Slow-ish Day (But not as slow as yesterday)

Just one drawing today.

Some of you with good memories might remember I drawing I did a few weeks ago with the same character. I was feeling kinda lazy today and wanted to do something that wasn’t too difficult so I decided to do a simple portrait of an old character. The one thing that I love with this piece is her eye. The shading on her eye is by far the strongest part of this piece. The background is a bit lazy but as we know my environments are in need of more work. But in my defense I do feel the one lone gum tree has pretty good shading. But yea I like this drawing but its exactly the sort of piece I shouldn’t make too often as the composition is pretty lazy and I do subscribe to the belief that one should be very skeptical of artists who don’t draw anything beyond a character’s face. But every now and again one should indulge themselves to lazy composition. (Even though I did a similar piece on Monday).

Anyway I am flying off to Sydney for a week tonight. So I wont be doing any digital art for a while. Regardless, you wont see a piece like this come from me for a while. I will try to post a bit while I’m away but those posts will likely be game design stuff.

Drawings!

Today I just worked on my digital art. I was focusing on a couple of things today. To make better use of the different brushes at my disposal in photoshop, keyboard shortcuts and shading.

First drawing today is a field of Paterson’s Curse

Once again continuing on from Friday last week where I was working on environments. I felt this piece came out reasonably well. My main issue is with the character in the center as she feels a bit out of style in comparison to all the flowers. Other than that I am reasonably happy with this work as I feel the perspective is pretty solid, and the color work is better than what I was doing last week. So I’m pleased with this one for now. Not a hundred percent what I envisioned it to be but its passable for now.

Second drawing of the day was a bit of a cheat as I didn’t actually draw an environment. But in my defense it turned out well, and it didn’t take too long for me to paint.

I’m mainly happy with the shading and coloring in this piece as it looks a lot more polished that work I would have been producing three months ago. So for that alone I am happy with it. A couple of rough edges here and there are still present but I’m still happy with it. Anyway I will see you all tomorrow.

Landscapes

So I set myself a challenge today. One hour = one drawing. And I mostly stuck to that plan. As I am aware of the fact that I am not great at drawing environments I decided make every drawing today a landscape of some form.

So. Drawing One.

To start myself off I did a basic one point perspective alleyway. So I initially tried to make the camera really close to the ground on this one but I just couldn’t get the angles right. After a long time with what was essentially a corridor I finally got things that look like buildings. Yay took me long enough. One thing I did well here was the cobblestone makes a good transition from high to low detail. I have a bad habit of drawing all things in high detail when they don’t need to be so yay, I’m learning how to cut corners.

Drawing Two

So this one is a two point perspective of an old aussie pub.  I feel as though I did a pretty good job on the shading and shadows in this one. As the pub looks good and the shadow its casting looks reasonable . One thing I tried to do in this drawing to sometimes good and sometimes bad effect was textured brushes to get the effect that I wanted  on certain things. I think it worked for the smallest clouds in the distance and the gum leaves but not so much for the gravel road.

So this drawing I specifically tried to avoid using hard lines as outlines to start with. This is not something I am good at. I think the mountains look atrocious in this piece but the work I did on the water and sand make up for it a little. I also need to do a bit of work on cities/towns in the distance as the city to the right there looks a bit laughable. I might do some work tomorrow on mountains and horizons due to how bad mine look here.

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The final environment for the day is this underwater chasm. It worked out much better than I was expecting it to, especially since I was working with color the whole time and color is not my forte. I am mostly happy with how the color has worked out here. My main issue with it is that everything feels a bit fuzzy and imprecise. The other thing is there is no really good visual focus to draw you in.

So yea, those were my four drawing for the day. Part of today’s goal was to see how much I can reasonably do in an hour. Currently what I can do in an hour is not where I want to be. I need to be looking for ways to improve my workflow and ways I can inject a lot more personality into my work.

 

New Kana Quest Playtest

I’m pretty happy to post this one today. We have the first playtest of Kana Quest on this blog and the fourth playtest of Kana Quest in total. A lot of stuff has changed since the last playtest. Here is a quick handy list for all the stuff I changed.

