The Pixels Never End

As usual, the work on WAID continues. Just to get this out of the way, I’m finally pronouncing dead my goal of submitting late to Indiecade. As much as it pains me to sit on my work as time goes by, I still just don’t feel comfortable sending out what I have. Mainly, I wasn’t able to get as far in development as I was hoping. I guess it didn’t help that I now know I won’t be in the country when Indiecade is going on, so any benefits that submitting a game confers for conference attenders are void. And considering the scale of the game and my development schedule, by the time I actually get feedback from the jury I’ll probably be in the final stages of development, if not finished. But I’m glad I at least set that goal, as it definitely helped push me along and sped things up!

I’ve got the characters and the tilesets — now I just have to fill out all the scenery/props for the game. After animating all of the characters, I can’t adequately express how pleasing it is to create a sprite and be able to just move on, without having to create 25+ slightly different copies of it. If it looks good, that’s it. Next one.

It’s also a bit nice to return to some objects that I had done for the first game and put a slightly different spin on it. With the simplistic style I’m using, it can only improve so much, but I’ll take any sign of progress!

I’ll stick to the pattern of showing my assets from the previous game and this upcoming one, side by side. But I haven’t actually finished the scenery for WAID2 yet; what I have here is still less than half of what I plan to make. However, it’s already more than the crap that I scribbled out last time around.

WAID1:

WAID2:

I’ve been working on some other art assets, but this is the only stuff fit for posting at the moment.

The Gang’s All Here

Here’s the art post that I had promised. I’m overdue, which means that this is going to be relatively long, and I’m going to indulge myself and ramble a bit!

I am right on the brink of finishing my character art, which is a huge milestone. The character art, while taking up a small amount of visual space in the game, is the focal point (it’s where you’ll always be looking) — and it is where I have allotted the most amount of development time out of all the visuals. And I think it really shows, and is a substantial improvement from my previous work.

To get a good idea of that, let’s first bring out the mugshots of the cast from the original “Why Am I Dead”:

Brings back memories! At the time, I was pretty happy with this work as a total beginner to pixel art. And now the full cast for “Why Am I Dead 2”, in all its glory:

Okay, well, with just a quick glance they do seem rather similar. After all, I haven’t changed the basic style or resolution of the sprites. HOWEVER! I think that even without taking the (much smoother) animations into account, the extra time that I’ve put into these new sprites can be seen when looked at closer. There is less wasted space in the new sprites, and far less jagged outlines and edges. Everything about the new characters is more varied — the posture, the frames, the hair, even the structures of their heads. I’ve also become more sparing of outlines, which helps me free up space, and ultimately add more details.

To give an idea of the progression I, as well as these characters went through, I’ve dug up the older versions of some of the sprites and put them side by side.

First up is Alton, the blonde guy. As the first character I worked on, he went through the wildest progression.

version 1 : OH GOD MY EYES! Everything about this was terrible, though admittedly it was just to get the idea down. The hair is too noisy, the arms are nonsensical and hunched over, and the legs are short and stubby.

version 2: Thankfully I changed the arms and legs to look, well, human. I also simplified the hair, and added color. His headphones still looked nothing like headphones, as I was struggling with how to depict them. I was trying, and failing, to draw them as if they were poking straight out at the viewer.

version 3: Subtle changes here. I tried another kind of headphones, and it also was not working. I also changed the logo on his shirt from one meaningless shape to another meaningless shape.

version 4: I simplified. A lot. Took the t-shirt logo out, and used the new space to draw the headphones as if they were lying flat on his chest. Toned down the shading on his hair, took out the shading on his pants, and changed the shape of his feet so they weren’t webbed-looking.

version 1: Hadn’t decided on colors yet, and was struggling with all of the information I was trying to get in. Rolled up sleeves, collar, undershirt, skirt design — the heavy outlines just looked really busy.

version 2: I changed how the sleeves looked, and added color in a way to make things less busy. Some details kept their hard outlines, while others lost them.

version 3: Changed the color and shape of her hair, which was cone-like and weird before. Removed some more outlines, and went back to white shoes.

version 1: Yuck! I was trying to experiment with different face-types, and knew that I wanted to give him a distinctive nose. I wasn’t able to use my limited space to do both without making him freakishly huge.

