New Stuff

This post will detail all the stuff I've done from 31 July till 15 August.

Level Select Stars

Now that the game has several difficulty modes, I needed a way to indicate on what difficulty a level was completed on. Previously, I had the level buttons be Stars, and it turned out to be very ugly. I couldn't find a way to present this data in a nice, presentable way, but I think today I've gotten somewhere. I wanted a simple dot above the pink circle, but I think a star is a bit more interesting and more symbolic.

The stars didn't have to be too big, and I think it works nicely.
No stars = Yet to be completed
Grey stars = Completed on Easy Difficulty
Gold stars = Completed on Normal or Hard

World Map
 One of my old ideas for the Level Selection stage was to have a world map and make each area clickable, to assess each area's levels. This idea was scrapped. The game didn't need a world map.

Yet today, I was bored and had some spare time at work, so I drew a more detailed world map (never had any true sketches) and I wonder if I can use this in any part of the game... maybe to show the different areas all in one screen at the start?

Another thing I realise is that some of the iconic scenes in the game are included in the world map, so the world map actually tells a story as you "travel through" it. There are even scenes in the world map that you wouldn't recognize as "iconic" till later parts in the game, such as the cliff at the edge, which isn't explored as part of the main storyline, but as a sort of "flashback" in very late-game.

The world map is rather complex and I actually am progressing quite fast thanks to my WACOM which makes drawing something so detailed easier.

I guess it also pieces the events of the story more solidly than using the 4-box icon to represent each area.

The world map would look much better than this, right?

Auto move
This game gets more AI-intensive every once in awhile. There's lots of things my friend wants to see in the game and one feature is "auto move".

Forest Vines v3
I had spent a few hours revising the spikes/vines sprite.

These are how the new spikes in the game will look like.

Testing my new spike patterns

Spikes in the game had undergone much revision and my previous spikes, while looked more fitting in the forest theme, looked very thick and wasn't very ordinary. I made them a lot thinner, but the real challenge was getting the vines to "touch" each other correctly.

I use a series of connected spikes, and they can be rearranged in certain patterns to prevent spikes from showing up in a repetitive manner.

For example, in the screenshot above, Spike #2 can be connected to not just Spike #3 but to Spike #5 and Spike #6 as well, which means I can set up my spikes in several different combinations so the game doesn't look so "artificially generated".

The tough part which I spent a lot of time on was not the drawing, but to arrange the width of the edges of the spike to pixel perfectly match and look smooth when connecting to other spikes.

I also drew two new spike frames #8 and #9 (not in screenshot), to reduce the repetitiveness of some single, stand-alone spikes in the game which made the environment look fake with my old spikes.

Returning to Introvert

29 July

So I was away for about 4 months - partially due to real life commitments and also partially because I lost motivation to continue developing the game.

But recently, I was coding another game for a friend and while involved in this secondary project, I also saw a lot of inspiration and I had this vision of a forest themed map for my own game. I visualized a small log which I wanted the player to go through, and at the other end, when he comes out of the log, he'd see himself as a better person and the environment around him becomes more "cheerful".

 Pictured: A log I was going to use

I ended up doing something quite different though, and excluded the log altogether.

ScenicForest.jpg

It took me two days to complete it, with all the background layers and parallax scrolling, it was really worth it. It is one of my best drawings with my new drawing tablet, the WACOM, and I feel like I should have gotten it sooner since it makes my drawings and turtle characters less rigid than using a Pen Tool, which restricts freehand drawing. I added one of David's music to this map and this scene really brings out David's music to showcase its potential.

Implementing the map into the game...

Also drawing a new 64 x 128 px turtle sprite for the new forest theme. Above was a placeholder turtle graphic scaled up by 400% I added to navigate the map. Drawing a new, unpixelated turtle would look better, which is what I'm doing now. It's my first time animating freely without the constrictions of a mouse.

Turtle Jump Sequence (Drawing the limbs)

I also discussed how the game was going so far with my friend, Li Hao, and when I look back at the game, I realize it has come very far from when I first started. It would be ready for release, but things just had room for improvement so I kept re-drawing and re-designing the game. This meant that I didn't get around to release the game even though completion was probably just around the corner.

