Winning Game Jam plovdiv

This year we participated in the first global game jam event in my home town- Plovdiv.
"Team Chameleon" was formed out of 5 people: 2 programmers, one graphics guy (me) ,a musician, and a level designer.

You can play the game HERE in your browser.

And THIS is it's entry page- on the global game jam website.
Howto play the Demo:
Please note that the game doesnt have a loading screen yet, so you will need to wait a bit for the graphics to load from the web. 
The astronaut can see in one of the 4 different color spectrums. Hit spacebar to switch between them and make their platforms visible. Also note that seeing in a color spectrum also makes you SEEN by the monsters that exist in that spectrum. The goal is to get to the bunker! :) 

The game won us the industry game jam award- given to us by gameloft!

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Organisation

During the first day of the event, when the topic was revealed:

"We don't see what we see, we see what we are" (or something like that)

All I did was wonder around and try to get to know people in the room - find out what their take on the theme was and also to see if I can find some programmers. 

The initial idea of the game is that we, as human beings have a limited perceiving of the world - for our eyes can not see the complete spectrum of light. This idea came to be after a chat with a color blind guy, whom I met at the event (what are the odds).

After finding 2 excellent programmers, or more like them finding me- we got together at the table and had to come up with a game pitch in less than 30 minutes!

For this part the best thing for me to do was to allow for everyone to shoot ideas and on my part-write them all down on a piece of paper and compile the pitch. 

Some of the ideas were:

- Colored vs black and white

- Perceiving things in a wrong way (in different colors)

- Seeing only things in certain colors.

- Forcing the player to memorize where platforms are

- Point and click items in a room in a sequence - in order to proceed to the next room (puzzle)

- Platforming (voted on this - it's a popular genre that people understand)

- At the end of the brainstorming session I enforced on the team the need for antagonism. Memorizing platforms is not enough to keep the players on their toes. Thus enemies need to be hidden in every color spectrum.  

After the pitch was done, I got everyone on the team sit down together and flesh out the idea.  We were 4 people in the room -  having us all vote wouldn't have worked, so my involvement in this part was not to vote on ideas. Instead I sat outside the idea pool and acted as a mediator. I outlined our production plan on the white board -going through everything we need, see if everyone is on the same page and if not- let voting do the work. People brought up valid issues in the design and they voted on the best solutions - fleshing out the design. Would invincible platforms still act as platforms or not? Would invincible enemies continue to chase you while you don't see them? Is the outlined plan realistic for the 48 hours? What are our priorities- which features can be labeled as "extras"? What do the programmers need from me- the artist and from the rest of the team. What resolution would the game run in. How big is the sprite. And so on.

While one of the event organizers told me that we are wasting time with this planning, I still believe that one hour wasted on planning saved us from several hours wasted in arguing and headaches. I have been through this with other teams in the past and I knew what a recipe for little disasters looks like. It's when problems are brought up really late during production!

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Workflow

First of all, game jam is an event in which a team has to make a game in 48 hours. Since I was the only graphics person in the entire team, I had to choose my battles wisely.

It started with an animation pencil test (done in pencil2d) - so i can give something to the programmers early on- for them to test with and also for me to get an idea about sprite size. This would later determine the line thickness of the final sprite and also the detail design.

Next on I looked for inspiration from "The forbidden Planet" and other b-movie posters from the silver screen era of awesomely cheesy 3d movies.

And thus drew the initial background- as tall as the game resolution and as wide as I my heart desired (then cropped it).   

Using Artrage- for it's natural media tools. Those helped me get closer to the poster vibe. Back in those days artists had no computers. I even faked some scratches on the paper and extra paper grain.

Having a BG tile lets me establish the overall color palette of the game - something that is a reference point when choosing colors for the player,platforms and enemy sprites - those need to stand out.

For the final sprite animations I used Toonboom studio. This allowed me to tweak colors and crispy line thickness. Finally- exporting to any size that my heart desires (or more like the programmers desire)- one of the greatest advantages of vectors.

Both the enemy and the player sprites are animated inside the same file- to save time and to have an easy way to compare them. The enemy design and coloring is inspired by a stylistic effect some pulp posters use - depicting it as a dark shadow with a detail defining neon rim light(s).

I managed to plan enough time for doing some 3 tone cell shading on the player sprite. The programmer required me to export both the player sprite and the enemy sprite in 4 different color mode versions. 

I know I could have done this as a cut out animation rather than inking all the frames. I chose to do it the proper way because setting up a cut out rig alone would have wasted that time anyway- the sprite animations are short so it wasn't worth it compromising their quality. If they were longer or the programmers needed it cut out for some procedural things- like armor swapping- then I would have had used "Spriter" instead of toonboom studio.

