Art Style Experimentation!

Messed around with pixel art for an hour or so. I don't think it's viable to animate, unfortunately, as I'm shaky enough with pixel art as it is. Cute, though!

EDIT: Nevermind.

Reference Links: BA5 & Light Study & Research pictures.

http://www.stencyl.com/help/view/animations/

Guide on states, animations, and how to do these.

Within this painting, the main source of light appears to be coming in from above the man in red's shoulder, on the left of the painting. The lighting brings the viewer's full attention to the people in front, as it illuminates them in comparison to the muted colours and light in the background.

Within this painting, the light source is visibly coming from the background, behind the mountains. This turns everything in the foreground into silhouettes, and causing a specular reflection of the trees in the relatively still water and a more diffused reflection for the cows where they have disturbed it. As the light portrayed is that of a sunset, the entire scene is bathed in a very red/orange glow.

Also of use are some more reference pictures of seed life and animate plant life in games.

The above game is Botanicula. While the designs are of animate creatures, they clearly all have a base in familiar wildlife around today. I also uploaded some more of my gathered pictures of seedling shoots.

BA5 - Another redesign!

After I put together all of my poses, Stina volunteered to throw them together into a gif animation on photoshop. It took a long time and a lot of lacking motivation in order to throw together the poses for the animation, though it came out fairly well. However, I was intimidated by the notion of trying to animate a run or a jump for the same kind of anatomy, and was worried about the time it would take me to do so. I felt like animating a walk alone wouldn't be enough, as I wanted our game to be fairly explorable, in order to give Stina enough room to show off her own artwork. With a walk, I felt like we would be restricted to a single flat plane to explore.

Original animation, unfinished.

Having been doing a little more study into 2D platformers, I noticed that many of these platformers used a 3/4 view of sorts, or at least had both legs visible. I wanted to incorporate this, as my current profile animation felt very stiff and stunted. I began another redesign, basing it on one of the most simple shapes possible - a sphere. I returned to my seed studies, and found one in this:

I took some of the features of my design, and placed them upon this new base.

A circle was incredibly easy to animate in various poses, and I quickly came up with the idea of having the creature move in a roll to dash, in order to get into practice with the concept of animating something a little more.

And with Stina's handy photoshop skills to preview:

Animation!

While Stencyl takes each individual image to make into a gif on its own, I felt it was really good to be able to see what each animation will look like without the fuss of importing into the engine and fiddling with file sizes. With the body of my creature now so simple, I could focus on the little things with less worry, such as the physics of weight on the creature's feet and its sprouting shoots. Stina also refrained from doing any between frame tweening, so the animation above should be the same as it is within the engine. Satisfied, I began cleaning up my lineart and adding further details like wind motion:

BA5 - Animation Pains

Have been struggling with the ins and outs of animation. Thus far, I've managed to put together a few poses and determined a vague order, though I've yet to test it in game. Now I've started trying to get opses and motion into my character, I've begun to feel very intimidating by the GameSalad and Stencyl engines. I have no inclination towards either but Stina seems to feel more at home with Stencyl, so I took a look into a quick interactive tutorial. It's complex on the surface, to say the least.

Stencyl tutorial.

I also looked into some more animation tutorials, specifically for upright/humanoid movement. I wanted to keep whatever I did simplified from a human walk, though, as a realistic human walk has so many nuances in order to make it believable.

Animation Careers: How to.

From the above video I took to heart the concept of tracing over previous drawings in order to keep the artwork consistent, and also added some extra poses to my walk.

BA5 Project 1 - Further concept refining

After speaking with Nigel on Friday, I came away with some new considerations for my character design when it came to animation. Since the creation of my character, I had begun to realize that even a character like the 'hamster seed' that I designed would be very difficult to animate at my level of skill and drawing consistency. I had already recognized an issue I have with keeping something looking similar in multiple poses and positions. While I wanted to work on this a little, I knew it was unrealistic to attempt to do so and also successfully place my asset within a game engine in the time left to me.

Nigel spoke about creating a character that still was 'seedlike', but would be less fluid/animalistic in animation. Having viewed a few videos on animation for animals, I was inclined to agree.

Run Cycle.

Another.

