Fun Guy continued

Creating the sprites was my favourite part, after creating the exciting city scape for our hero. I used an exclusively grey palette to colour our antagonists.

The sprites for the rockers were exciting to create because there were so many weapons they could use to thwart Fun Guy’s plans. Below is the place holder sprite I made to test out the animation and see how we’d use it in XNA, here we used the animate function in the update section and practised using pixel perfect precision to select each frame of the animation.

After all the actual finalised sprites were drawn we used a sprite packing software to pack them neatly and label the frames with their co-ordinates. This was really helpful and allowed me to spend more time on the animations, really trying to get that rocker vibe across with the grey and black clothes, and some studs and wrinkles, although when resizing them all, the details were too small. Another lesson learned was to find a balance between detail and simplicity depending on the sprites intended size.

Here is one of the final sprites, the idle state of him smoking adds to the connotation of ‘rocker’ and although it is a stereotype I hopes it was not too blatant, although I think the scene looked really cool and visually interesting as the smoke from their cigarettes dissipated away.

Soon after, I created a female rocker to balance out the genders as the other characters were all male, her attack is to throw flick knives, I just wanted there to be a balance of characters and to not stereotype too blatantly and cheapen the representation we created. The animations in the attack state involved movement of the arms, while her idle state was a short pacing, with a basic walk cycle. The flick knife she throws was a separate sprite travelling along the x axis.

Storyboards

Below are storyboards outlining the controls and ways to navigate the enemy’s attacks. I genuinely enjoy drawing up the numerous storyboards for our games, it may seem mundane having to draw them all out but it’s all about carefully explaining the mechanics for the programmers and artists to understand. I find that it’s an incredibly effective way to learn how to communicate visually and being able to describe the complex game through paper can help break down the process for the team members involved.

The finite state machines, cause and effect statements and the object orientation lists are really useful too, however a visual representation can take the edge out of having to visualise it mentally. I often ask team mates if the storyboards are clear enough before moving onto the more complicated descriptions, like increasing the challenge, tactics involved or whole sessions, which can be pages long, and bad play, where the player reaches a defeat termination condition. Although, truth be told, later I have had to use a word processor to re-write the text as my handwriting suffers as I’m drawing, then remembering what to write, then writing, then drawing, then remembering… etc! Here, word processors save the day and also allow me to word my descriptions succinctly and edit them so they make sense, and leave notes for artists and programmers.

For each game I’ve storyboarded, I’ve used what I suppose is muscle memory to draw characters over and over again, bees, mushrooms, rockers, Icarus from Greek Mythology, ice cream making machines, conveyor belts, what an odd and intriguing set of objects!

In Fun Guy, one way to navigate their attacks is to jump, although using the guitar is more effective in some situations, the strategy is to deal with the rockers on the lower levels firs by defeating them because they will be out of the way when dealing with the ones roaming on the higher buildings.

Another enemy we had was a biker rocker who did wheelies and tried to run you over, although it was not included in the version of the game right now, the sprites are ready to be implemented later. That enemy was a great way to make the player think about how use the floor space effectively without getting run over, using buildings to hop onto to dodge him. 

Fun Guy is seen defeating a rocker, picking up his paint bucket and returning to the van. The consequences of his actions, the feedback, is seen as a visual sparkle here, in the game, it is just shown as Fun Guy holding a paint bucket. The guitar attack is a flourish of notes on sheet music and it great to look at and does not seem too violent, which helps our narrative continuity as hippies did not condone violence.

The player can wait until the biker passes him and use that to time their descent to the ground floor, we hoped these strategies would make the player think before acting and introduce a dynamic environment for their learning curve.

I really really like our game! I've played it a lot, although I've found some things which can be addressed, I think it was an exciting project and the team's spirit and enthusiasm showed. We worked really well together and there was a good balance of knowledge, someone always knew something the other didn't and sharing this information made the experience a learning one, our talents complemented each others. We were in university on our days off to make use of the facilities, and used social networking sites to communicate during the holidays and to send files to each other, that was definitely a useful tool considering all the data that was flying all over the place. Speaking of data flying all over the place, keeping the files organised was a useful tool and something I have definitely been practicing in my other projects.

