Molly's new look!

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eric-molly

I've been working with comic artist Eric Kim on a final character design for Molly and here is the result! The pencils and inks are all his and I just went in and did some cleanup and the colouring. Eric is going to be creating portraits and possibly even  some comic book style cut scenes for important story scenes when we create the final version of the game.  So like the previous screen mockup this is a little sneak peak of what we're hoping to achieve in the final version.

I've been keeping all the sketches that lead up to this final design, and I'll post them up sometime in the future.

Back in the day Eric and I were both 3D artists at a visual effects studio working on some not so great films and doing mini-comics  on the side, so it was fun to get to work with him again.   If you dig this you should check out his blog and portfolio there's some fantastic stuff in both.  When he's not doing art for Guerrilla Gardening he's busy at work on the upcoming Billy Smoke graphic novel written by B. Clay Moore.

Sound Recording - Molly's got a voice!

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Last Monday Scott Moyle (voice of Night of the Cephalopods) and I took a train to the depths of darkest Hamilton to do a recording session for Guerrilla Gardening at the Decoder Ring Theatre studio. For those of you who aren't familiar with  Decoder Ring Theatre, it's a present day podcast done in the style of old pulp radio plays from the early days of radio.  The writing is sharp and funny and the performances are quick and full of wry wit.  I've been a fan of the show long before I'd met Scott or any of the other cast members so it was a treat to see where it all gets made.

Those who are familiar with Decoder Ring Theatre will recognize the voice in the following clip as none other then Clarissa Der Nederlanden the 'Flying Squirrel' from The Red Panda Adventures and now the voice of Molly in our prototype:

Molly critiques a statue of General Bauhaus.

Allow me a little fanboy moment, but how frickin cool is that!?

Since this is all temporary audio for the prototype she's also voicing the female civilians:

A happy citizen is a rebellious citizen.

While Scott is voicing all the cops:

A cop finds something unexpected in his path.

...and male civilians:

A civilian admiring a flower.

We got through a ton of audio, much more then I thought we could, thanks to the help of Decoder Ring creator Gregg Taylor who manned the recording equipment.  A heroic effort given he'd recently thrown his back.

There is now so much audio that it will be impossible for us to get it all in before I leave for the Game Developers Conference.   However we easily have our vocal needs covered for the rest of the prototyping period, including stuff like interactive tutorials if we have time  (a bit of an extravagance for a prototype, but good for testing with people new to the game).

I have a bunch of thoughts on the recording and writing process for the prototype but I'm going to keep this short and save that for another post.

Note: Wordpress seems to have added some crackle and pop to the playback,  rest assured  the originals are nice and clean.

First Glimpse of Final Artwork

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Mockup of final game artwork.

I've been busy creating a mockup of what we want the final artwork in the game to look like and I thought I'd share a small section.

I decided to make the city grey and a little run down, this gives us a believable excuse for adding chunks of plantable ground anywhere on the map, and also provides solid contrast between the dull city environment and bright colourful plants.  It was important to give some visual impact to Molly's guerrilla gardening efforts.   If the city was already very colourful there wouldn't be much difference between a level before and after Molly has run through throwing seeds.  This way you know you've made a real difference to the mood of the city when you play.

citizen-happiness

We're planning on using a similar approach for the citizens of the city.   Here's an image I mocked up for the design document and grant proposal earlier this year:It shows the slow progression from dull desaturated citizen hunched from the monotony of life under General Bauhaus to happy citizen cheered by his revitalized city into taking on the state.  This was a first take on the idea, rather then final artwork so it probably will go through some changes but it gets across the idea nicely.

Development Video #3 - Shorter, Faster... Better?

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Here's the first of this month's development videos.  It focuses  on a new plant we've added called the 'perennial-screamer', for reasons that will become obvious when you watch the video.

As I mentioned last post we're trying something new, cutting down the length of the  individual videos and posting two development videos a month instead of one.  I also experimented with zooming in and cutting the game footage so that it's hopefully a bit clearer what's going on.   So while it looks pretty chunky and old school the game actually runs at 1024x768.

If you want to see a sharp version of  the new art in this video, I'd recommend checking out the previously mentioned  T.O.Jam posting about the game.  It shows off the over the top statue of General Bauhaus, a perennial-screamer and a useful flower who's identity has yet to be revealed, though fans of obscure flora may notice a certain resemblance to a real life flower.

T.O.Jam preview image.

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The Toronto Games Jam blog has a new post about Guerrilla Gardening  with a brand new image that gives a little sneak peak of some things to come.   If you want to see it you'll have to Click the Link! T.O.Jam is a yearly event where local Toronto programmers, artists, musicians and sound designers meet up, form small teams and try to make finished games in a single weekend.  It's been running for three years and last year's was the second largest game Jam ever and the largest game jam to this day with a dairy based theme.  There are a ton of interesting fun games to check out from all three years, all free to download and play so it's well worth browsing around.  If you are local to Toronto and three days of back breaking game making labour sounds like fun the next T.O.Jam is set for sometime in May.

