Care to play?

Communications.

We did end up finishing something of a product in time!  I can't actually express how much fun and energy-giving this was.  Working with Brian is a blast.  We joked a good deal about sci-fi space opera tropes, and tried to incorporate some nods to popular series. Since the theme was 10 seconds, we wanted to put the player in a situation where every second and choice counts, and let them see the consequences of those choices in an entertaining way.  By letting the player rewind through time, we could extend the gameplay beyond the constraints of the traditional '10 seconds' while preserving the theme and experience once choices were again being made in a new timeline.

Its a point-and-click choose your own adventure, and the rewind mechanic is in a basic state is functioning. There are roughly 5 endings achievable, character elevation works, and sound is in (thanks to Brian's daughter!)  There are some spelling errors in the initial scenes- The Incomprehensible seems to be appropriately the biggest contender in that.  Just can't comprehend that alien enemy...

Captain: "...."

  Some of the things that were planned, but we were short on time to finish: (1) Animated rewind of time, (2) The rest of the endings/interactions to get them (3) Animated view screen content based on the current threats.  There was a whole list of features that were not part of the 'core' experience that it would be a lot of fun to get working on a second pass, like parallax shifting of stars through the windows of the Pequod's hallway and  a greater sense of the battle that the game throws you in in medias res among others.  I believe there will be further development, but it's going to be secondary to the primary company projects.  

There's a few days left of voting at Ludum Dare's site, but more importantly there's some nice feedback in the comments regarding how people felt about the retro-styling and the comic-y cut-scene presentation.  I enjoyed painting all the little cells, and rather like all the little characters and their little ships.  (I actually want a folder or shirt or something with the Ensign panicking on it )

I believe that there are plans for a formal post-mortem on the game, probably to be put on RealityFoil's own website, so stay tuned for that as well.  I'll save talk about design decisions and art development for that so that this doesn't all get painfully repetitive.  In the meantime, enjoy some more art~

Emergency landing, planet side!  Lucky you navigated towards water, Captain.

Attacking the Incomprehensible, without sacrificing your ally the Albatross for the greater good.

Warp Cores are very sensitive to space combat.

Getting down to the wire... less than a day left.  I have so much to paint!! Lost some hours this morning vacuuming a very green (should be clear) swimming pool.

Brian grapped a screen shot- he got the speaking portraits implemented!  Poor Ensign Nameless, he's worried.

August 23rd-26th!

   I'm teaming up with Brian, a coworker here at Reality Foil, LLC for this fun game-jam event.  I have no idea what we're actually going to make, but we talked about maybe needing 2D character animation.  I haven't bone-animated anything in flash for over a year, so I threw some flats together on layers, opened the bone tool, set some poses and exported it to various file-types to see what we thought about it all.  It looks ROUGH, let me tell you, but now all that great stuff from Actionscript 3/Flash/Prototyping class with Patricia Huettel is finally filtering back into my brain after months and months of not touching it.  

So stay tuned for progress updates, screenshots, tears of pain and of joy!


Man, I miss my Saxon Crown game... I should revisit that little point and click adventure.  

This was a concept paint of the environment "Heart Chamber" where the boss would be encountered.  I was focusing on clear materials definitions for the environment artists, suggestion of propulation assets, and clarification of the red blood cell powerups and the virus mine enemies.  It was done wholly in photoshop, in about 3 hours.  Later, after I made the Cell logo text, I converted the paintup to a 'wallpaper' format as you see here. 

It happened January 25th- 27th, so I'm a little late in posting up the meaty bits associated with the efforts.  Reasons?  Doing a 48 hour event pushed a lot of things behind by about 48 hours!  After that there's been some family medical emergencies, and work that is under NDA....but I've been noodling away. 

If you every get a chance to do a GGJ, do it.  Anyone is welcome, anyone interested in game production at all.  There were even two boys, 13 and 14 I think their ages were, at the Pittsburgh location who set out to code an entirely text based team.

This concept was trying to feel out the opening menu screen and whether we wanted custom font or just to use a premade font.  We liked the effect, animated the blood cell throbbing with a heartbeat sound, and went with it.

I took on the role of Producer for an outstanding team, as well as a Concept Artist, Game Designer and Texture Artist.  Producer meant collecting files and holding meetings, being the final decider on directions discussed, keeping everyone to deadlines, and most of all keeping cool, calm and collected while encouraging team enthusiasm and health.  By the end, concept and UI work complete,  I was putting blankets over sleeping teammates and telling others when they'd been working for more than 2 hours straight to stand and have a 5 minute walk and water break.

Our Team logo, NoBrows.  It's a stylized portrait of Travis.  Apparently at some point he'd lost a bet and shaved his eyebrows as a result long prior in history.  So our team wagered him his eyebrows if we won any awards.  It became a running joke over the event, and the logo was a surprise to get him and everyone to laugh.  It worked well.  Sadly, he still has his eyebrows in real life.

Some early iterations of White Cell's design over top of a vein/artery environment concept.  With only 48 hours, I was trying to cut down by combining the environment, propulation and character on one piece.

