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!