New years resolution

Kind of depressed that I’ve failed to reach my goal of a playable demo before the end of the year, but I’m determined to work harder in the coming year.  Even though I’ll be busy with school, I’ll be away from a lot of my current distractions once move out for school, which means  I can (hopefully) concentrate more on the game.

But besides that, I’m making the new years resolution to write more interesting blog posts.  I haven’t made that many posts this year, and most of them are pretty boring, mainly consisting of me ranting about my lack of progress (like I’m doing now!).  That’ll change…I have some stuff interesting stuff I want to talk about in the coming days.

So yeah, things will get better around here!  I promise!  Yeaaaah….

Sprites

So, I just wanted to talk about the sprite making process, because I just realized I did something pretty stupid and want to take a break from working on the game to write something out…

I don’t have any training in animation, and pretty much all of my sprite-animating knowledge has come from reading random animation tutorials online and studying sprite sheets for various games.  Due to this, when making sprites, I tend to improvise and experiment a lot, and most of my progress has been through trail and error.  This whole project has been like this, actually–sometimes I just stop and wonder at the strangeness of it all.

But unfortunately, I made one of the most basic mistakes–the sprite I’d been using as a reference for my other sprites is off from the reference sheet I made a while ago.  I decided that I didn’t like how the main “standing” sprite looked, and edited a bit.  Just to double-check some proportions, I brought up my reference sheet, only to realize that I’d forgotten some details and made some parts of the main character’s outfit a bit wrong.  I’d been so confident of my ability to recreate the character’s design that I’d forgotten to do what I should have been doing from the start–referencing my reference sheet (the one that I posted a while ago, actually).

Gah, I really need to concentrate better than this.  This sets me back a bit, but at least I’ve learned a lesson from this.  Up until now, I’d just been making the sprites sort of haphazardly…now I have the reference sheet printed out and in front of me.

Slowly plowing forth…

Time flies, and I get nothing done.  Well, that’s not particularly true, but I’m kind of disappointed in how little progress I’ve made.

November was a strange month for me.  I was pretty productive at the start, but various things came up concerning college, so I had to get that straightened out.  Then near the end of the month, I spent some time hanging out with cousins for various reasons.  And then I made the mistake of buying some games because they’d gone on sale, and suddenly large chunks of my time just disappeared.

But I’m not here to blog about my life–I’m here to talk about working on the game (which is, despite the above, still a large chunk of my life).  The point I guess I’m trying to make is that I have trouble switching gears.  When something comes up, I feel the need to focus my attention on that so that I can get back to what I want to do.  The problem is that once something is taken care of, I’m terribly slow in going back to being productive.  It’s a constant problem of mine, and compounded with my usual horrible time management skills, I get very little work done.

As an example, here’s a little outline of the past couple months of working on the game (to make up for the lack of updates): I spent October mostly doing artwork…both concept art for the game and practice sketches to work on my technique.  I then decided to switch to creating in-game content…stuff like sprites and background objects.  But then I ended up going back to drawing, and found it hard to transition back to working on putting the game together.  And now that I’ve finally gotten back on track, I feel like drawing, but I’m afraid of getting distracted again.  It’s like…I can’t do both at once because it’s too much of a shift.  Yet, if I focus on one too much, I feel like I’m neglecting the other.  Urghhh…

Well, no more wasting time–I’m going to have to get used to working hard if I’m ever going to survive art school.

Here’s two different images.  The first is an example of concept sketches I do, and the bottom is an example of how an in-game screenshot of the game currently looks like now (you can see that I’ve used the zombies from the first image as placeholder graphics for enemies in the second).  In the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out the coding part of the game.  Having almost no experience with programming, I’m lucky that Game Maker 8 simplifies the process, though there’s still a lot for me to figure out.  Unfortunately, all this work is pretty invisible, and the game is still a mess, graphically.

It’s interesting…on my past projects, this would be around the time I give up (when the game has some sloppy pixel art and somewhat working code).  However, I’m really determined to make this shine.

Sprite sketch and retrospect

Augh, it’s already a week into October…where did the time go?

So, September has passed, and I feel that I’m at the stage where I can begin creating resources for the game, and hopefully build up a playable version soon. I had to return my portfolio for ACCD’s spring portfolio review, so I spent the end of September preparing my portfolio, creating as many images as I could and putting it all together. It’s all stuff I did for the game, and I’ve already posted it up on my blogspot. Some of it is stuff I’ve already posted, but a lot of it is stuff I was working on up til the deadline, and haven’t put up here. To avoid being redundant, I won’t be posting stuff again here unless it’s relevant to what I want to talk about.

In the last few days, I’ve mainly been sketching out the main movements for the main character. You can see the quality and cleanness of these varies, due to me constantly editing some of them and getting frustrated.

I used the pencil tool for these.  There’s something really nice about sketching stuff with pixel-exactness, as opposed to using the usual brush tool.

A background maybe

I started working on this a while back, but I haven’t worked on it in a while and haven’t had the motivation to, so I figured I might as well post it now. This is a rough sketch of how a possible in-game background would look (complete with an unfinished sprite of the main character in front).