Nigel suggested using a design that was more upright and stiff in nature, which would mean less animation would be required to create something smooth than if I had stuck with an animal design. I set out, at first, trying to keep my drawing looking consistent through opposite stages of the walk. While this design is very simple, I think it has a similar look to the previous design, except upright. Another thing I decided to implement into my design was the inclusion of more a more flowing interpretation of the leaves on the creature's head. While this makes them less clearly leaves, I feel it synergizes better with Stina's twirling, entwined background. I left the body of the creature blocky and simplified, so it would still stand out against what was behind it.

I also spoke to Lothar, and eased some of my confusions/worries in regards to the brief. While it was originally thought that we would have to design a fully realized level, it seems as though just implementing a functional asset within even just a screen's worth of space would be acceptable providing it was interactive and worked well. This is a relief, considering I thought I would have to create far more terrain than I now do.

BA5 Project 1

Stina and I have chosen to work together on a new project separate from Illusions. We wanted to create something very simple and understated in terms of narrative after the narrative-heavy design of our previous game. With the brief meaning we'd likely end up using Gamesalad, we decided to push for something level and sidescroll based.

I began looking into independent games like Braid, Fly'N, Limbo and so on. Each was a sidescroller in movement, but employed various gameplay mechanics to keep them unique. Through back and forth discussions, we decided we wanted to create a game around the mechanic of creatures who could adapt to their environment in order to bypass obstacles.Visually, Stina and I quickly took background and character design respectively. Knowing my creation would have to be animated (and knowing how little I know about animation), I chose to do something simple. For inspiration, I examined a fair few sources.

A primary beacon of interest was SA2's chao. These creatures develop abilities and physically when exposed to different sources, adapting and growing depending on what they are given.



Visually, I felt very drawn to the art style used in Fly'n. I discussed it with Stina many times, having felt greatly inspired by the simple representations and shapes. The forest-esque environment made me want to place our design within a similar world.

And my own interpretation. I eventually decided that these were too similar to the original Fly'n design.

Going back to my idea of adapting to succeed, I began to think about how I would represent that visually on the character. With adaptation in mind, I immediately began to think more of plants and how they change to suit their environment. I used Pokemon for the visual reference side, knowing that their grass types tend to look like plants themselves and have features relevant to their powers. Eg: Chikorita's vines come from visible nodules in her neck, and the leaves she throws are situated upon her head.

Shaymin, the second Pokemon linked, is interesting because it looks like a real creature with more grass-based features. I wanted to use this idea for my own creatures.

I wanted to go one step further than these creatures and do something directly related to a plant. Specifically, I studied seeds.

 

 

And my interpretation..

From here, I cleaned up my ideas and created new ones.

For a flying/gliding power, I looked at dandelion seeds and how they float.

And my interpretation:

Game Technology.

Steam & Desura.

I chose to look into digital distribution software, specifically for the PC. This led me to focus in a little more on the opportunities that certain pieces software from this background have created.

While digital distribution had been a valid format for other forums of media since the 1980s, it didn't become a popular method of distributing games till the early 2000s. This was primarily due to bandwidth limitations relative to the size of the average game. Before then, there were a few attempts to create an online distribution service for games, the first of which was GameLine, which operated in the early 1980s and died during the video game crash of 1983. GameLine was used with the Atari 2600 to rent out specific games to users for 5 - 10 days.

During the 1990s and late 1980s, Nintendo and Sega released various peripherals for their consoles in order to enable online functionality, including the Famicom Modem, Satellaview and Randnet. These platforms were used to provide subscribers with extra content such as game cheats, connectivity with friends and occasionally a very small amount of DLC.

The PC platform granted easier access to digital distribution in this time due to the hardware already being available for online connectivity. However, there were no dedicated services for digital distribution and most content sharing was done from person to person in the form of user content.

In the early 2000s, digital disribution changed forever. Valve Corporation had encountered issues releasing patches and content for their online games. Releasing a patch would result in a disconnection for a large amount of their userbase for several days at a time. To counter this, they resolved to make a platform that would enable them to update their games automatically, while providing better anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures.

While Steam started out primarily as a means to provide updates to players for their games, Valve soon began making deals with independent and big name developers in order to bring their games to the platform. Social aspects were also included, allowing players to keep track of and talk to their friends in a streamlined format similar to instant messaging software like MSN and AIM.

