Fire

I have been spending some time now setting things on fire, at the moment for the main menu where there will be several animations, some of them fire.

Fire is quite a tricky and tedious thing to animate, but it is also in a sense quite forgiving since the movement of fire will look more realistic if it is not completely fluid. I have been spending almost the entire day today animating fire and I thought I would make a quick post showing some of it. These animations will be used to show when a player is ready to play.

Tuesday

Today has been a productive day for me, the end of the project is coming closer and it feels like it is time to pick up the pace and work extra hard to make Totemic the best it can be.

I started out with making small feathers which will be used as particle effects when the gatherers die, at our weekly coaching session we were asked to make the totem pole "pop", since we have been told this before I started working on an animation for it. Although it turned out a bit "Las Vegas" it fits the style of the game and makes the totem more special.

When that was done I created some text we needed, copying the style of our logo and banner and started testing out a second death animation for the gatherers, this one for when they are caught in a volcano.

Gatherer deaths

Today I managed to create death animations for all four gatherers, to save us some time I created a general one that could be used for anything and used the same body for all of them. If we have time we will create more death animations to get some variety and an even more cartoonish effect but now we have at least one for all of them.

Here is how a couple of them they turned out

The animations were done in photoshop, basically I just moved the body in an arc and moved the legs and masks to follow the motion. For finishing touches I gave the masks facial expressions and moved the fur on the bodies a bit, I did not put too much thought into that since in the game they will be played faster and will look very small next to other things that small details will not be visible and is therefore unnecessary to spend to much time on.

 

Another week done

Since my last post, where I showed you the updated versions of the background and totem pole I have created this week, I have been busy working on animations and graphical material for the GGC which was due today.

We needed animated visual representation of the "force field" power up so after some sketching, trying to figure out what it would look like, I decided to test something very different from what I had thought about to help myself think outside the box. I took inspiration from our first version of the defenders and Taz, the tasmanian devil, and created a tornado. The result did not feel right and did not really fit the profile of the power up, with some additional work it could potentially be used as a trap for another map in the game.

Instead I took inspiration from the pick up-sprite for the power up and made a semi-transparent bubble with a light going from the bottom to the top. I added one highlight and a half circle shadow to make it look rounder while trying to maintain the flatshaded, cartoony artstyle. The moving light I made by using timeline in Photoshop, moving and adding to it while moving it across the circle, bit by bit in the frames, in total I used ten frames. This fit the power up a lot better and after showing it to the team we decided to implement it in the game and it looks really well.

A lot of my time is spent going back and forth between the team members, helping and giving feedback to the artists and discussing things with the Lead Designer and the Lead Programmer, especially yesterday when the Lead Designer was ill and I got to take on a lot of his responsibility. The team worked really well and I made sure that everyone had a clear task to do so that the work would flow effortlessly, which it did. We were not able to start playtesting with four players this week as I had wanted to but hopefully we will be able to do it next week.

Today I compiled the artwork we wanted to hand in for the GGC, it included logos, concept art and screenshots. The screenshots are what took the longest time since the rest only needed our logos added to them, I tried to arrange them so that they would show as much as possible of the gameplay.
In this screenshot you see some particle effects I threw together today, as well as the shield and a volcano created by another artist.

The yellow and red defenders have just collided and are traveling away from each other, the purple gatherer has picked up a shield (or force field) power up and the yellow gatherer is holding the totem and earning score. The blue gatherer has picked up a crystal owl, which is a score multiplier that increases the score when holding the totem, as well as giving some score when picked up. The representation of this in the GUI is something I have also been working on this week and after a lot of testing and discussing with the rest of the team we settled with a crystal owl miniature appearing on the player's block on the totem, as well as a number showing how many you have, there will be a maximum of how many times it will multiply the score though.

I felt it would be a good idea to have a proper blog for the development of our game so I created one where we could post pictures and posts that follow the project in general, covering all aspects, while we write more in depth and personal in our own blogs. I think it will give a good overview and promote our game but also help the team to follow what everyone is working on. In addition to the blog, which van be found at totemicgame.wordpress.com I created a Facebook page where everyone in the team can post things to promote our game, it can be found on www.facebook.com/totemicgame.

So this is pretty much what I have been up to these past few days, during the weekend I will have to work with the Lead Designer to prepare and practice for our practice presentation monday morning before starting another week full of work.

