New vidya, and some other stuff

Here is a lil cover for Phlogiston Game Music vol. 1

I posted this before but heres the new part,the drawing process video!
I thought I had lost the footage at one point so I didn't record the last half of the work, but most of it is there really, all that's missing is some tweaking on the character and the smoke from the missiles.

And I remind you of where you can get the album, here.

Ive done some more work on Recession, but its slowing down because of college stuff. But said college stuff is pretty cool: I have to make two games in AS3 and a deviantArt-like website with some PHP. The two AS3 games are for a collaborative project where all students make two small 10-second games, that are then all put together in some sort of warioware-like supergame where the player plows through an endless series of microgames to raise his overall score. One of my two games is a 10-second bullet hell where you fight a procedurally generated monster. In the second game, you have to water some weird walking plant monsters with a watering pail using your mouse.
The PHP website's concept is basically a deviantArt site that is specialized in sketching, doodles and pencils. I made the visual concept for it, a very dirty, sketchy-looking interface:

There is a toolbar on top that is missing in this screenshot. The idea right now is to have the sketchy background change entirely depending on the site section you are in.

Also I'm working on an AS3 game with Bisse, who recently came back from his mysterious radio silence. Welcome back, Bisse! It'll visually look a lot like some bastard child of Gyruss and Abadox, two awesome NES games that I played to death as a kid...

Most of the work on my personal game project "Recession" lately has been about the intro sequence. It will resemble the intro sequence of Day of the Tentacle in how it is made:

That is, a series of partly-animated slides. On most frames, the only animated part is some lip syncing, and in some others its a more elaborate movement. I guess I didn't really need an example to illustrate this but heh, I love that game...

I wont animate them yet, I'll start by outlining the base images, and then get to work on finishing the game gameplay-wise. I'll do the big animation work much later on, it will probably be the last thing I do on the project actually. So if I end up losing interest ill still have a usable, non-animated sequence as a bit of narrative. The intro sequence is all sketched and two of the base slides are done right now. Ill show some of them later, for now ill get to work on one of those AS3 games I need to get done.

Sweet vectors

I tried Illustrator's CS4 version (amongst other things) for the first time yesterday at college, and I just had to draw something.
So here's Pepito! The protagonist of Recessions' final version:

Here's his actual sprite for comparison:


Still working on the final battle. Its shaping up pretty well. Its looking raddd.
I hope ill finish it soon so I can work on less spoilery stuff that I can talk about in more detail.

Work on recession and college stuff

College has started again, which might slow down work on recession a little! But my schedule leaves me a lot of free time. I spent a lot of time this weekend on College newspaper-related work, like the cover image that I finished today:

It was fun enough to work on. I recorded the job with camstudio, I'll probably put it together as a video on youtube later this week. For now I got more stuff to finish for the paper. Working on this big picture up there made me realize how awkward I still am with a tablet. I couldn't keep a steady hand and it took a ridiculous amount of time to get clean lines and curves. The result is really messy, but you probably can't notice much with that shrunk down version (the real one is 5 times that size at full resolution)
Also my computer's overheating problems really showed when I was working on this. The combination of recording with CamStudio and drawing with the tablet (with pressure sensitivity etc) made my core temperature skyrocket. It reached 86 degrees at one point, and my core's maximum temperature is supposed to be 70. I took frequent breaks to let it cool off. I probably won't record tablet drawings again for some time, it's too much hassle to stop every 5 minutes.

Aside from that, I did some more work on Recession, the details of which I still cant really talk about in great detail, its all final battle and endgame stuff. I must have spent about 6 days so far on that. Especially for the visual side, its a very long job, and its still far from over. A lot of animation to deal with and very large sprites to produce. It is sort of frustrating to know most players might never get to see all of that work if the game ends up being too hard. It is also frustrating to know that I can't really showcase that kind of spoiler art, even though its the most impressive looking work of the whole project, by a wide margin! There is some of it I can show though, like this minor enemy that appears during the boss fight. Its shown here at 4X:



After that's done, I'll work on getting a fully playable but visually unpolished version as soon as possible so technical problems can be found early. The to-do list for the "fully playable" milestone:
-Finish the obscure endgame stuff (what im on right now)
-Place the new boss battles in the maze (for a big part of summer I scripted fun boss fights, tested them, but I never put them in their context)
-Build the saving system (didn't even start to work on this, not even sure how saving will work exactly yet)
-Rebuild an area of the maze that doesn't work (the factory. Not that youd know what I'm talking about, but its the factory.)
-Rebuild or populate some rooms that are boring
-Make up some system to deal with dialogues, and then place the main ones in the game. (the other secondary dialogues will be for later)
-Put up some temporary interfaces for the pause menu, game options, etc.
-Build the shop interface, just a functional one for now
-Finish the basic map display
-Probably forgot something on that list.