I'll be posting our next development video up Sunday night right on schedule, unless I'm set upon by wolves (a constant danger in the wastelands of urban Canada).  Based on feedback we're going to try something a little different, next weeks video will be shorter  and I'll be posting a second one half way through the month.  So you'll get the same amount of content as before but more often and in bite sized chunks.

Development Video #2

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A little late but here is this months development video!  Andrew has been busy getting features into the prototype and stomping out bugs so this time I recorded it solo.  Last month all we could do with the prototype was create a simple world with a few people wandering around and almost no interactive elements,  you'll  see we've come a long way and there's a good chunk of simple gameplay working now.

Because YouTube and pixel art aren't friends here's a still shot from the current version. Remember as we mentioned in the first video, we're keeping the art minimal for the prototype, so this doesn't represent what the final game will look like.

Designing the Police.

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The police will be the main enemy in Guerrilla Gardening and outwitting them through distraction and stealth is going to be a key part of the game play.  It's important to me that they are also a visual representation of the military dictatorship you're fighting against so I wanted them to feel imposing and anonymous (or at least as imposing as little pixel art police men can be). My initial design was a rush job, used to illustrate an early design doc I was preparing as part of a grant application. I hid the eyes to add that touch of imposing anonymity and borrowed a lot of design elements from military dress uniforms since dictatorships will often blur the line between the police and military.

police-sprite-01
police-sprite-01

Because it was a rush job I've never been completely happy with this design, so I decided to go back to the drawing board before animating him. To begin redesigning the police I started with a few pencil sketches.

police-sketches
police-sketches

I didn't bother doing any large detailed sketches, since it's easy to get carried away and add details that will never make it into a small sprite. I just wanted to get a good feel for the build and general style.  I also decided that I wanted to experiment with elements from riot police and swat teams in addition to the military dress style since you often see those sorts of uniforms worn by police in modern clashes with protesters.

I then took my original sprite and started editing it. I found the original stance kind of cramped so the first thing I did was make it more broad and open. I then tried a bunch of variations based on the styles I'd chosen.

police-sprite-02
police-sprite-02
police-sprite-03
police-sprite-03

I liked the way these were looking, but decided I should increase the sense of danger by bulking them up. This also had the advantage of giving them a unique silhouette so they'd be easier to distinguish from Molly and the civilians.

When Andrew and I met to work over the weekend I showed him what I had and we decided to go with the swat style design.  We still like some of the other designs and may use them for higher rank enemies in the future.  Before going forward I did some subtle colour edits based on Andrew's feedback.

police-sprite-04
police-sprite-04
police-rotation
police-rotation

At this point I felt he was ready for the 'full revolve'  and drew him in five directions flipping the sprite where I could to make the full eight needed.

He's looking pretty good. There may be some small perspective errors but  it's easier to spot them after the sprite is in the game, so from here I take each of the angles and create a simple walk cycles for them.

We're Back!

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We're back to regularly updating the blog and as you'll notice all the previous post have returned. We're also proud to announce that Guerrilla Gardening has been selected  as recipient of the Ontario Media Developement Corporation: Screen-based Content Initiative (say that ten times fast) which will be providing much of the funding for our early prototype work!

As a small developer trying to  make the shift from contract work to independent projects like Guerrilla Gardening, I can't express how much this is going to help us.  It's fantastic that the province of Ontario is helping support not just Spooky Squid Games but several other small independent game developers at the early development stage, when it is especially difficult to get outside funding.

Anyway I know most of you are here to read about the game and not about the trials and tribulations of funding small game companies.  I'll be posting up an entry about the process of  designing the police sprites in a few minutes and should have the new development video online either tonight or sometime tomorrow depending on how long my 'post life drawing class' coffee buzz lasts.

Okami Style Glitch

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We spent Saturday working on the police sprites and implementing Molly's plant seeding action.   About half way through the day this neat glitch happened where trails of blooming flowers followed Molly as she ran.   It reminded me of the effect in Okami. Here's a little clip of the glitch in action:

Speaking of glitches, if the embedded video has excessive blurring and noise when you play it, just click to view it on the YouTube page. I'll try to figure out why it's doing that.

Development Video #1

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We're starting up the Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution development blog with the first of what will be a regular feature : our series of monthly development videos showing the progress and pitfalls of making the game.  Right now we're prototyping and tool building so what you'll be seeing is very rough and very early but should be of interest to anyone who wants to see the ugly exposed underbelly of game development.

As you can tell YouTube isn't doing us any favours visually so here is a screenshot to give you a better idea of what the prototype currently looks like.

Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together

As I mentioned in the video we're keeping the art very minimal right now so we can change it easily.   I also showed an illustration I did for the back cover of the graphic novel Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together. We're using that pixel art as a goal for the final visuals, so here's the high quality version without the video distortion.

Other than these videos what else will we be posting here?   I'll be posting about the art development process with sketches and pixel art. Andrew will be posting about how he's approaching the programming. We'll both be posting about the discoveries we make taking the game from our current design document through prototyping to final game.

We'll also occasionally talk about development on our smaller projects such as Night of The Cephalopods and about some of the other interesting things going on in Toronto's thriving indie games scene.

We want to make sure that we post stuff that you find interesting so feel free to comment or ask questions and tell us what you'd like to see, both on the blog and in the videos.