Weapons and thoughts

I spent most of last week finalizing the designs of the weapons.  As I had thought, I ended up making several changes to my notes while working on the designs.

I’m still not entirely set on these designs, though.  I’ll probably come back and change a few things, maybe clean up the drawings, but for now, I want to move on to other things.  Mainly, I wanted to finish these so that I know what weapons I put on certain creatures– my plan for this week is to focus on environmental props and some creature designs.

As the images show, I’ve roughly divided up the weapons into different tiers.  Rather than implement a system where the weapons found in-game get progressively stronger as the game goes on, I wanted a system where the player can pick up any weapon and still be able to get good results with it throughout the game.  Effectively, players should be able to play through the entire game with whatever weapon they feel suits their play style the best (or, whatever they think looks coolest).  In the end, though, what really matters is the aptitude that the main character has with each weapon type–the more you use a weapon of a certain type, the better the main character gets at using it, and the more special attacks he can execute with that weapon type.

The system roughly works like this:

Low tier weapons are, statistically, the weakest, and the most common to encounter or find.  They possess no special effects, but they cost almost nothing to use when executing special attacks.  While, hit-by-hit, they do less damage, the player can execute more special attacks within a given time frame than they can with higher tier weapons.  Meaning, someone who has reached the highest aptitude with a weapon will roughly do almost the same damage per second with a low tier weapon as they would with a higher tier weapon.

Middle tier weapons are the most reliable, usually harboring some added effect.  These weapons were designed to provide a balance between power and usability.  Using a special attack with these weapons requires a bit more tact and more energy, but they consistently provide solid performance.

High tier weapons are, usually, statistically the strongest.  However, they also usually come with some drawback.  Conversely, they might also be seemingly weak, while carrying some special effect that makes them more valuable than the lower tiered weapons.  For example, one of the high tier spears, the Demon Spear, does great damage, with the negative effect of damaging the main character every time he fails to connect an attack with an opponent.  Due to this, only somebody sure of their ability to wield spears would find this weapon useful.  On the other hand, the other high-tier spear, the Holy Spear, is statistically weak unless used against certain opponents, or when executing a special attack.

Whew, what a wall of text.

Besides the weapons, I spent a lot of time messing around with the main character design.

While working on this, it became painfully obvious that I need to brush up on anatomy and do some more studies.  My original working plan was to include a couple hours in my schedule to do practice drawings, but my motivation for that quickly disappeared…

I haven’t been working as fast as I could…but at least its something… orz

Plants, man

Whoops, haven’t posted in a while.

To make each “level” of the game interesting, I’ve been working on making up props for the backgrounds.  The forest stage has, appropriately, a bunch of odd looking plants and stuff.

These are still pretty sketchy, but I wanted to at least post something to show my progress.

MAGIC

Worked on different stuff over the past few days…didn’t feel that they were good enough to show, so I didn’t make any new posts.  I think this one is clean enough to post, though.

I sketched out the different magic attacks that the player can use in-game.  Doing the sketch gave me new ideas, so I feel somewhat accomplished.  However, it also made me realize that I needed to finalize the main character’s design…I’ve been giving him featureless, bland black clothes in almost every concept sketch I’ve made.

I’ve also been working on determining a finalized look for each area of the game, so that I can finally start producing the sprites I need.  It’s tough.

Already distracted…

Worked on a lot of art today…but not all of it was for the game.  I got distracted and started working on other pieces I’d been meaning to finish during the summer, instead of working on the one I’d planned to concentrate on for today.

At least I got some concept silhouettes done.

There’s not much change between the concepts…mostly, I just refined the design with each one, with the most refined one on the right.

I’ve been debating whether I want to do final enemy concepts traditionally or digitally.  I find digital sketching to be easier (due to copy+paste), and I feel that I can get things done faster with digital, but there’s a certain look that I feel that I can only achieve traditionally.

I’m back

Alright, I think I’ve had enough of a break.

It’s been almost a year, and I’m finally at the point that I think I can start posting on this blog again.  In that year, I’ve graduated from high school, been accepted into Art Center College of Design, and have, of course worked on the game.  I don’t actually start school until January 2011, so I have a lot of free time–and what better use of that time than to work on my game?

Today, I started sketching up new concepts for the game.  I had a bunch of artwork that I made over the school year for my ACCD portfolio (available on my personal blog, which, to avoid being redundant, I won’t be posting here), though I’ve been spending most of the time since then working on the “game design” portion of the game.  I’ve spent some time over the summer working out game mechanics, item data, and monster stats, and I feel that I’ve gotten to the point that I can go ahead with producing the visual content for the game.  I had originally planned for all the game design docs to be written and finalized by now, but, embarrassingly, I’ve hit a sort of writer’s block.  Thus, I decided to let the writing bit sit, and head straight into drawing.  Hopefully, as I’m working on the content for the game, I’ll come up with more ways to tighten up the game.

I spent most of my time with monster concept art.  I’ve got a bunch of sketches down, but they’re pretty messy.  I’m planning on finishing at least one good picture by tomorrow.

Whew, feels good to be working on this again.