I was told that this game was an achievement in itself, even if it weren't published. I was told that for a first game, it was really good, but personally I'd be more than happy to see it through to its release.

It's come a long way now...

There were a couple of changes I made to the game in the past few days (had a long weekend), mostly to improve player experience.

I also looked at the old game trailer and Li Hao said the trailer was pretty good, even though it was very outdated and showcased a lot of the game's outdated graphics. In fact it was so far back (1 year+ ago) that it actually gave me some nostalgia just looking at it.

When the time comes (probably at least a couple more months), I shall make a new trailer, to showcase the new graphics and features of the game and it shall hopefully be my final trailer before the game is set for release.

JigMemory & The4items

2 March 2014

Been spending my time drawing for the past couple of days. I have completed the IntoDarkness comic, but I've not added any of the new comics in. I think I will wait until I've done all the drawing before implementing them.

I realise that at the rate at which I'm drawing stuff, the game might hit 20MB. Oh man... I was hoping to keep it under 10MB but I now realise it's pretty much impossible.

I've begun working on two new comics/stories that will branch out from the final endings. Both comics were drawn on my phone initially, which seems to be the case for most of my comics, since I tend to randomly get inspiration while on-the-go.
Preview:
JigMemory

 

 The4items
This comic will only be shown when you collect all 4 specific items which are hidden as easter eggs throughout the game. That makes this comic a super secret secret comic, since requiring 4 secret items is gonna be pretty much put the player in one of those end-game situations by then.

Also, I drew a sleek version of the in-game key.

Shiny.

AppleStory

I drew this when I was trapped on an island 6 months ago. The only leisure items I had  with me were a notebook and a pen.

This is a really long comic that spans several pages and multiple endings, though not as long as the main story. The time-consuming part is the "multiple endings" component. I'm thinking of adding it to the game too, but having another long comic is going to increase the game size by 1~2MB, and the main story comic took me two months to draw. Well... I guess I'll see how things go.

On the other hand, I realised that being an artist is expensive. After more than a week plus of research and doing product comparisons, I just bought a professional drawing tablet in hopes that it will boost my productivity ^^. I think the tablet is a tad too professional (and thus, expensive) for my ability, but Li Hao recommended me to get it. This is the second-most expensive thing I've bought throughout the span of this project. But Li Hao says this is not only for Introvert, but also useful as a hobby (or career if I choose to go down such a path).

I suppose that he is correct, and the investment should be worth it. I can't wait to use it!!!

Inspiration

23 February 2014

Note: This post has nothing whatsoever to do with any progress I made lately, but I just felt like talking about Inspiration for awhile. This kind of stuff normally goes in my personal blog, but since it has some relation to what I do here, I guess I'll put it here instead.

Just the other day, I was sitting in a computer lab. At one point, the lab got really noisy. People were blasting their music and I found myself in this really irritating atmosphere.

I grabbed my handbook, contemplating to go out of the lab and take a break from what I was doing, but it felt weird to go out alone while everybody was in the lab either sleeping, listening to music or using the computer terminals.

After a gruelling decision, I grabbed my notebook and made my way out of the lab. I went to this sheltered area that is sort of like an open shed without walls. Every morning, we gather at this sheltered area, and I'd occasionally look into the distance, observing how the morning sunlight filtered through the trees. On some days, the intense rays of light seemed to make its way beautifully through the gaps between the treetops. On other days, a mist shrouded the entire area in a mysterious fog. It was also possible to have a combination of both.

So I grabbed a chair and sat down.

I was amazed by how peaceful it was. It was so tranquil, so calm. It was just the subtle sound of the whirring fans in the shed and me. So many thoughts flowed through my mind it seemed as though I was talking to myself.

I took out my notebook and my trusty orange mechanical pencil and started drawing.

At one point, a gust of wind blew and I watched tiny yellow leaves float delicately down in a pattern that resembled how snow would fall.

