January 2009

Progress: Prototype Demo



Sry about the quality, I will try post a better version of this once I've found a decent video capture program. So I'll give you a run down on whats going on in this demo, I thought uploading a prototype would be the best method on showing you some of the mechanics that exist in the game. The platforms are working on collision of the characters jump action and in the parallax background, but gravity is a problem when the character runs off the platforms, in this demo it is clear that the gravity and the triggered animations for the character are not reacting when they should. I need to fix the actioscript that is conflicting with other pieces of code in the game, this is where the actionscript gets sectioned off into variables that only triggered when they are called upon, but there is also the performance problem in Actionscript 3. AS3 emmeory usage and garage collecting is all managed manually, and the graphics are becoming too much to handle. I might end up exporting the game in AS2 because AS2 sorts the garbage collection automatically. At this stage I dont think everything has to look or act perfectly, just has to behave well enough for you to understand the basic game mechanics. The next prototype I will be showing how the health particles setting works in visually showing the character's health in the game, but now I have the chance to tweek the engine before the more complicated code is implemented.

Character's Run Cycle



My first attempt at the character's run cycle, I've opted for a jointed animation done in vector, I found it to be easier to than frame-by-frame in photoshop. I really wanted to do it this way to create some very expressive animations that would fit the game's initial art style, but vectors looks a hell of a lot better in Flash than anything else because the program supports it. Suppose I'm thinking too ambitious in wanting a dynamic and expressive art style that is seamlessly animated in the game, I would need to build it a different engine. Anyways, most of the animations are jointed than frame-by-frame (err, come to think of it jointed is still animated frame-by-frame in Flash) at the limbs character and enemies (but most of the enemies have no joints because they are a sort of drak matter), therefore the rotation points are jointed. The character has lost a lot of detail from his initial concept, but he still has the essential parts that make him the protagonist. Err, what else...I must of said this in my last post, but the Animators Survival Kit is awesome, it has helped me a lot with animating this and other characters (duh, what else), here's a sample of a run cycle with a more cartoon proportions. I had to improvise a bit by including a sword in one of the charcters hands (argh just noticed that I might have put the sword in the wrong hand, it might give me problems when animating sword attacks and specials because teh hand would obstruct the view of attacks unless I move it out of the way, but it will look stupid and unrealistic (unrealistic in creating a possible world with realistic physics way) in moving his hand out of the way every time he needs to attack with his other hand, so it would be better to just swap the arms around the next free chance I've got and to do this before I start animating special attacks. I will be posting the progress of my flash game as a video demo soon, bye.

Saturday 24 January 2009

Enemy Concepts



kay... need to stop with the concept art and get some of the graphics done for the actual game. Im not sure yet if these graphics are going to be vector. There are some problems with using a mix of two extreme art styles in Flash. Im using vector art for the character designs and speed paints of the environments. I think I need to keep the game consistent in one complete art style, vector art would probabily be the best option because of its effiency within Flash. Also I still have things in the game engine to finish, such as the health particle setting and enemy AI (at the moment the placeholder for the enemy is scripted to move on the x-axis at a set number of pixels, it doesn't actually react to the character's coordinates in flash, which I need to do) and RP elements such as a leveling up system and an inventory (need to set up arrays for these). I also need to start experimenting with animation, and start writing up my dissertation, argh dammit, lots to do.

Anyways, some of these concepts for the enemies will be vectorised in Flash. The basic premise for these generic nightmare creatures are that they comprise of small blobs of dark matter that churn and materialize into fears such as the undead, daemons, monstrous beasts etc. They will include different patterns in how they are defeated by the player, and will increase difficulty depending on the type of nightmare and the chances of failure. At the moment the enemies are going down the serious route, but I'd like to throw in some dark humor aspects in the game, it's probabily a good idea to not make it too serious for this type of game, humor is our friend in 2-D platformers. I will also try add some quirky-looking things to break up the seriousness and surprise the player with unusual situations.

Monday 19 January 2009

Dream and Myth


yep..so another scary character with a huge glowy axe. All these character designs will have some sort of description to why they look like they do, but not right now heh. I still need to give them names too, argh. I think dreams and myths come from the same place, so in order for these characters to have some kind of expression within a symbolic form, their names could probabily be worth thinking about within mythology. I have already started looking at Japanese folklaw and using the whole "Baku" concept of supernatural beings that devour dreams and nightmares, but its not enough, I dont think for the characters to truely stick out, plus the whole Japanese folklaw stuff has been used to hell, and its getting old. How about looking at something Finnish or Vedic Mythology? yeahh, so must watch and read more random stuff for inspiration. Thinking of downloading Castlevania Symphony of the Night on XBLA, just for funs..and maybe research for animation, cos I'm pretty stuck on how thats going to be done in Flash. Do I go frame-by-frame, which might be most likely considering the detail in the protagonist, or jointed animation where characters body parts are animated at the pivot points, at the joints basically, bit like Odin Sphere (but a lot worse than how Vallinaware does it). I have the Animators Survival Kit, I love this book, anyone who is doing some kind of animation needs to own this, if you dont then what the hells, man. Soo, will keep you posted and more concepts to come, but first, dissertation.

Update:The Protagonist


...meh, it will do for now.

Sunday 18 January 2009

Experiments in visual style

Today, I need to sort out some of the conecpt art and character designs, and maybe attempt to colour some of them in Photoshop. Argh, after using 3d programs for a more than a month (damn you client!) I'm still trying to adjust to this one. Anyways, the characters below are not the two main characters I will be using in the game, I was just using them to experiment with, trying out different brushes and styles to see if I could use any of them to represent the character's supranatural qualities in devouring nightmares. The main characters will also have some back story elements that need to be shown within their designs, so I will have them done soon. soo yah. more to come. (p.s. if you are finding this style a bit on the scary side, then you're in luck, its only going to get worse when the nightmares come murhhahaa...so leave now!)



Thursday 15 January 2009

Level Designs

Hey ya'll, long time no post, just finished the client project, so sry about that, anyways these are some of the post-apocalyptic level designs. Argh, I think these might cause a few problems within the background, 1. is that I will be tiling these like backdrops in the level, but I think after a few scrolls it will soon get old. 2. is looking at these again, they look as they might conflict with the particles health setting, the idea was to keep the background simple and the character complex (expressively drawn and animated frame-by-frame so that the particle setting will be clearly presented to the player. I will try sort out these problems and will post more of the concept art, until next time. Surresh Out.