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!