It was beautiful.

A friend came out of the lab to join me, but left after a short while as he felt warm. I guess I was too distracted by nature to realise how warm it was.

As much as I don't like going out, I begin to realise that a lot of my inspiration comes from outside when my mind is not preoccupied by something, which is often the case when I am sitting in front of the computer. From taking the train, to lying down on my bed with an empty mind, inspiration can strike any time, anywhere, and this is when I'd take out my phone and draw/write it down (yea, my phone has a stylus, which totally fits my needs!). When I sleep however, I have no phone, so I'd try to remember it and draw it when I wake up the next day.

In fact, the very inspiration for Introvert came from a collection of memories and experiences much too complicated to tell in one sitting.

Today, I watched
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A18Rh5gVx2U&list=UUutXfzLC5wrV3SInT_tdY0w
and thus decided to write down the shed experience I had the other day. I think it's something worth noting down.

Progress
So I lied. I was going to talk about my progress anyway.
I was trying to learn how to do this 'I am lost' picture effect for a very dark place, but I couldn't find a way to do it, so I wondered if learning to do a "Dreamy Effect" would help, so I googled that.

I ended up reading up and learning how to do the "Tilt Shift" effect, which hopefully will come in useful next time.

And later on, found a dreamy effect tutorial! Here's the dreamy effect I did for one of the scenes that is part of my "IntoDarkness" comic. I think I may not use the dreamy effect in the end. But I'm not so sure yet.

The other amazing thing is that unlike Paint, I can replicate this effect for other pictures. I can even make this effect in the game, which I experimented with, and here's how it looks like for the levels.

 A few adjustments had to be made depending on how dark / light a level is, to make the dreamy effect look proper. I wonder if it makes the levels look too pale and hard to see with the reduced contrast for the daytime levels.

I made this a toggle effect, which means I can switch between "Dreamy" and "Normal" mode with the push of a button. I'm not sure if I want this in the final version though, because I did this purely for fun and I don't know if it would be something logical or meaningful to add in the game haha. Maybe I would add this for a particular level instead of a freely toggle-able effect.

Adding this as a hidden feature seems too mundane, as I already have a ton of "hidden features" and I don't know if I want another one added to the list.

Comic Scenes part 5 and Stories

20 Feb 2014

It's been awhile since I last typed here. At some point many days ago, I wanted to find time to write here as I was getting quite excited about the things I was working on, but decided to hold it off.

Today I finally have some spare time to write here, and tomorrow is a Friday!

First of all, I have stopped working on the main storyline comic scenes. I have not wrapped them up yet since I am just taking a break from the nearly 50 scenes I drew. This does not mean I have stopped drawing entirely. Rather, I am pretty hyped up drawing new and better scenes that can potentially be used! I have also begun to work on small branches of comics and stories that seem to have really great potential and based on the comments I received, these little comics are "good"!

I am also experimenting on different methods of drawing and optimizing the time I take to draw comics to increase my efficiency.

I spend about 75% of my time tracing my handdrawn backgrounds and characters and getting the turtles to "look right". That's the tough part. Using a pen tool to trace over my handdrawn turtles just doesn't seem very natural.

The turtles also lose some of the stuff that makes it look good and they don't look that alive as commented from Li Hao when I put a handdrawn scene beside a digital scene. It looks like converting a scene to digital made the turtles look less alive.

This made me rethink about the way I draw my comics digitally. Li Hao talked about WACOM, a drawing tablet that can potentially solve my problems. It's an expensive investment though. But it will make my life smoother.

The hard part about a comic is getting a good story, whereas the tracing is the tedious part. Thankfully, I can work on the hard part outside of home, which means when I get home, all I need to do is start on the drawing. But tracing takes up so much time.

I decided to test my hand drawing skills, by drawing with the mouse, rather than tracing with the pen. I think I sort of trained my mouse-control from using Paint for several years. When I first did this on a new comic, the outlines of turtles didn't look as clean, but I could see that the turtles look more natural and alive, and their expressions are really more life-like. The best part was, I completed the same amount of work that would take an entire day, in 3 hours! Massive time saver there!

