GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR3. LOOT ITEMS

The weeks flies by and time for another weekly blog post.
This week I have been drawn items for the player to be able to loot. These items have values and some of em have power ups that the player can use for her advantage. Also there are items that works as a trap but they have a high value because of the high risk to be detected by the antagonist.
A example of a item that I have worked on is this gramophone. 

This gramophone will be able to pick up by the player but when the player pick it up it will start to play music and the antagonist (Otto von Fancy) will hear where the player are positioned and start to run right against the player.
The player will also be slowed by picking up this item since it is heavy. So the risk to get caught are high when holding this item but will be rewarded when the item are brought to the drop zone.
I will make a animation for this gramophone later, I will add some music notes and make the head of the gramophone move a bit. By this the item will look a little more  like cartoonish, which our group are aiming for this game. I wont make animation for all of those items but maybe one or two more depends on how many items I will be able to make total.
Now this picture is too big and I will have to re size it so it will probably looks a little more pixled but I’m pretty satisfied how it turned out. This maybe was not the most funniest item I have drawn but it was instructive.
I also had made two other items but I did some how mess it up badly and saved this gramophone file over the other items. So by this I have learned to read those pop up windows carefully and think before I do press enter.  Anyway those I did draw was inventions that are created by the antagonist, he is a scientist and it is his inventions that the protagonist stealing. I am also trying to draw those items a bit steampunk style, so a lot of reference picture I have searched for I have remade and changed em up a little to get thise steampunk feeling to em.

Hope you liked the blog post, I did rush it in the last minute this time because I have forgot it was Thursday so might be some spelling error. Anyway see you next week and thanks for reading! 🙂

/Kim

GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR2. Sprite sheet

This week I have done some some new stuff, this stuff is called sprite sheet. A sprite is a single graphic image that is incorporated into a larger scene so that it appears to be part of the scene. When you put many sprites into a single image you get a sprite sheet. Sprite sheets are used to speed up the process of displaying images to the screen. Sprite sheet animation is sprites that rendering in a quick succession to give the illusion of moving. For example sprite sheet is used to make the character to move in most of the games or a lamp to flash.
Since we havn’t done any movement sprite sheet yet I show how a typical sprite sheet looks like. This is a example of a movement sprite sheet from Megaman 7. We have not implanted this in our game.

So to my work this week. I had some problem by doing this sprite sheets since I have never done it before. My task was to create a lamp, and give it some light and also some highlights to help the player to see when he or she can pick up the lamp and when you can’t. So by indicating this I picked the color red for showing that you are too far away from the lamp for being picked up and blue color for showing that you are now able to pick up the lamp.

After importing this sprite sheet into the game I could see that it had some flaws. the red and blue highlights need some rendering because you can see a sharp line where it ends which is pretty ugly in the game. This will be fixed before beta but will do fine for the alpha which is this friday.

Another sprite sheet I made was an tool item which will give the player points for picking up. This one was easier because of the space the item have in the sprite. It was easier to avoid the edge of the sprite I think.

Tool sprite sheet

Here I had the same highlight color as the lamp, blue for showing that you are able to pick up the tool item and red for showing the player that the item is too far away from the player.

I have learned a lot of sprite sheet this week that I will take with me. For example how to plan the sprite size and adapting the item to the sprite size.

Thanks for reading!

//Kim

Game development weekly blog post nr1.

Time for start my weekly blog post about our game we are making.
We like the story with the whole game and also the visual of it. But as artist it was kinda hard to redesign the characters so what we did was changing the game visually. By doing this it was easier for us all to stand behind the game and say ”this is our game” since we came up with the design of the characters and environment and not just copy the team behind the concept.

I did some sketches what I thought could be our new main character (the player).

The nr 1 was inspired from the team who did this concept so I was seeking some sort of inspiration at first. Nr 2 is a ninja that the team had talked about before about implant a ninja instead of the burglar so I did some alternative head styles to him/her. I tried to keep the characters as much as unisex as possible since we did not plan to make the character in a specific sex.

But we didn’t feel like this was good enough so we got back to brainstorming again and we felt that Otto von Fancy who is the antagonist in this game were looking very British and we all liked that. So what we did we took the game back to early 19th-century and added a solid steampunk theme to it. Here we have a bunch of options to go with,both with the characters but also the objects.

We made new sketches and this time we went away from human character and did sketch some animals. We thought this was a very cool idea and this could be also easier to keep the character to unisex.
Unfortunately I some how lost my sketches but they didn’t get picked for the main character. Instead we went with Evelina Foxberg character design, the raccoon.

Art made by Evelina Foxberg

The raccoon I really like since they have a famous reputation for being light-fingered in the animal kingdom together with the fox. The bag around the raccoon waist represent the inventory. The eyepatch is for the narrative feeling of steampunk and nothing you can use for like see in the dark like a night vision goggles.

Anyway, after todays playtest with our teacher we are rethinking about the raccoon as a character. This is because of our teacher did mention that both raccoon and turtle (our Otto von Fancy is a turtle) are in the game Sly Cooper. This is pretty funny I think since no one in our team did know about this game and didn’t refer to this game at all and we manage to pick both animal to our game. This shouldn’t be a big problem if it wasn’t for the raccoon and turtle in Sly Cooper are main characters in the game, as in ours.