d4i - round 2 - Superfrog remake game for Team 17

This is for a group (team Stilton) project that I am part of in term 2 of my final year in University - design for industry module.
The goal is to recreate a 90ies classic platformer game by team17 and make it relevant in today's market. The name of the game is "Superfrog". The target platform is Iphone/android smart phones.

This is what we pitched to Team17, at their office:

It went very well. They were impressed by our progress so far and the approach we are taking.
 The presentation slides 13-21 are the ones that I worked on and presented.

A little disclaimer about the game:

It's merely a demo of the first level and a test to see how it works out as a modern remake. At this point, it's just an university assignment and a fan-made game.
Team 17 is awesome in a way that they will aid us with feedback.
Please note that I (and the others) have signed an NDA paper as well.

However, due to the nature of the legality of our university owning the demo, this game is likely to not be bound by secrecy. This can be very positive, as it allows us to seek the most hardcore superfrog fans out and get them involved!

We want to create something that not only pushes the graphics and makes it competitive/relevant today, but also keeps all the core ideas that hold a special place in people's nostalgic hearts.

It's going to be a brave remake that brings it back to life with a kick.
That means adressing the old art style, adressing the level designs, adressing everything - so its extra "Super" :D .

EDIT: Today Team17 announced and made it public that they are remaking Superfrog.
They did tell us that they are working on a remake at the meeting, but we did not see it. Our game is not to be confused with that, as it had no impact on the development of the official remake, nor did the official have impact on the development of team Stilton's superfrog.  I never saw the official concept art or assets while working on the art style guide and my concept art. Looking at the sprite, mine is very different in character design. They kept with the original more, while I used a number of tricks to make the character look more like a frog and sneak in some more superman references. It's a good thing that we didnt see how othe official one looks.

That said, we are NOT working on the official Team 17 game. It will be interesting to see how our game is different to theirs, as we take an alternative route. :)

 I was assigned as Art director and lead character modeller and animator  but also ended doing the majority of the concept art.
During the christmass break, I compiled an art style guide that looks into the graphics of different platformer games and reverse engineers their approach. It also contains a big number of changes that our game will have from the original.
Here is the WIP art style gide:

As work in progress, please note that it is going to change, new slides will be added, old slides might be removed or changed.  

Here are some of the pencil tests of run cycles I did for superfrog:

The concept art for the enemies:

I picked a number of the original enemies from the old superfrog (depending on how often they appear in world one and how much time it would take to animate- snail has no legs, bee doesnt walk, hedgehoog's knees are hidden). Using Artrage 3, made a quick concept drawing of some of these enemies and decided to model three of them.

And finally the concept art for the level itself:

To create that I decided to be a bit cheeky. The background (skybox) plate was drawn in artrage, then imported to inkscape.

The reason I chose to use inkscape(VECTORS) for the midground (and some of the BG that will paralax):
- It allows me to create clones of a single object. When I change the original, all of the clones update to accomodate the changes. This is very useful when you need to make the asset fit with the rest of the environment. It saves time!
- It forced me to be modular even in the way the level concept art is made.
- It helped me understand possible issues in art style when starting to put the assets in Unity. I numbered those issues and wrote them on a notes layer.
- Much smaller file (since its made of mostly clones of just a very few actual objects)
- Less destructive editing
- Helps me preview if a tiled texture is tiling well.
- This approach gives a nice and easy png files with transparency (grass strands) that are already named to export to a consistent directory.
- Textures and assets can be used in unity as placeholder graphics. The vector nature of the file means that the object size in the file is the size you get when you export, but that can be multiplied by the dpi factor and  give very crisp and clean images in any resolution due to pixel snapping.

I shared the source SVG file with the rest of the team to play with. Some of the team members expressed interest in using it as a starting point, others with no experience or desire for vector graphics decided to stick to photoshop.

The programmers on the team were able to put together a quick unity demo with the assets from my svg file for the presentation for Team 17. Experience in creating gameplay mockups at Cogworks and Disney interactive paid off!

I am sure that game designers would be smirking at the idea of putting a platformer style gameplay on a touch based device without buttons. Team stilton has come up with a number of ways to accommodate the limitations. We are going to take on that challenge. The game will hopefully have an online ( unity 3d engine) demo which anyone can play for free in their browser.

Reusing 3d animation and rigs for games - research report for university

One of the university modules in this semester had for an (optional) assignment the research of reusing character rigs and animation to be imported to a game's engine.

I was given a deadline to write a greenlight pitch, a research paper (almost 30 pages!) and then create a technical demo video.

 It's pretty much do it yourself sort of a thing set by university(just as many other things).

In this case before even delving into reusing animation clips, I decided that it's more important to find out what exactly are the best practices in character rigging and animation for game engines - where the data has to be created in a specific way that will make it friendly to use by the programmers and the engine.