I actually began to like the handdrawn turtles. But I hope to get more opinions.

---

So I began to work on this new comic codenamed comic Jig (seen above), and another comic, CliffTop (seen below), that was completely handdrawn on my phone.

I would upload them onto my computer and the only thing I would need to do is to add colours once I reach home. This eliminated the drawing I needed to do at home and saved me a lot of time. I was quite happy!

Sadly, at this point, I am beginning to realise that perhaps game development isn't something I might pursue, since I am doing better at other areas, from what I have been told. While this project has come a long way and I am more proud of it than anything else I have ever done, I feel it lacks a lot of the feeling that I express through drawing.

But I still have lots to do, and I wonder what the future has in stall for me.

Comic Scenes part 4

1 February 2014

I've been caught up in plenty of drawing and implementing of the comic scenes. I managed to create several special effects for almost every scene. This is rewarding, but also extremely time-consuming.

Not being as strong a programmer as I am in drawing stuff, tasks that involve coding tend to take up a lot of my time. Thankfully, this is the week of the Lunar New Year and I have roughly 6 days to work on as many of the Countryside scenes as possible.

A lot of the scenes are meant to be simple when I draw it out in free-hand (hard copy), but when I draw it on my computer, I make things a lot more complex (or if I want to see it in a good way, more detailed). Making things more complex makes my own life harder, but I still do so sometimes when I want to achieve a particular effect.

Since I am taking a break from development now, I shall just walkthrough one of the scenes I did recently.

I usually start off with a hand-drawn scene. I don't do it all the time, but I think it makes my end result look better, and I can even see the flow of the story before finalizing it in digital copies. Here's a scene I drew free-hand on the left, and the digital version on the right:

 

     Few minutes, or even seconds                                       Few hours, or even days

I wanted to choose a scene that was changed dramatically from handdrawn to digital, but in this scene they look mostly identical without much added detail. Even so, I have the tendency to add parallax scrolling to the scene. It adds depth and looks more realistic. Take the bottom right picture (the one with the moon).

Instead of making my image flat, I do what most other platformer developers would do: make layers.

Sky as background                                Trees as "middle-ground"                      Characters as foreground

The three parts of the scene above when stacked together and set to scroll at different rates as the camera pans, provide for some really cool effects that I can play with, fueling my ideas to create some ambitious effects that often cost me more time than I actually plan to use. This is one thing that makes this stand out from my normal comics. Not only do they allow the possibility of animations, they allow for scrolling for enhanced realism.

Sadly, I am not skilled enough when it comes to creating the effects in Flixel itself and when multiple effects are stacked together, complications rise. I was trying to combine two scenes with camera panning together, and to do this, I needed to use two cameras. The main camera will navigate from scene to scene as per normal, whereas the scene I want to add special effects to (such as scroll or zoom), is attached to the secondary camera, so that if I zoom in or out on a specific scene, I do it on the secondary camera and the other scenes aren't affected.

But well...even tasks like these can end up giving me problems. And recently, because I've been coming up with more and more special effects, my productivity is slowing down when I implement these scenes. e.g. What if I want to display a  scene with scrolling beside another scene that is zooming?! And when I spend more time programming, the lesser time I have to devote to drawing. Aww!

Final scene (Story35)

If you want to see how the scene looked like when it was in progress, there's a picture below. I actually drew this in "daytime" mode because I draw a lot of the scenes in daytime mode, so I have to use the same colour scheme for the trees and grass before adjusting them to the appropriate "night" scenery.

Scene in progress

The above scenes I showed are Story scene 34, Story scene 35 and Story scene 36

I have at least 40 scenes of this comic completed and best of all: IMPLEMENTED, which means they are already in the game itself, viewable with most of the effects for the scenes completed.