This interface, accessible within games through the keyboard shortcut of shift + tab, brought the social aspect of couch or LAN gaming to games that were otherwise single player and cut off. Many gamers began outright abandoning other forms of instant messenger. Steam capitalized on this fact by providing everything a gamer would need on their one platform.

The Steam Workshop is a place to find user-generated content for games like Portal, Tf2, Scribblenauts and so on.

Dedicated distribution platforms like Steam began to create a very centralized, all encompassing and self-contained environment for games and communities that had previously been very spread out or even isolated. Games could be updated and updates applied smoothly and automatically, keeping security and stability intact with little effort from or disturbance to a player's experience. News sections kept players filled in on new and upcoming events on Steam and with Steam-related games, allowing games with little advertising of their own to step into the limelight. The indie community flourished in this environment, especially with the release of Steam Greenlight.

Steam Greenlight was released on August 30th of 2012, and allowed indie developers to put their game at the community's mercy for a small, one time fee. Using Greenlight, Steam users were able to vote on games that appealed to them and that they wanted to play. With enough votes, the game would be put on Steam as a fully fledged item in the store. This allowed indie developers to continue working under their own employ as they always had; without meddling from publishers or executives and, at the end of development, they were able to place their finished product on a platform responsible for an estimated 70% of the digital distribution market (in 2009). [Brad Wardell, 2009]

With the big franchises and developers not appealing to every section of the market, digital distribution platforms allow communities to play and support what they want to see. A big issue indie developers had was finding a publisher for their 'risky' and intuitive game ideas. Steam bypasses this issue, allowing indie developers to put their game straight onto Greenlight and allow the public to decide on whether or not they want it. With Steam collecting statistics for purchases (only available to game companies and secured with an NDA) and votes, hard evidence can be provided in regards to the popularity of each game and each genre, showing exactly what consumers wish to buy and see more of.

Games that may previously have struggled to sell have sold extraordinarily well on Steam. Terraria, a 2D adventuring/building game (think Minecraft) sold over a million units in a year. Demilogic via Youtube on 25 Nov 2011.

Another very similar platform to Steam is Desura. Desura, however, focuses more on the indie side of the games industry (and did so long before Greenlight existed). Desura provides much of the same essential functionality with Steam, and the developers do not view their program as a rival to Steam -- only a similar platform that focuses on another area of the market.

Developing games to place on Desura is transparent and easily accessible even to the average viewer -- the main software page dedicates a section to it.

Desura is more accessible to indie developers than Steam. This is both good and bad; less confident developers can get their game onto Desura more easily but have to compete with a fair few trash games for attention. Notably, unlike Steam, Desura does not use DRM where possible. In regards to games that require DRM (due to requests from publishers/devs), Desura will allow DRM and inform potential buyers of that fact before purchase. [Keith Poole, 2011]

Digital distribution for PC games has vastly improved the diversity and accessibility of what is immediately available to all levels of gamer. These platforms have helped raise awareness of many independent games and have, in some cases, been the cause of the of the success of individual games. In recent years, Valve has expanded Steam's reach onto the PS3 via Steamworks, allowing cross-platform play between PS3 and PC when playing Portal 2. The same will be available for Valve's Counter-Strike: GO, with the additional option of mouse and keyboard support in order to allow for equal play. [Mike Bendell, 2013] This brings once divided communities even closer together, allowing those who were once isolated on the PSN to communicate with gamers using Steam.

Digital Distribution Software and network platforms in general have allowed gamers to expand their horizons and friendship groups. Having developed software that focuses the community of a single console or platform, developers are beginning to focus more on the concept of cross platform play, further expanding the linked network of gamers and bringing an ever-diversifying library of games to the attention of more and more eyes.

Brad Wardell. (2009). Customer Report for 2009. Available: http://www.stardock.com/press/Reports/Stardock2009.pdf. Last accessed 03/01/2013.

Keith Poole. (2011). Interview with Keith Poole from Desura. Available: http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?threads/interview-with-keith-poole-from-desura-part-2.503/. Last accessed 05/01/2013.

Mike Bendel. (2011). Valve Confirms Cross Platform Co-Op for PS3 Portal 2, Steam Copy Free With Purchase. Available: http://exophase.com/20856/valve-confirms-cross-platform-co-op-for-ps3-portal-2-can-unlock-copies-on-steam/. Last accessed 05/01/2013.

Research links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_live
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live_Marketplace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desura
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_distribution_in_video_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_video_game_development