UPDATE 11 - Gold
The game is now complete and on sale on the iphone app store, along with a free lite version. The level graphics have changed style quite a bit
but my character is still in there which is good to see.
The game now has an official homepage, and already seems to be off to a good start
with a good number of downloads. This is the first game project I have worked on that has been properly published and commercially sold so I'll be looking
forward to see how well this does.
Here are a couple of screens from the final game.
UPDATE 10
Due to the new Uni term starting i've had to hand over the the rest of the work to the other artist on the project, I'll help out where I can but I don't have enough time
to deal with any more of the major aspects of the project from this point onwards so good luck to the team, im looking forward to seeing the finished result in a few weeks time.
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UPDATE 9
Working on a carry sequence which is basically the run sequence with arms up in the air and a rope swing sequence.
The rope swing I decided to split into two seperate sequences to allow suitable animation for a forward and back swing,
this allows the bandana to animate properly but need some code changes to the game to work.
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UPDATE 8
Been a while since the last update but things are on the move again now we have a confirmed list of required game
assets. The project also has had a second artist join the team to handle backgrounds to help get the game finished
as soon as possible.
One of the changes that effects my side of things is the character is now down to 34x34 pixels, and he will be animated
at 15fps. So for my first change to meet the new criteria i've updated my run cycle to 15 frames instead of 8, this has
helped smooth things out, theres a comparision showing before and after.
There are a couple of tweaks that still need to be done but first priority was to get the extra frames worked out in rough and see how it looks
and so far it seems to be working.
Top priority for me at the moment is to get all the character frames sorted so next I will start doing roughs for all the other key movements
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UPDATE 7 - New character
I have a new character design based on guidelines given to me. Heres a before and after showing the original from the first
concept and the first proper design.
Once the base idea was inplace I experimented with a few rough frames and put together a simple run cycle, this is only a first rough at the moment
so will be refined later, but for now I just want to get some of the important animations done in rough before cleaning them up.
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UPDATE 6
One of the coders has been experimenting with adding height map support to enable realtime shadow effects to enhance the level graphics, this feature is still quite
experimental but could lead to some interesting effects if the game wanted to play with lighting. As this could effect the requirements for the level graphics I have
stopped working on level graphics for the moment and will focus on the character untill things have stabalized on the code side.
This was a test image sent over to me to show the type of effects that could be done with the new system.
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UPDATE 5
With the rock texture done, I decided I would also make the background texture double res and clean it up from the original version from the
concept.
Next I felt it would be time to tackle the lava, I am hoping to have the lava animated so made 2 versions of the texture, a normal and a glowing, with
these I can make a bunch of inbetween frames to blend them to work in the game.
When placed into the game the texture scale was fine as I made sure to follow the original closer while making this texture. I will need to expand this texture
further as it is only a sample at the moment.
After some communication with the team it seemed some work on the floor surface / crust would be usefull to help visualise how things would look. I did some
tests with variety of styles with mud / sand and grass surfaces. One of the questions with the game at the moment is if the ground should remain flat or
if we should have slopes. After some quick tests personally I felt just from the visual side the flat ground looked a bit boring and didn't seem as interesting,
the flat topped surfaces gave everything a completely different feel.
This was a quick mock up I put together with a test mud surface with flat tops to see how it may look in this style, this also shows the new lava texture in use as well,
missing the glow effect that the original concept image used, these will be added later.
The question of how the ground will work is still an unknown at this point so it seems my time would be better spent working out some new concepts for alternative
themes untill I get some more information back from the rest of the team.
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UPDATE 4
The concept was sent to the rest of the team for feedback and seems like it has done the job for the moment, although it has now been decided there will
probably be 4-5 different visual themes throughout the game, so I will need to work on some more concepts to cover the different themes.
Due to the way the levels will be made, instead of just drawing each level in specific layout, the graphics need to be flexible to fit multiple layouts,
the levels will likely be generated from masks so I will need to make block textures out of all the materials. So I started with the main rocks.
When testing this texture the results were quite nice but the rocks were far to large, so I would need to make a denser texture, to avoid quality loss
instead of scaling down I decided to make the texture at double res so I would be adding 4x the detail and then scaling down after. This would give a
good source image to use if the game was ever to be ported to a higher resolution system.
Here is a test image using the original images sent to me as masks for the new rock texture to see how well it works. To stop the image from looking too flat and
just cutout we are aiming to use edge detection to apply a gradient effect, this seems to work quite nicely and I have simulated this effect in the images.
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UPDATE 3 - First concept
Now all the elements of the level were in place, I could do a first version for the character. This I knew would be a challenge as I am more familiar
with high resolution work and the limitations were quite steep as the character needed to be around 40 pixels high. I expect to have to go through a number
of versions before getting something good, but this was how the first version come out.
Then I put everything together for a first complete concept that I could send over for review, heres a side by side showing how things have changed.
I quite like the look of this first concept and could imagine it working quite nicely with some animated background light streaks and pulsing lava glows,
but the character could use some work, but I will look into that later.
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UPDATE 2 - The layouts
I have recieved the first sketches, these were just made to get a feel for the scale and see how everything fits together these are
usefull for me as this tells me the style, layout and scale I need to work to to fit with their vision of the game.
Started off by working on the left land mass and after a while started to get something that worked and continued by adding some details.
Continued to work on the rocks around the edges and added some lava
Then I started on a background texture, along with the pads and light effects.
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UPDATE 1
Welcome to the new blog, i'll start off by covering a few of the details. A handfull of developers decided to team up to
work on a new mobile game, primary focus is on the iphone, if the game goes down well ports to other systems could be done.
I have been invited to join the team as the main artist and provide artwork as needed.
The game is still at the stage where everything is changing and there are a lot of unknowns, so my short term brief is to
take some rough sketches outlining what a potential level may look like and make it look better.
At this stage I can just forget engine limitations and just knock up a suitable concept that can be used as a standard to
aim towards, and then provide proper graphics to fit with the limitations of the engine to achieve something similar.
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