version 2: Downsized his head, arms, and legs. Also played with the shirt and sleeves to change his posture and make him look less macho and stiff.

version 1: I had NO idea what I was doing with this guy at first, and was just throwing stuff at the wall. His hair, face, and clothes are all a mess, and I did this stupid thing where I outline a black shape with a different black.

version 2: Simplified a whole lot. The hair, arms, and legs all got smaller, and I alternated colors a bit so I didn’t have black on black with everything. At the same time, I felt I strayed a little too much from my original concept and lost the effect I was trying to get with him.

version 3: A good compromise, I think. Added detail rather than removed it, for a change! The posture is more what I had in mind originally without looking stiff, and the different pieces of clothing are actually distinguishable from each other.

Once all of the art is done, I’ll be a hop skip and a jump away from a fully presentable demo. The hope is to get there by the end of this month. Time to break out the coffee!

Western Peace

Since graduating, it’s been my desire to travel abroad and teach English. This has been something in the works for a while, as I’ve approached it with a large, perhaps excessive amount, of caution.

Which is why I’m very excited to say that just over the past month I accepted a job teaching English as a second language in the beautiful city of Xi’an, China. Obviously, the work needed for this came before my work on my game project, which was a large part of why I had trouble holding to my development schedule for last month. If that means I don’t feel comfortable submitting to Indiecade, I will consider it a small blip on the screen compared to this news! I’ll be leaving the states at the end of this summer, and it can’t come fast enough.

I’ve known since before graduating that I wanted to travel outside the US in some capacity; I had studied abroad in China for a semester, and found the experience eye-opening and fulfilling. And although I would love the idea of going to other foreign countries besides China, I’m just too tempted to continue studying the Chinese language (老实说，我也想吃中国饭,哈哈)! The decision to teach ESL in conjunction was a practical one as much as a personal one. Most ESL jobs allow the kind of flexibility that would allow me to actually see China, and there are many more openings across all of China, allowing me more freedom in the location I work.

That the job is located in Xi’an is no accident — it is in the dead center of China, and loaded with ancient history for which I am an unapologetic romantic.

Teaching ESL also dovetails with my interests in education. Although I don’t often mention it in this blog, I’m extremely interested in what games can do for education, and I believe that the art of game design and the art of teaching are very similar at their core. Both require one to design a system with the intent of conveying information to an audience by guiding them through it. The game designer uses code to convey emotions and information to the player, while the teacher designs lesson plans and exercises to convey information and patterns of thought to the student. In both games and education, interactivity is vital — the game designer must use mechanics other than walls of text or cutscenes, and the teacher must have exercises other than mindless drills. There are still other, more specific similarities, but I’d rather not ramble on about this too long! Suffice it to say that I feel there is a connection between gaining experience as a teacher and improving as a game designer.

And I would also love to continue my independent development while in Xi’an. I obviously will be more restricted with development time than I am now, but I will still have more than enough time and resources to do work on the side!

More WAID2 art and news to come shortly!

A Very Short Summary of May

Well, May has come and gone, which is sadly to say that I missed the regular deadline for Indiecade. In my young naive eyes however, hope springs eternal; the late entry deadline extends to the end of June, so I’m not out for the count. Plans haven’t really changed, they’ve just gotten a bit…bumpy.

There is, I have to admit, still quite a lot of work left to be done, and I fell quite short of my optimistic estimates. But the deadline did keep me honest, and I managed to accomplish a lot. The character art is coming around the home stretch, the tilesets for mapping the game environment are done, I’ve cut into the writing, the AI pathfinding/movement has been smoothed out…and I’ve finished implementing another important aspect to the game that I haven’t really talked about yet. It’s a bit hard to describe in short, but it was a major goal that I’m happy to have behind me.

There’s a lot more to say and quite a bit to show, but for now I’ll end by just laying out some tile art, which is used to generate the rooms in the game. It’s not the flashiest kind of art asset to show off by itself, so I’m just dumping a lot of it at once to make up for that. The image isn’t exhaustive, that is to say there are a couple tilesets not shown that will be in the game, but this is more than enough to get the idea across!