At this point the game should be fully playable from beginning to end, so ill put it out for testing to friends and on The Poppenkast and to others who'd like to help out.
Then I'll do a very long job of polishing the hell out of the visuals, mostly by adding unique scenery elements to certain rooms. Then I'll draw and implement the basic story of the game which is just told through a few storyboards at the beginning and end. Then I'll finally replace the temporary interfaces (like the pause menu) with the final prettier ones, and that should be it.

Absolutely no clue as to when that will all be done, though. Hopefully soon?

Art! Arty Shmart!

ART SHMART
I decided I really should update this log more often with whatever I do everyday. Every time I think about doing that I promptly forget about it a day or two later.
Well here is one thing I finished today, an album cover for C-Jeff from iimusic.net
C-Jeff asked me to make something neat from this photo . I started out with just doing a color reduction, not really thinking about spending hours on making a whole pixel art piece from it but just make it look good, as I was already pretty busy with my own projects, but then as I cleaned up the result it went on and on, aanddd....

I ended up practically redrawing the whole image and spending more than a day on it, yayy. The longest part was probably to make out what the electrical pylon structure was supposed to be like. On the photo, its just a mess of black lines and the actual perspective is very hard to discern. Its not too hard for the lower levels of the iron bars, but as you get higher it turns into an absolute mess of black. I sort of half-ignored the model for the topmost part of the structure as a result. There are many bars missing and probably a few that are "connected" wrong but the result is fine looking. I'm not sure yet whether ill upload this on pixel joint yet.It does end up as pretty much a trace as far as the pose and big metal structure goes, but on the other hand there's much more work to this one than just tracing the model image.


On other news, RECESSION (the game):
Maybe some regular updates on how my big current project Recession is doing would be interesting. Except right now, the details of what I am working on is a lot of end-game spoiler stuff, so I guess its a terrible time to start doing this! Meanwhile I'll yap about what the game is currently like and what the game is shaping up to be and what is left to work on etc.

The game, as I explained a few times before in other entries, is closely tied to the theme of money. Originally it was a short and simple game made in a couple of hours for a poppenkast competition with money as a theme. It was a simple non-linear platformer with money and enemies spread about. In the game, almost any action except walking costs you money: Shooting, jumping, getting hit, using bombs, double-jumping. If your money gets below 0, you die. Note that in the newer version, instead of dying right away, you have a limited time to refund your debt (with interest) before dying. The game being much bigger required a much more forgiving way of dealing with debt!

The two main numbers to keep track of in the game is your current money (which serves as ammo, life and stamina all at once), and your money's exchange value, called RATE.

The RATE starts at 1.50, and that number multiplies any amount of money you gain. So the higher your rate, the more money you get. But the rate also DIVIDES any money you lose, so the lower your rate, the more you lose. The rate value goes down as you play the game, so as time passes, you get less money from treasures and everything becomes more expensive. The goal of that first game was to figure out where the best treasures are, and then figure out the shortest path possible to them, and then try to get to that big jackpot with a RATE that is still very high, while trying to keep jumping and shooting to a minimum. That early version of the game is available to download here, just scroll down to the games list below the blog entries.

The game was neat and I decided to make a bigger one with the same system. The bigger game was pretty much built over the smaller one, expanding on the maze and adding more paths and areas. I have been working on this new version since the beginning of summer now, and I think it could be done for September. A lot of the game is finished, but there is still significant things left to work out. Some things like saving and loading the game aren't made yet (it wasn't needed in the original game as it was beatable in just minutes), as well as many interfaces, dialogues still use placeholder message boxes, the game's mini map isn't made either. There is also some work left on finishing some of the paths of the maze. All of the boss battles except the final one are finished (and there are a lot of them too).

The biggest chunk of work left is going to be on the polishing of the game's visuals in general. Most of the game's rooms are almost featureless as far as visuals go. They don't look ugly and have tiles and all, but very few rooms stand out as nice-looking, or as having unique features. This is not a big problem for games in general I think, but I sort of want to go all out as far as art goes and add character to the maze's visuals, for instance by adding background elements that are unique to a room, like say a big statue or animated machinery or computers or a giant sleeping monster. This visual polish is probably the most time consuming task left on the project. I will also have to draw images for the game's introduction and ending.

wow a new blog post

Hey its been a while since I wrote there

Ive been working on lots of stuff but I've been especially busy with college.