My excellent, talented teammates were  - Amanda Wallenhorst, Jordan Jenkins, Cody Wilcoxon, Matthew Kline, Travis Kehler, Kyle Hickey, and Theresa Liddington.  This year's theme was a heartbeat, and we had decided early on that we wanted to make a side-scroller in the Unreal Development Kit.  Cue the canonball run collection adventure of White Cell, who fights to free your heart from the grip of Cardiovascular Disease. W, S, A, & D guide the character along the environment to collect red blood cell power ups, and players have to be careful to avoid the exploding viral mines.  The product came out beautifully polished for 48hours and 8 sleep deprived artists, and everyone who played it commented on that aspect. 

Our Stylized main protagonist, White Cell.  

The enemy virus mines and some indication of how they should animate to the skinning/rigging team.

We discussed wanting to maybe spend another week jam session on it as a group, figuring if we got that far in 2 days, a dedicated 7 might allow us to push in a projectile attack, some other interesting enemy variants, expand the 'boss battle' and have more than one level.  I really hope we can organize it together.  As the Producer, I suppose that will be in my court to start emailing everyone!

In the meantime, All GGJ participants upload their source files and playables to the GGJ site, and agree to released them under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 version of the Creative Commons License. So go play our game, Cell, as well as all the other amazing 48-hour free vignettes created by this amazing event!

The base palette we decided to use as well as a prop concept in a infected and non-infected state of texture swap.

Spoiler?  WhiteCell is based on a basophil immune cell, so win or loose, he has excreted his defensive chemicals to poison/eat the enemy and perishes.  Its a glorious sacrifice to save the body and become a hero.  If he loses....poor thing gets infected.

We even had suggestion that we should have WhiteCell plushies made, with the hole in their body still there, looking cute and gore. It was great people got into the ambiance and feel so much, and really liked the style.

Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) hosts an annual game art & design scholarship competition for girls only called G.I.R.L. at their website.

I'd entered it a while back, and was selected as a semifinalist.  Semifinalists had to create two  pieces of concept art - one environment and one posed character that were new and inspired by a choice of one of Sony's game properties.   There was also a 500 word essay about women in the gaming industry that answers the following questions: 

Why do you want to work in the gaming industry? How can you change and improve the image of women in games?  How do you think such changes will help create games that more women will want to play? 

 Likened to a magician with a box of tricks, the modern gaming culture is a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant man. His tricks are a rich history of archetypes drawn from the range of Campbellian hero cycles from Gilgamesh to The Lord of the Rings. As traditional gender roles are ascribed, women in gaming are relegated to romantic interest, the wise old mentor woman, the less mighty then the male protagonist warrior, Magdalene or the Virgin Mother. With primarily five women to choose from for the hundreds of games released each year, it is no wonder that both female and male gamers have become bored and mostly ignore these old hat additions to any narrative. As an aspiring ‘magician’, I hope to show new roles and twists not just for female audiences, but to enrich the storytelling and awareness of all the culture of entertainment.
 Subtlety of role and character should be emphasized in much the same way as a control in an experiment. By choosing gender as the control, for example in a team-based story or performance, an audience loves or hates a character based on their actions and reactions within their environment. All male examples abound in two-man comedy: Abbot & Costello, David Spade & Chris Farley, and Beavis & Butthead. These are ready to mind examples, while concurrent female duos are lacking. ‘Partner’ situations in crime drama, which can edge into the comedic sublime, hold similar state. Watson & Holmes, Poirot & Hastings, and Martin Riggs & Roger Murtaugh of Lethal Weapon all brilliantly portrayed through the decades, admirable in their faults and triumphs. The Dame of female sleuthing, Miss Marple, has no partner associated. Rita Mae Brown’s modern mysteries give Mrs. Murphy a man and two cats. Examples of heroic, “Fantastic” Fours stand out for men as well, The Brothers Earp and Doc Holiday, the Ghostbusters, and the boys of South Park. Female groups of any number lack the same colour of character. Playboy-bunny fashion for She-Ra, Sex & the City titles itself nicely, shopping and romance for the “Charmed” Ones, and all well within insipid, ascribed gender definition. Depth does exist, but in small and singular flashes. Kouta Hirano’s Integral Hellsing and Production I.G’s Balsa of Seirei no Moribito are characters whose strength and interest within plot, and not within the five stereotypes, are noteworthy. Neither woman is overshadowed by men, or infallible. Both display consistency without instance of distressed damsel syndrome.
    The lack of development of the female antagonist and protagonist is a sign of juvenile development in the storytelling skills of the industry, and a fear of a perceived ‘risk’ in acceptance. Boredom of the audience with the existing face cards is evidence enough that the culture wants an act that doesn’t involve superfluous women. I want to show audiences new archetypes - a Suicide Queen and One-eyed Jennys.  Then audiences will see a trick they don’t know the secret to.

Spooky forest in complementary palette.

Little forest-dwelling Harvester of the glow leaves.