Sandwich

A valid question

News in the New Year!

Happy 2012, you!

It's been a while hasn't it? We hope you're well.

SuperGlad is growing up. Just look at that hub. Isn't it lovely? And by the time we're done, it won't just be a pretty face. You'll be able to play with everything you see, and that includes initiating a sword fight between Ruby and Lloyd.

It sure is turning out to be a long development cycle for a mobile game, right? Well, that's mainly because it's Fran and our pet project - meaning it doesn't pay the bills, so we have to balance our time on it with other stuff (indeed, we and Fran are currently working on ANOTHER game together!).

However, this means we can really spend our time making something great without worrying about strict milestones. And that's definitely turning out to be a good thing.

These here are early screenshots of the first 2 dreamy mini-games featured in the game. I'm not going to reveal too much about them, as we want it to be a surprise when you play, but you can probably work out which one is the nightmare!

Excited? Good! More soon. :)

Quick Character Design Update

Thought it might be nice to show you the new character designs somewhat finalised.

I like them so much more now! When I look at the previous designs I am filled with disgust! do me a favour and don't scroll down haha.

From now on I am going to squish all my characters into tiny, big-eyed versions of themselves.

That is all! Told you it was quick.

Wait, stop, START AGAIN!

Hi all, Fran here again.

Thought I'd drop in and do an arty post since there's not been one in a while.

So I had started animating all the basic movements for Ruby and Lloyd, I thought I had their main environment [the hub] pretty much designed. The Coatsink guys were starting to put these animations and artwork into their game engine thingy [technical term] It was all going fine...

BUT THEN

I realised I hated everything I'd done!! [this is common for me] I looked around at other games [most notably the Scarygirl game which is just beautiful] and realised that I hadn't really got the hang of this designing for games thing.

Ruby and Lloyd just didn't look...right. I'd neglected to really think about how small a space there is to play with when you're designing for an Iphone screen. I was animating using toon boom which is an amazing program but frame-by-frame is really time consuming and you don't get that smooth flash-esque look which I think works well in games.

SO...I've started redesigning, re-animating everything! This time using good old After Effects. Haha, a little setback time-wise but I think the whole look of the game is really going to benefit from it.

Here are a few sneak peaks of the new character designs which I think of as squished down versions of the old ones. I hope you agree they are going to work much better...still trying to work out a few things [outlines, no outlines??!!] but feel like I am totally on the right track now and hopefully, with a load of work, the game is gonna be a total treat for the eyeballs.

Update: Mini-games and the Lucidity system

Wow, it's the end of October. That means it's been a month since our last update. Time sure flies when you're having fun; just like Ruby and Lloyd are flying here (though they don't seem too happy about it).

This is a piece of concept art that Fran drew for one of SuperGlad's first mini-games. The game is simple enough (and scarily addictive): our protagonists find themselves falling endlessly down a nightmarish hole, dodging demons and spikes, and grabbing power-ups to stay alive. The longer they survive, the more points they get.

But what are the points used for? In so many games they're obligatory; a meaningless number giving you a rank on a leaderboard. Well, in SuperGlad they'll be used on Game Center leaderboards, sure, but they'll also be your currency and experience points.

The idea is that the longer Ruby and Lloyd spend in the dream world, the more lucid they become. Thus, the more control they will have over the dreamscape and its denizens.

Lucidity points, as we're calling them, can be earned in many different ways in the game. You can use them to create or materialise objects and creatures from Ruby and Lloyd's subconscious in the dream hub. Then you can play around with your new toys to your heart's content!

What's more, this Lucidity system will allow us to tell the story. But you'll just have to wait and see about that.

Update: Bringing Fran's animations into the game

We're well overdue an update I think, and it's going to be a fairly technical one (be warned!).

One of the challenges we've had to overcome is finding a way to efficiently and effectively translate Fran's animations in the game. As an artist/animator for film (or similar), Fran isn't familiar with how animation generally works in games; that is, as code (or Flash, etc). So we needed to find a way of bringing her vision to the medium.

Originally, we had planned on simply having a programmer imitate her animations/storyboards in code form. However, this is far from ideal. Not only is it time-consuming, but the outcome is (probably) going to be imperfect, considering we'd be using a non-animator to simulate an animator's work. I mean, the animation might turn out technically fine, but it would be lacking a whole lot of 'Fran-ness'.

So we started to think about other ways of doing this, and found that several general (not necessarily game-oriented) animation programs had methods of exporting projects that we might be able to work with directly (i.e code/flash-based forms of output). And then we looked at what programs Fran traditionally uses for her animations, and discovered that our answer laid with Adobe After Effects.

As you can see here, After Effects allows the user to export a project in a format called 'XFL' which is a group of folders and files which we use, almost directly, with our game engine. We're having to construct some functionality that will allow the necessary files to be imported, but once that's done, we're hoping for a fairly painless translation of Fran's work as dynamic in-game animations.

Now, I know this all might seem a bit elementary to a veteran game developer, but we're quite new and learning as we go - and in some ways I think that's beneficial to us, because we have no precedents or limiting frameworks that we're aiming for or working within. We have our own original game engine (the Pinch engine), which we've blended with elements of Cocos2D, Box2D and now (hopefully) a successful animation system. The tools are in place for an excellent game!