Upgrades

This week I have been working on developing the background image since it was very flat and boring and did not really blend with the other environmental elements. This was also true for the totem pole and we have gotten feedback stating that we should do something more with it. So I gave the totem pole some highlights and shadows that also gave the coloured blocks some texture. The background I gave some texture by adding old looking stone tiles and grass which highlights the area of the totem pole, the further away from the "scoring zone" the more broken and scattered they are until the jungle takes over towards the edges.
Here is how it looked before...

 and now...

I decided to recycle the plants we already had by changing the colour and bringing down the contrast to make them fit and blend into the background better. I used the grass mostly towards the center and the more jungle-looking plants towards the edges to make it look like a ruin centered in a jungle. During the playtesting session last week we got some comments that the screen felt a bit cluttered and i think that it was partly because the plants stood out so much against the background. By making them blend in more I have been able to use more of them, making the environment more interesting, without making it look as cluttered. I still have to wait until all new obstacles and the level design is complete so that we can test it properly in-game, but it is looking good so far.

Alpha Update

I thought I would just give you a quick update of how the Alpha presentation for our GGC project, went. So yesterday we first held a short presentation, covering the original concept, changes that had been made and what had been going well and not so well. After that we got to show the game to the audience before getting feedback from the three teachers present. As usual it was Oskar (Lead Designer) and I that presented, we got to go up first of all and it went really well, we got some advice and a pass for the Alpha assignment.

Later, during the afternoon, our class and the second years set up our laptops for a playtesting session were we got some additional feedback as well as confirmation that we are working towards our aesthetic goals. Most of the negative feedback we got was about the volcanoes which were not working as they should, the collision is off and it is possible to get killed when near it. The programmers had an idea of it being an area of effect but it is not intuitive and especially since there is no visual feedback the players do not understand, either way the collision should only be at the base of the volcano and only when the characters feet are near it. This was something that we were aware of and need to work on, apart from that the feedback was generally positive and the players seemed to enjoy it. Both during the playtesting session and the presentation we were commended for showing as complete of a game that we did, which felt really good.

Here is a screenshot from the Alpha we showed.

Alpha Week

This week has been busy as usual, we started out Monday morning with going up on stage to practice our GGC presentations. It went rather well, we definitely need to prepare more and keep working on our presentation but it seemed as we had gotten further with our presentation than some of the other teams. The point of this presentation was to show what we had ready at the moment and get some valuable feedback on what we might want to add, remove or change. We got some really good advice and immediately made changes, both inspired by the feedback and by other teams. We did feel that it was challenging to create the presentation considering how unfinished the project still is and I think it will be changed even more before the big one at the GGC.

For the presentation I created a PowerPoint presentation and a PowerPoint template that we will use for all presentations in the future, I also created a PowerPoint presentation for the Alpha presentation we had today.

This week I also created a foot for the totem pole, since it looked a bit like it was floating on the game space. I thought it would be a good idea to have it for the Alpha and following playtesting session to aid the audience and the players to understand our vision since there had been some people pointing it out before. This is how it looks at the moment, there are also some new art assets created by our other artist that has been placed to make the gameplay more interesting and to decorate the background.

Since the original placeholder art and animation for the gatherers did not look right I created a new one. It needs some polishing but it looks very comical which was exactly what I was aiming for. Previously they had really long legs which took up about half of their frames, I thought it would be better to make the bodies smaller in comparison to the masks and scale them up while cutting their legs at their knees. (The original placeholder can be seen in the mockup above). Here is how it turned out.

I have also been looking at the power-ups this week, I created two placeholders as we needed them when showing the Alpha, although they will need to be iterated since they did not turn out as I wanted. I had an idea that I wanted to test but they did not really fit the art style, they looked more like they would belong in the game we designed last semester called "With Love...". They did however look well enough for the Alpha and were implemented, we will have to figure that out when we start completing all placeholders next week. We want all art to be complete prior to the Beta so that the programmers have time to implement it and still have time to work out any issues and finish balancing the game and controls.

Late the night before the Alpha presentation the Lead Programmer asked me to make a quick win text that he could place on a white background. I quickly created four winner texts and a background (that was not white) to use for placeholders, so that we would have something, although in the end he unfortunately did not find the time to implement them. At the moment it is just text but we will change that later, perhaps have a a text saying "wins" or "winner is" and then have the mask or the character appear next to it.