All this and much more was done in less than 48 hours!!!
Even managed to speedpaint a picture for the title screen during the last thirty minutes.

The title picture reuses the Planet graphic. There is the obvious mistake of having a different number of fingers. That index finger sure is crazy. But this is what generally happens after some sleep deprivation. :)

What didn't make the cut:

Our level designer kept insisting on having different backgrounds (suns) for each color mode. I resisted  because it complicates the core "hook" of perceiving colors and it is also creating more work for me.

He also insisted on having cut scene drawings to tell a comedic narrative. While this was welcome by me since his ideas on those are really entertaining- I decided not to do it because things with more priority were not finished. 

If we had more time I would have had the programmers change the font at the title screen, fixed the issues with my own half baked graphics, had insisted that platforms in the game are jump through type rather than solid, had insisted to place a different background for each level and a different music too (the musician made more than one tracks for the level) and many other things.

But this game is finished now and it's time to move on to better things. :)

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.

D4i-term1 - Car safety game for Himex

One of the final year modules of the University of Bradford is to work in a team (of 4-6 students) to deliver a product to a real client (with a deadline, for free).

The team that I joined is made of 6 people:
- 2 programmers.
- 3 environment artist/modellers/generalists.
- 1 animator/illustrator- me.

In this blog I have decided to (selfishly) write only about my own contributions to our projects.
This is to avoid any unconvenience on the other member's side - maybe they dont want me to say this or that. Also there is a lot to write and it's best to pick my battles when it comes to this blog. Posts are LONG as it is.Other team members have their own blogs and time to write.

We all did a BELBIN test before having permission to form a team.
My Belbin results (strengths that are also my weaknesses according to the test) gave out the impression that I am good at:

The Belbin team report had this to say for my role in the team:
"should do most of the problem solving or be responsible for coming up with any new
ideas and suggesting solutions to the rest of the team."

My technical role in the team is Illustrator,Animator, Character modelling.

As a start, my job was to design a T-shirt picture to be used to present our team.The idea of the shirt and branding is by the whole team :

I did this with inkscape, as usual. There was a limitation of the number of colours for printing

Produced a number of variations for the rest of the team to vote on. The catch phrases and the name (like a sir) were some of the other team member's ideas. We tend to end most of our presentations with a bad pun joke involving cheese. it's important to leave a smile there.

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I was team leader during Term one, but I asked to step down from that position and focus on animation for term two. Leading a team can become stressful - I dont have the time and energy to do a great job at it, while also contributing so much to development. It doesnt really give you any power if thats what you think - a good team leader shouldn't force ideas but rather keep people on topic during the meetings, keep everyone heard and make sure that everyone is on track and knows what they're doing.


What the experience taught me is that a group leader is someone who is passionate about and good at organising other people. Someone who constantly keeps motivating others and reminds them where they should be at a given moment with their work.
So it was a tough job ,especially when there is no office place and everyone is just juggling with uni work.
In industry that person who organises things would be the producer. He or she would elect who should be in charge of what and keep everyone in line, keep communication between the people and so on.
Not a job for the ideas person.
The group leader should not be personally biased by ideas, but should make decisions based on what's best for the project and sometimes what would keep everyone happy.


There is also a lot of infrastructure organisation  that I really am not good at and other team members did instead of me.

So each term has one project. The project in term one was to deliver a game pitch to HIMEX - a car insurance company- for a game that brings awareness about car accidents. The target audience is young drivers. Teens. This is the client's brief.

Everyone in the team proposed a game idea. This is what I proposed initially - two ideas.
They were fed into a team discussion and everyone from the team added some really great ideas to make it more fun.
We decided that an IOS game will need simpler contros. I pitched for a pacman like design where the car moves indefinetelly by default and you turn left and right by timing your tap at the turns.

This is the second presentation we made...
Everyone had a say what goes on each slide, but we divided who does and presents each slide in the 15 minute slot.
The slides that are in GREY are the ones that I mostly worked on.They are half arsed because of me.

For the final presentation, we used Prezi.
I didnt do a lot on it, but gather images.Some things were changed for the game pitch, based on the team's decisions, a public questionaire of the target audience (over 80 people) and the client's feedback from the last presentation.A number of new devices were added to the game idea and some designs were removed.I presented the game pitch slide only.

The presentation was a success. The client just gave us a lot of praise and no critical feedback(alas).
It's in no way a complete design document and does have it's quirks, but what went in there as a pitch really left Himex impressed and "inspired" to make a game.

However, we are not going to be developing this game for Himex, because we already have Team 17 as a client for term2's design for industry project. But let's leave that for other posts when the subject has matured enough..:)