Also, heres a "making-of" video about a project ive been helping out on for a while now, a game for the progressive metal band Last Chance To Reason. I'm making visual assets for it mostly.
Should have more about this around march. More new things coming soon.
Participated in the Global Game Jam this weekend. It was quite an experience. The game we were working on was RoVo (the splash image was made by Josse Laurendeau Piron, he did a lot of amazing illustrations for the game)
The idea was pretty cool: An RTS where you control a bunch of Robots and try to survive in a post apocalyptic wasteland. You upgrade them by modifying a large factory that produces them. As new robots start coming out of the factory, the past generations of your robot slowly go insane as they realize theyre obsolete, and turn on you, repopulating the battlefield with ever-stronger robots to make your life difficult. A good way to play is to engineer weaknesses in your robots so you can easily dispose of them when they turn on you.
Buuut yeah... in the end we just had a generic RTS engine working. The game was all 3d with lots of cool stuff working, some neat pathfinding... but the final game had no combat, no robot upgrading, so not much from the actual concept. What we did end up with was however very impressive, everyone did an amazing job, the game was just too much for the time we had.
Im pretty happy with the things I made for it though. Here are some of them:
I am horrible at updating this blog I am the champion of not updating things.
To make it up, heres some stuff I've done since!
I am currently working on an entry to the ACTION 52 OWNS activity on Tigsource, a game makin thingy organized by Arthur "Mr. Podunkian" Lee, where 52 developpers remake the 52 awful games from the notoriouslyawfulAction 52videogamecartidge. This 1991 NES game cart was a pack of 52 awful games, half of them almost unplayable, some of them LITERALLY unplayable, all of them riddled with bugs and design problems and glitches. The cart was sold at the outrageous price of 200$. The activity is for individual developpers or small teams to each make a new action 52 game, inspired from games of the original NES cartidge. Some games are still available for developpers on the sign up page. You will need a TIGsource account to sign up, as the process uses your TIGsource member ID.
The game I got was game 27: NON HUMAN. Here is a video of the original:
My own game inspired from it is almost done. I will try to finish it over the holidays, but that wont be easy, cant make promises.... My take on it is a robot warrior going on an action-packed shootin' adventure against horrible mutants and zombies and giant eyes and mouths. The robot, like in the original, can only shoot forward. And like the original, the game is a continuous horizontal path, with no rooms or levels. Here is a video of someone playing through an early build (as well as two other games from the same activity)
You can find a more recent (though still old) build in the TIGsource topic about the activity. I wont post it here until its really done though, I don't want the build to start spreading around before its all wrapped up.
Almost half of the 52 games are finished as of this blog post, check them out!
In other news, I also made a few covers for indie game soundtracks!
You can get the fantastic, free game this soundtrack is for on The Poppenkast Forums. You can get the also free soundtrack itself at the IImusic website.
Thats a cover for the original soundtrack of Super Crate Box, a game by Vlambeer. Heres a recording of me making the right half of the picture:
You can get the fantastic, free game the soundtrack is for at the Super Crate Box Website. You can get the also free soundtrack itself at the IImusic website.
Oi, made this album cover for Norrin Radd's "Anomaly" a few months ago. The album is out now, so I can finally put this up! Also heres a video of the thing being drawn here:
Just got back from a 24 hour web design competition, the webjam. The competition theme was "2012, a survival kit". This is the site we made: And heres the team that did this with me! Matthieu Gadrat and Philippe Trudel Guerbilsky made a wonderful job with the programming, Pierre-Olivier Nantel worked on video and motion design, and I worked on the prints you see in the videos, helped out a little on the filming and made some illustration. Phil and me both worked on the text content. We were coached by Sophie Blondeau, who had some sort of overseer job of checking on us for 10 minutes at every hour and support us. (But she mostly watched episodes of How I met your mother along with the other teams' coaches...)
We won third place! It was fun but there were two horrible 8 hour bus rides and very little sleep. And I have an internship starting tomorrow, too!
Also! I finally got me a domain name and updated my site a little. Ill do some more of that later. I'm thinking I should spruce up the background animation. Like make some alternate background themes that would be picked at random, that would be fun. The new URL is http://www.frankiesmileshow.com
Finished this giant digital illustration for a contest.
My college has this contest to decide the front page of the next student notebook, thats my entry. Had a lot of fun working on it! You can see a higher resolution version of it here.
I was horribly busy recently, but its all over now! Heres some of the things that hogged all of my time these past few weeks:
First, a 1-minute pixel art video:
This video took about 5 days of work. Its silly but fun, I like the result a lot.
Also, in our flash course we had to make two flash microgames. The games were to be handled by an external shell that would randomly play em. Because the external shell handles them, there arn't any play controls on the games themselves so just hit refresh when you want to try again. first game is called DISASTER. Spin around the screen with your mouse to avoid the projectiles, and click to shoot the monsters eyes. you can play it here: http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/datthang/Disaster/jeu.swf
You can try out the final project with all of the student's games including my own here: http://tim.college-em.qc.ca/~microjeux/ though its all in french, and some of the games can be a little confusing even when you understand the language....And quite frankly a lot of the games are a little poorly made! Its understandable though, there was a lot of work to do this semester and not everyone was particularly interested to invest a lot of time in this one project.
Lastly I spent quite a bit of time working on a php website. The assignment was to make a website where you can register and then upload pictures. You can check the website there: http://tim.college-em.qc.ca/~coulomf7/index.php Though it might go offline soon, its just temporarily hosted on my college's server for the purpose of the assignment. I couldn't really finish it on time but it had pretty much all required features.
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.
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