Currently in progress are:
Story 39
Story 42

I don't always do the scenes in chronological order because I just start with whatever I am motivated to draw, but I still try my best to not jump too far ahead and skip too many scenes. Just to list down some of the effects I managed to do (YAY!):
- Camera panning from scene to scene + Individual scene scrolling
For a lot of the new scenes, I tend to put many of them together on a single page. But the game screen is only large enough to contain 1 or 2 scenes. So I pan my camera from scene to scene. Sometimes, I stop the camera at a specific scene to play an animation, or do its thing (scrolling up/down). This was the most difficult thing to do. I do this a lot with later scenes.

- Individual scenes' zooming effects
Gives illusion that the camera is moving to, or further away from an object or character. I think this is the coolest effect so far. I use it sparingly because of its limited uses. Only two scenes utilize this so far.

- Lightning flash

There is one scene with cool stormy effects. When a lightning flashes, the scene illuminates and the side of trees/ characters facing the lightning will brighten. But it's always the same side that brightens lulz.

- Scene illumination / lighting changes when sun rises or sets
A simple effect that looks great. Starting to use this more frequently.

Story43

I completed this scene this noon complete with an awesome sunrise.

- Moving clouds
One of the first thing I did with early scenes, and probably still the only moving object in my later scenes other than the sun.

Once Story 50 is finished, I will take a break from comics. I've also started to add watermarks to any significant pictures I post here. I'm only doing this because these pictures are being used for a purpose, and I don't want them taken by unknown people before this project is completed.

I'm fine with pictures that aren't being used in this project though, but most of the things I put here are related to the project in one way or another.

Fun
I wanted to put this picture above as I was writing about programming, but I decided to leave this till the end anyway. Here's a piece of code I wrote for fun. It's called "HowMyBrainWorks.as"

HowMyBrainWorks.png

Failed to compile. Unknown function "sleep()" does not exist.

Comic Scenes Part 3 + Cliff Scenes

26 January 2014

I created several new scenes over the past week and halfway through discovered something that potentially makes the scenes look much better - remove the black outlines.

I should be happy, but when I realise that I've already drawn several scenes out, I don't feel like returning to the old scenes to correct them.

Above is the first scene I drew without black outlines. It looks very good when I compare it to my other forest scenes.

 Above was a comparison I did halfway through while producing the scene.

This is my forest template. I put all my forest-related assets here, so anytime I create a new forest scene, I just have to drag in and re-position my assets. It saves a lot of my time! The character templates are also commonly used, so I just put them here as well.

I have currently 21+ completed scenes, and barely halfway done. I can see this taking up a lot of my time. But I have completed about 90% of the Forest scenes, and I have started moving on to the Countryside scenes. I've already drawn out a few frames of how the comic looks like on paper and now I have to digitalize them.

While not in the comic, I also found this particular picture having great potential so I decided to take a break and work on this. I relate to it a lot.

I really like this scene, and the above is a screenshot taken one day ago.

This is a very familiar scene, and I had created several such scenes over the years. I looked through my ancient "My Pictures" folder and was struck with nostalgia as I recall pictures that date back to 2010 (4 years ago). I did a compilation of all the "Cliffs" for fun and here's what it looks like:

All of them are to scale (in terms of size comparison with each other) except CliffEdge, which I had to scale down to squeeze in here. I just noticed a trend as well, and it's that the pictures got slightly bigger over time. I think it shows the transition of me using MS Paint to Photoshop very perfectly. In my latest picture, I completely removed the use of outlines. All this while, I had been using outlines - something which was a necessity for me while using Paint. And now that I've moved to Photoshop, I think outlines may be gone from my pictures over time since the scenes tend to look better without them.

There's one more TC that doesn't particular look like one of the above since it was drawn for a different purpose, but it does resemble a cliff edge shot.

This is TC34.4, also drawn in MSPaint years ago. I really like the part at the bottom right. It still makes me feel something till today. I remember how tedious it was to manually create gradients in Paint pixels by pixels - but it was what made the moon at the center look one of the nicest among the TC I had drawn back then.

Here's today's progress on Countryside comic scenes:

It's looking satisfactory so far! I can't wait to finish up the first of the Countryside scenes!!!

At least one person will be looking at how shiny that apple is.