The biggest thing I'm working on right now is a game I initially made as a poppenkast 4-hour competition entry, called Recession. The competition's theme was money. You can get the competition version of my entry here : DOWNLOAD RECESSION v.0.21
The looping track heard througout the game is by Chef Boyardee.
The game is pretty simple: You control a little guy who runs around and collects cash. Any action in the game costs money except walking: jumping, shooting, getting hit all cost cash. SO cash is a both your ammo, your life and your stamina. There is an exchange rate that is applied to all revenues and expenses, and the exchange rate drops as time passes, so in other words, the longer you play, the more expensive everything becomes, and treasures are worth less.

That game was made in around 5 hours, I made it in early April. It was cool enough but I felt that a lot of things could improve on it, that I could play with that money concept way further. After the game was ready for the competition I decided to keep working on it, and now we are more than one month later and the game has grown - a lot. I am hoping I will finish the real, final version of the game this month, as college work stops hogging all of my time. Now there's exciting boss battles, much more exploration, more atmosphere, more music, more secrets, weapons, cooler visuals, its all there! Its a lot of fun to work on, too.

In other news

Today I made my first big photo manipulation work. I'm sure that people experienced in photo manips wont find this any impressive but I'm pretty happy with it (click to see in full size, its pretty big):


This is for a college work, where we received a fictional contract to build a website for the upcoming movie of The Hobbit. Its a team effort, and I am the team's art director-ish guy. This is the source image I used. I used it without permission, whoops...
First I took out the guy with a brush, and replaced him with a wood texture in the opening to act as a closed door, added hinges, a door knob-ish thing in the middle and rivets, used a lattice texture found on the web for the windows, added a shadow cast on the door (which instantly added a LOT of realism, its insane the impact this one shadow had on the whole thing), then I added a dark atmosphere using an edited clouds render with a color burn blending mode, added plant silhouettes on the foreground, added flowers and vines, edited the shadow on the door to include shadows of the hanging vine, added a logo of the film I found with google images and edited to fit the colors of my image, and done! It took around 4 hours in all. I think I'm growing to like photo manipulation a lot, so I'll do more in the future. I'll try using strictly photos of my own or open-license free images too for stuff I want to put in my portfolio, just grabbing whatever I find on google images feels a little cheap to me. It didn't matter for that particular college work though.

I did a bunch of other things for college, like a website for Stéphane Turgeon, a francophone rock band.

I worked on this with two other students. I took care of the visuals and the CSS, and the others mostly worked on the MEDIA section (it is empty in this version however).

and also a 3d modeling work of an art studio of sorts, turned into a Quicktime VR that is then connected to all of the other students' 3d rooms. You can access my own 3d room here. From it you can also travel around the network and see the other students' works. I wish I had more time to finish my own, it feels a little empty and some of the textures are wonky. I will eventually get a better, faster computer so I can practice 3d modeling at home, my current machine is too slow for it. I'm beginning to like working in 3d some more but its frustrating to only be able to do it at college, and it slows my learning curve by a lot I'm sure.
We had another, similar project for a video course where the same concept had to be used with photos rather than 3d renders: we had to take many panoramic photos of a place of our choice, then modify the photos somehow and turn them into a Quicktime VR. Mine can be seen here. I took photos of our student newspaper redaction room, and added monsters sitting there. It was fun but took a little too long! I also included a friend Marc-André Trépannier in one of the photos, playing a ukulele. I drew a freaky little monster riding him.
We also had to include short videos in our rooms that would start when the visitor clicks a certain object (mine is a little drawing on one of the room's billboards). Making these videos automatically load a new Quicktime VR file by adding something called an HREFtrack on the video was a real pain in the ass, it usually just didn't work for dozens of stupid, obscure technical reasons.

In another course called "Présentation multimedia" that focuses on nonstandard communications between users and computers (like with heat sensors on input and lasers or motors for output instead of the usual keyboard and screen), we are working on a game!

(that's a mockup though, not a screenshot of the actual thing)
Its a side scrolling shooter where one player uses the arrow keys to move a little ship through a dangerous tunnel, and the other player uses a microphone to influence the level's generation. It's lots of fun to work on, we should finish it soon enough (maybe tomorrow actually).

One final project I'm working on for college is a video clip for a Canadian artist who's name eludes me right now. We recorded him singing his song over a green screen from multiple angles, and next week we will put the clips together and throw in a little animation and have some fun with it. I might put it on youtube when its done who knows.

That's it for now yo, cheers.