Character shape/motion study

I've been fortunate enough to have a friend lend me a drawing tablet for a little while. It's been a good excuse to doodle a little bit. I started messing around with the shape/form of my character and working out how I want her sprite to display in-game. Through my prototypes thus-far I've learned I don't really like to have the character all the way in profile. It was actually weird for me to realize that most side scrolling games don't put the character in profile, even though everything is flat and you're moving left and right.

Anyway, I'm not going to act like I'm a great artist but I do have some formal art training and I like how these scribbles turned out, so here they are. I'll probably never clean these particular scribbles up into actual drawings, but the exercise was good.

Character concept art

Main character concept art I drew tonight.

The tentative story is that her friend wakes her up in the morning to show her something cool he found (some sort of large, pulsing, floating black thing in a nearby valley). He gets sucked into it, she follows him. She ends up inside and he's nowhere to be found. Adventure begins.

I have a lot more planned out, but I don't want to give too much away. 

October Updates

Current Hue prototype. http://t.co/3CUb1xc8

Also, I just finished submitting Hue for government funding! I'm really excited! Even if I don't get it, it should be a cool experience getting feedback on what I can do better if I try again (they apparently do that).

It's been a while...

I stopped updating this because I figure nobody really reads it. Just for the sake of tracking stuff, in the past 3 months I have...

• Done a bunch of level design stuff on paper.
• Made an effort to solidify the core game design and story.
• Changed the way just about everything in the game works.
• Move speed.
• Jump height.
• Camera zoom.
• Size of character.
• There is now momentum behind everything (rather than the character just stopping and starting on a dime).
• Complete overhaul on how repelling/bouncing works.
• Complete overhaul on how sticking works (still in progress)
• Applied to become a corporation so I can apply for a grant from the Canada Media Fund.
• Played around on my guitar and acted like I was composing music.

The overhauls to repelling and sticking were for a few reasons:

• Objects in the game are now 1 single collision volume instead of 7 volumes/triggers (had top/bottom/left/right repel triggers, 1 main collision volume, 1 stick trigger, 1 smaller collision volume "core" inside the stick trigger).
• Looking ahead, they make it easier to throw different animations into the mix.
• I didn't like the way either of the old mechanics felt... they were functional but they didn't feel quite right.
• Repelling specifically now multiplies the character's speed, which means getting a running start or jumping from a great height actually makes a difference. I always wanted to do this, but a few months ago I simply didn't know how.

Work in Progress - Character Sprite

So, I actually simplified my character from the initial sketches I did. But, I think the design has more character now. I've viewed this animated and it looks pretty good. I'll leave you in suspense for now. I have a lot more animation left to do and quite a bit of coding around it. I also need to clean this one up a bit... it's a little hard to maintain a balance between going for a decidedly low-tech and simple look and making things look nice. 

The amount of work I have left to do on the character is a little overwhelming, but I basically know what I need to do. Lots of frames and lots of code making the frames show up at the right times.

"Repel" Tiles: A History

The tiles used for objects that repel the player have been through several iterations. Here's a breakdown of all of them so far. Keep in mind that each individual coloured square in each of these splits up into 9 pieces for tiling purposes (top left, middle middle, bottom right, etc.).

Concept 1: Animated diamond tiles

Logic: they point out in every direction, and the animation makes them similar to those boost strip things racing games have (in my head).

Flaw: This doesn't really tile that well, and the animation was annoying to me. Plus individual pieces liked to not be in sync. I'm sure I could have fixed it somehow, but I had already decided not to use this idea by then. I'll spare you the animation, but as you can see above there are two frames for each colour.

Concept 2: Pixely lines

Logic: At this point I think I was convinced I was going to make an Atari-esque looking game, so I went with that. The lines to me seemed to more clearly illustrate "you bounce off this thing" to me than the diamond idea. Plus this one tiles fairly well. This remained my placeholder image for quite a while.

Flaw: It doesn't look good. Doesn't match my current art direction.

Concept 3: Diamonds revisited.

Logic: I was sketching out ideas for tiles with a pencil and I ended up going back to this (sans animation). I wanted it to look at least sort of made-of-stone. I think I forgot how bad it looked when tiled. Here's how bad it looked when tiled:

Flaw: See image above. It would look alright if I tiled it differently, but the way this game is built that would mean a lot of extra work. I was basically faced with the choice of writing several new lines of code and babysitting the classes of all my tiles every time I build an object or coming up with a new idea. I still really like the way these look as squares, so it feels almost like a waste not to use them. I tried just tiling them as individual smaller squares, but it didn't look too hot either.

Concept 4: Zig-zagging bricks

Logic: I basically arrived at this while trying to make the diamond tiles tile more nicely. I really like the way it looks, but...

Flaw: It's just too solid looking. It looks like a wall you would hit and then stop. I tried to use the zig-zagging and alternating colours to suggest motion, but in the end it's still a brick wall. Plus, from a game design standpoint, it's similar enough to the brick wall that it sends the wrong message to the user regarding gameplay. Assuming the player knows that the way the blocks look dictate gameplay and the straight bricks stop you when you hit them, so the slanted ones... make you move in a diagonal line? Well, sometimes... but not always. It also looks like it maybe repels you in the direction the bricks point (which is open to interpretation based on how you look at it), but again it only does that sometimes. So basically, the designer in me hated this idea despite my eyeballs thinking it looks cool.

Concept 5: Jelly blocks

Logic: Once I accepted that zig-zags and diamonds weren't going to work, I had to think about what I could possibly do to suggest an object that will repel the player. Anything involving circles would have the same problem as diamonds. Lines, a la the pixel blocks, felt like they would always look like placeholders to me. I also decided that these blocks shouldn't be stone. So I tried to make them look like rubber. Now they look more like jell-o to me.

Flaw: I'm going to stick with this design for now, but I'm far from married to it. I think it might be slightly too cartoony. They also remind me of something that would be in a Flash game from 1999. If I come up with something better I'll change it. I'm probably going to animate them slightly when the player touches them (either some kind of wobble, or just a blur effect to indicate vibration and make it look a bit more kinetic). So I guess that extra bit of work is a flaw, but whatever. Oh, and it just hit me that the right side will look almost identical to a stick object if it's a larger wall. I need to fix that.

New tiles

First batch done.