In the research paper I used for sources the excellent presentations on animation in Uncharted 2 by naughty dog, among  other things.It was a bit rushed so It got me 64.4% .

For the video, I used kdenlive to put together a quick overview of the findings of experimenting with some of the tools in Maya:

http://youtu.be/YOuWO8My84c

That got me 85 % .

The paper and the video focus on the work that is done in the animation package rather than the game engine. I have in the past done character modelling, rigging and animation for Unity 3d. That first experience was a bit of a trial and error - the animation data needed to fit with how the character actor is scripted.It's something that I will keep fo a future post, until there is time to put together a demo of that game.

Soda trip - animatic

For a final year project, I am going to do a 2 minute 3d animation that will serve as a music video for a song by "The Junior Panthers".

The Junior Panthers is an indie rock band that I heard one night while listening to Indie Pop Rocks.

One year ago a strange impulse made me write an email to Edwin - to ask if I can use one of their tracks and make a video.

He responded incredibly well to my enthusiasm and sent me the band's CDs and a T-shirt  (hey hey free stuff!! :D).

Now that made me very happy. However the day in which I received the JP goodies in my mail, the call from Disney Interactive Studios happened.
So the music video was put on hold for a year.

Here is a funny thing about that placement. A big part of the work there was just that- putting together videos, based on the music in them.
Had I not taken that internship, I would have probably done this in a different, less good way.

And today...

The university had me pitch it to them:
ppt@googledocs

Does starting with the music track introduce new challenges for the editor?
Well, it depends...
If the music is picked right, it can do half the job for you.
It will set the structure of your story. The rhythm will set the pacing of the shots.
Music's sound gives a sense of the mood and visuals -  the lyrics inspire abstract ideas.

So listening to the track over and over again and outlining its structure, I timed it in my mind and wrote down what would happen in each section.

Robert Mckee has a great book , which helped  a lot with getting a better understanding of how story writing works. It's not about forcing you to be formulaic.It's more in the sense of giving you the right type of questions to ask yourself when you write.

 For example I started with this:

Then moving on to the animatic:

I used a combination of Kdenlive and Mypaint  this time around.

Kdenlive used to be quite unstable. But version 0.9.2 didn't crash once after hours of work.

The animatic took about 4-5 hours to make.
Some of the drawings are reused in multiple shots- retaining the framing of the camera, but moving the character around. That saved a lot of time too.

Soda trip - animatic from todor imreorov on Vimeo.

Concept art:
When designing the character, it's good to think about what you want to communicate with that to the audience. Who is that character and what are they all about? Does the character drive the plot, or is that character being driven by the plot?
How does the character fit with the rest of the style and what does that style say about the film?

I started with this basic sketch, which I am going to refine later on.

Anyway more on the character models and concept art in the next update!! :)

Adding sound to Toast! animation

The name of Toast! was changed to "Malfunction". Decided that I don't want to give away the ending too much with the title.


Adding sound to the animation

The sound in Toast! is really low on quality standards. After seeing it for the first time with sound, I thought that it was horrible.

Some of the sound effects were recorded by myself. For the robot , I used the creaking door of the kitchen at the halls. The title screen sound was made by a real empty tin can (from mexican beans) and a pencil.




The bucket sounds, electricity and so on were taken from the internet, after carefully examining their license.

The Music in the end is made by me, with my Nintendo ds. I used "Jam sessions" imitation of guitar. You might notice that the rhythm is the same as the title sceen sound.



The voices were recorded and edited with Audacity. My brother did his goofy/mickey mouse rip-off voice, as my voice is too deep to imitate a boy's.

All and all, I hate the sound in "Malfunction". It's messy and badly edited.You can even hear some static sounds in the background. Flash has a real nice way of setting the volume ease out and ease in and I played with that too alot.

Toast! storyboard ver1

Today I got some valuable feedback for the storyboard from my animation tutor at uni, who also has a blog here . He liked my storyboard. I am really glad that there is someone like him to show it to, because he's a guy with experience and his feedback is valuable..

Here is what I got this far:
First of all, the rules of my assignment do not allow me to make the animation longer than 30 seconds. But I have too many shots put in that small time window.And the duration of some of the shots is too short. So 10 seconds must go. For that I must cut out some of the first shots. Some other scenes need a slight change in the camera and the composition (more space between and around characters).


after thinking about it, I decided to make a short version of my animation (for the module assignment) and later a longer one which will be as much as at least 2 minutes!

Before editing my storyboard , I would like to post it in the name of good documentation and progress evaluation. So here it is, no revisions- purely as it came out of my mind:

Toast! storyboard ver1 01.02.2010



I used software called Toonboom storyboard to do it. You can download a trial version, but you should export your work as a video/pdf before you close the app, because if it has over 30 panels, you are not going to be able to open it again.

It's a really awesome application for storyboards- simple and powerful. This storyboard took about 2 hours to make with it.