I learned about sacrificing ideas due to time constraints and that learning on the spot was often the best way to get things finished, I learned a lot of techniques on Photoshop which allowed me to complete some tasks quicker than I would have had I not known how to use certain functions. Also, using the least possible amount of place holder art work meant we could code the frames for the animation only once, so we didn’t need to redo them, this was helpful to the coders and helped me learn about time management and making the decision of how many frames would be sufficient.

Thanks again for reading! The post will be about my second game of the year: Taking Care of Buzziness. It takes elements of emergence and uses growth as the main challenge, it's set in a honey comb full of growing, crying, hungry, angry baby bees!

Development of Fun Guy continued

Initially, the character design was going to be animals, and the bad guys were going to be the authority – the police, who’d be slugs with police hats, it looked adorable and cute and my team mate created an angry state for them which was quite frightening, we decided that these animals did not convey the 60s as much as, say, a mushroom and human rockers.

The slugs looked quite pedestrian and bored and it was interesting seeing their body language change as they get angry or upset. The idea of having the authority as the antagonists was scrapped because if there are these police-officer-type characters in the scenery, the player may think twice before going to defeat them. Even in games like Grand Theft Auto IV, the police aren’t the bad guys. They are the antagonists of the protagonist due to the context of the main character being a criminal. Being arrested is a challenge to overcome so the player uses as weapons and choices at their disposal to defeat the police. Other than that the police officers are programmed to react to other felonies too.

The main player was initially designed as a person and the notes from their guitar could be used to create bridges to pass over inaccessible areas, like big gaps in the cityscape. However the 800 by 600 pixel screen didn’t allow this to be used, the team felt the idea would be used best elsewhere and used the guitar solely as a weapon. Another idea involved objects being turned into their friendlier versions of themselves, like a rocker on a bike turning into a bicycle after the player shoots his guitar at him.

Later, the sprite used for the very start of our digital prototype looked like this:

A dashing fellow he was, however the final art work looked like this, my teammate worked on this, we swapped suggestions throughout the process:

The team had some ideas for contextual changes in the scenery, examples include:

Above, Joey’s Garage is closed down and after the colour is restored it is open for business, with a camper van inside. The second example includes a tie dye centre which opens up after all the buckets are delivered to the camper van.

Below is a storyboard showing how the victory condition is achieved, it was outlined in the brief; the player should know how to achieve this as its integral to how the game world is constructed. Here we made the rockers look like bad guys so the player would know their goal is to defeat them and take back their paint.

And that's all for now, next I'll share some information about the sprites development and some more storyboards. Thanks for reading!

The Development of Fun Guy

Originators: The end of year show, where all the students games will be, is on the 28^th of June to the 5^th of July at the London College of Communication. Check out the LCC Games Blog for more info: http://lccgames.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/originators-end-of-year-show.html. There is also features for each game being shown!

It’s been a while but I am back after completing my second year! Two games and a handful of assignments later and I feel like I've taken on the world. And won. In all seriousness I've learned a lot of things which only seem possible to learn after the first year, I think one has to make all those mistakes in the first year in order to refine themselves in the second year, and then some more in the third year.

I’d like to talk (edit: write!) about the development of the two games I created with my team during this year and the things I learned from the process. I’ll do these in installments, so watch this space! Don’t watch too hard or you’ll tire out your eyes.

The first game of the second year of my course was Fun Guy! I worked with a brilliant team consisting of four people, 2 were programmers and 2 were artists. After creating the game concept document and the design document, I began focusing on the artwork.

The brief was:

"Choose one decade from the 1900s – 1970s. this will set the scene and define the overall tone of your game world. The game world itself will have a pre-defined area of play, with the start point of the game being on one side of this space and the high level goal the other.

Within this area you must:

• -          Use narrative to inform the player about what is going on in this game world and to learn through the narrative process of play what conditions incur a lose state.
• -          Use narrative to inform the about how the game world works and what s/he must do to in order to reach a victory state.

Your game must make use of conceptualisation in both art and design which is strongly influenced by research into your chosen decade."

                                                                                                                                                                                              

We created a side scrolling game where you play as a hippy mushroom called fun guy, unfortunately the dastardly rockers have taken all of London’s vibrant colour, turning it grey and monotone. It’s up to Fun Guy to defeat the rockers and bring the colour back and restore London to its 60s hippy glory! As Fun Guy, you must use your trusty guitar to fire notes to defeat them, take their dropped paint buckets and deliver them to you camper van to restore the colour. 

