http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23219

A very interesting article about making games without violence as the main interactive mechanic.

Yeah. I'm on holiday. So not updating this much ahahahahaha.

Oh the pain

Well, I finished the essay.

...Only to discover I'd misread the date. I have in fact completed my essay a month early.
At least this gives me plenty of time for finishing up the project work. But man, do I feel stupid! It's like I pulled an April Fools prank on myself!

Ahh well. Hopefully I can have some kind of demo of the game going for the hand in date, since I have easter to work on it!

Walk the walk

...Okay, well hours of wasted time have revealed something to me:

I really should forget about the animation and concentrate on the game.

I was trying to make really nice 8 frame walk cycles. It's just not a good idea when you're only trained in rudimentary animation and trying to make the whole game on your own.
So due to how badly the Left/Right one came out, I'm sticking to 3 frame walk animations. It'll have to do. Hopefully I can have these finished for Thursday.

Some teething problems with the area size of the office. Urgh, I'm going to have to tweak it all so it's in proportion with the other areas. Not looking forward to that!
So my goal for Thursday is to see if I can have all the visual bits in order so I can finally start making the game work!

Knuckling down

At the moment, I have a game with two rooms in which you wander around and make snarky comments about things. It's not much of a game yet, but it's a start! At least the walkable areas are set up and I've got the hang of making the character say things about stuff the player clicks on.
I guess mainly I'm going to be making the areas and setting them up, and making the GUI this week.

Wheeeeee

http://adamatomic.com/gravity/

This game is awesome.
It's so absolutely simple, you are a little yellow robot...thing and you climb up a long shaft with thing grapple bungee rope thing, but you do it by hooking onto mines, and if you get too close, kaboom!
The graphics and gameplay may be simple, but there's something really pleasing about how the physics works, and the colours used and stuff. Even though it appears old skool due to the sound and graphics, something about the sound and the fluidity and clean physics of the game kind of make it clear that it's a recently made game. Similar to Cave Story, I guess.

I am rather a fan of really well-done pixel graphics. you can tell a game is new but done in pixels, 'cause the colours are always nicer than in actual old games. I remember pixel graphics, and the colours were NEVER that nice! New pixel games have a much more artistic approach to the colours used, rather than the more functional approach employed by the old games studios.
However much I like the look of pixels though, I'm not a fan of working with them at all. Very restrictive. I'm glad AGS can manage full colour and transparency as well as pixels.
I wonder if I should implement voice acting in my game? (sorry, small tangent here) I think it'll depend on my timeframe and how hard it is to add voices.

Can you believe this is my fiftieth post on here!? Yikes!

Four Pitchy Tasty

Still working on the pitch document. This one is trickier than the 'Palette Battle' one, because the style isn't so clear. Palette Battle the feel was 'dull industrial combined with bright chibi and lots of paint splatters'. This one is more 'chic, suburban hipster lifestyle with hint of nostalgia for retro games'. Aaaaaaagh.
Luckily for inspiration today, Scott Pilgrim vol. 5 finally arrived...This is probably why the cover art came out looking so Scott Pilgrim-esque. If I can say one other thing, it's that Manga Studio is the best inking program in existence. I wish there was a plugin for Photoshop that made it ink like Manga Studio! I've been drawing the characters in pencil, scanning them and inking in MS, then using Photoshop for the colour to do all the character art for this.

It's fun writing the pitch for the tongue-in-cheek tone of it. The art takes much longer though, because it's higher quality than the little chibis from Palette Battle. In general, this game has a lot of 'me' in it. It's very much to my personal style and taste. Basically I'm trying to go for a look that's really a lot more 'hip boutique' or 'indie comics' than 'video games'.

Dedicated follower of fashion

Kirsty Lang, Carrie's luvvie housmate.
Something good about an episodic game is that you could feasibly change the characters clothes every story arc to keep up with current fashion trends. For this reason, I've deliberately gone for making Kirsty's clothes pretty 'ala mode'. With most games, characters seem to wear quite timeless styles rather than following fashion trends. As I've mentioned before, since games have such a short lifespan, you don't really have to do this, unless you expect the production time to be more than a couple of years. I haven't gone way overboard here, since this is not so much a 'this year' look as a 'this decade' or 'this five years' look, but even when it's not in fashion, people probably won't hold it against the game, since the game will be old news by then and it'll be expected.
After all, the PHS in Final Fantasy VII was based on a trend at the time (1997) for a certain type of mobile phones in Japan. But even without knowing that, you can enjoy the game.

Another difference here is that as well as not being timeless, the game isn't placeless either. The fact that it's based in the UK means that the fashion is very much what's in in the UK right now. Again, making something universal by making it very specific is something that I'm interested in.