To add a strategic value to the game, we decided to not allow the player to use their guitar when carrying a paint bucket. This created a moment where the player must think about where they’ll go to descend down the cityscape to their van and to use the block button; using his tambourine as a shield.

Researching the 60s left most of us wishing the 2000s were this colourful, the decade was certainly bold and bright and segregated into mods, rockers and hippies. We ignored the mods as we wanted two polar opposites, the peaceful hippies with their colourful tie-dye clothes and friendly approachable nature and then the rockers who in stark contrast wore dark leather, drove gas-guzzling bike, seemed intimidating and aggressive. We played off the connotations in order to make our narrative understandable, one was a good guy, the rest were bad.

The colour changing mechanic was the most exciting aspect of the game, the artists, my teammate and I firstly decided to create the cityscape using magazines and text columns and drawing windows on them, however it all got a bit too muddled up and intense with all the text and fonts. 

We collected magazines from all over the university to create our city scape, here I stuck white pieces of paper with windows drawn on them.

Instead we opted for 60s patterns and strange retro windows as well as traditional ones. It was really fun creating a colourful scene just to desaturate it later and see how much oomph would be generated just by the transition from bland to colourful.

Once the player defeats all the rockers on the screen, collects their paint and delivers them to their camper van, the screen moves onto the next stage, but the colour is restored, allowing the player to revel in it for a shirt while before having to defeat the next set of loitering and violent rockers.

The start of the game, depressing, grey and with loitering rockers smoking on the rooftops.

After defeating the first rocker with Fun Guy's guitar (hitting the space bar) we take his paint bucket by walking in to it.

Here's the transition: as the screen scrolls to the next, the city is colourful and vibrant, the record store is more pronounced and the polka dot motif is saturated.

Here's another part of the city, there is one rocker left to defeat and a paint bucket available for the player to collect, and when thats done, the screen is bold and shiny!

Another cool thing we ‘whooped’ about when coming up with were the contextual changes in the scenery, a black and white TV emporium becomes a colour TV emporium, an important aspect of the 60s and our main mechanic for our game, bland to bright. We had a few others but due to time constraints did not include them, which was unfortunate as they were a visually interesting feature and added to the narrative and the world we had created for the player. 

Static examples include a garage and a record shop, vinyls being instantly recognisable by their retro shapes and sizes. The cars were an important part of the scenery, they made the cityscape seems more natural and evoked the 60s style, minis and buses with adverts of Typhoo Tea, we incuded a Jaguar E type and a (admittedly American icon) Ford Mustang, reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, it took me a while to find the perfect shade of olive green! We used cranes to depict that London was changing all the while.

All these things added to the atmosphere of 60s London and helped create a setting in which the player will root for the good guy and know that they need to defeat these intimidating rockers roaming around with back packs that look suspiciously like colour vacuums.

The colour vaccums were an important decision made a little later in development as an answer to the question: how was the player to know the rockers had stolen the colour? We hoped these little blobs of colour on the otherwise monotone screen would enlighten the player and make them bring out their hippy side.

Important things learned:

TEAMWORK - We all knew how to work in a team, but in smaller teams, here I learned how to give criticism in a constructive manner, and always in a helpful way and I also learned how to take such criticism and how to use it to create a better game, which was every team member's goal.

ORGANISATION - Putting files in their correct folders and naming them accordingly was a mundane but essential task, it made the process a lot easier when files were where they should be and named appropriately.

PROPORTIONS - Maintaining the proportions was essential and challenging, but once they were calculated and made concrete, we were able to start creating the game world without too much fear of having a totally inaccessible area!

LEVEL DESIGN - The day before coming into uni I used sticky notes to represent each type of rocker and then I class the team decided where to place them, paying attention to the other rockers' positions and their attacks. Placing a long range attack rocker near another long-range attack rocker seemed unfair, especially for the first level.

Below are the levels drawn out on paper, we also used another piece to play through the game, making sure the height of the character's jump always remained the same.

That's all for now, I shall root about in my flash drives to find some initial ideas we scrapped and some final sprites, including all the different rockers with their specific weapons and art work for you to feast your eyes upon! Or to just, y'know, look at.

Thank you for reading!