1. Visual:
   1. All the kana now have a sprite that works within the game’s art style.
   2. Most of the UI is now done and matches the art style. New UI elements include a new undo button, the next level button, and the pause menu.
   3. New particle affect to show that kana are matching that looks like twinkling stars. A significant visual upgrade on the bright green bar.
   4. Levels fade in and out so transitions from level to level are better.
2. Mechanics:
   1. Mystery tile mechanic is a big one. I’m really happy with this mechanic as it got players of paper prototypes to do what I wanted them to do as soon as they saw it. Specific lesson I learnt from this mechanic was “Guide your player to the fun parts of your game”. What the mystery tiles do is they appear as a question mark and using the given information the player has to figure out its pronunciation. This using information was already in the game, but I just needed to make is super obvious.
   2. Paint Tile. So the paint tiles are only used for the pure vowel kana and what they do is they “paint” other kana by changing the vowel sounds. So if I used an “i” paint tile on a “ka” tile the “ka” would become a “ki”. The hardest part of this mechanic was getting the painted tile effect to stay on the affected tile even when they player hammered the undo button in weird ways.
   3. Pause Menu. This isn’t really a mechanic but it is important. This just brings up a menu when the player hits escape. From this menu you can go to level select and replay any previous levels, and quit the game.
   4. Level Select. As mentioned before this is a specific scene that allows you to replay any level you have seen before. That said there is a chance that my game saving script might be messing up in the background without me knowing. So if anyone can access levels they shouldn’t be able to via the level select please let me know.
   5. Game Saving. Oh yeah there is also some rudimentary game saving now. So if you quit the game you will be able to use the level select screen to go back to the last level you were on.
3. Tutorial:
   1. A script for making tutorials much easier. I went over this script a couple of weeks a go but yeah, I am using here. And you can expect me to use it to further change the tutorial in the future. At the moment this tutorial script is doing its job but, it is limited in what it can do and its a guzzler on the memory. Yea the inefficient code part is a killer as its currently preventing me from making tutorials beyond about 12 events as that will cause the scene to lag hard. Just something I will have to fix in the future.

Just before I give you the links to download I have one small request. That is that you run the game in 1280 x 720 resolution as I have not yet got the UI to adjust to different screen resolutions. If you don’t have a computer that can run that resolution you can run other resolutions but be aware that certain things will be cut off.

Here are the links:

Windows – https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6PHPlztnNd8MUZBOGt4TDRobFU

Mac – https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6PHPlztnNd8bEp6VlFlRUZtRWc

New Mechanic, Bugs, and Sprites.

Today was mostly a day focusing on Kana Quest.  But the first thing I did was make a few more changes to the  drawing from yesterday.

There is a lot more I could do with this piece, and to be honest I’m not actually happy with how it came out but I need to finish it and move onto something new. The main changes for today was increasing the boldness of the lines in the gems, and changing some of the colors in the background. The things I don’t like about this piece is it just feels kinda flat and lifeless to me. I know I’m working in a cartoon style but this drawing feels so much less dynamic than what I was going for. I think my lack of skill in shading and color theory really hurt this piece. But alas. It’s time to move on from the art of Rebecca Sugar onto a new artist. I think I might focus on landscapes and buildings after this so I look forward to having my buildings looking like boxes and getting annoyed at them.

Next up is I finally finished implementing a mechanic for kana quest from a while back.

It works like this, you have a “paint” tile that when you use it changes the vowel of any kana you use it with. So above an “a” paint tile used with an “nn” tile changes the sound to a “Na”. Most of the mechanic was already done for me today but the thing I did do was create that splotchy overlay to show that the sound has been altered. The hardest part was actually getting that overlay to go back in the correct place when the undo button was used. But I got it working despite the many bugs.

Finally today I started work on a level select scene in the game. Thus allowing players to pick and choose any level they have beaten.  This is good as it allows folk to replay levels if they have forgotten how to play. You can see the begging of the sprites I will use below.

So the numbered tiles will be used for the levels. I will use green borders for levels that the player can access and red ones for levels that they can’t.

And that’s everything I did today.

Almost Done…

Made a lot of progress with the last Rebecca Sugar Study. Added the features to the Gems and worked on the background.

Its not 100% where I want it to be yet. I want to make a few touch ups to the house and the Gems tomorrow but I will be done with it very soon which makes me happy.

See you all tomorrow.

Fixing Stuff and Slow Progress

Today I worked on fixing a bunch of bugs in Kana Quest, and continued my last study of Rebecca Sugar’s work. It’s actually been a while since I posted on here. The reason why is the last study is taking waay longer than I wanted it to. The characters are mostly done but the background is proving to be a huge hurdle for me and I’m just having a lot of trouble doing it.

When I started this thing I though it would take one or two days of concentrated work. Turns out its taken more. Anyway, one thing that I did manage to achieve today is getting Kana Quest to fade in and out when going to a new level as well as squash a few bugs. I am also pleased that Kana quest is slowly making its way to looking like a reasonably polished thing even if the gameplay feels like a hundred miles away. Baby steps.

Anyway I will talk to you all tomorrow or Friday.

Lots of Boring behind the scenes stuff for Kana Quest.

Today I was mostly building tutorials for a new playtest of Kana Quest. I fixed (slowly) a bunch of really boring mundane stuff in Kana Quest like creating an actual recolored sprite for non moving tiles rather than just relying on Unity’s in build color changer (Which only looks good if you have black and white textures). These things sound really small but when you code your game with trans-dimensional spaghetti code everything simple takes longer.

So as a result I’m just giving you all a screenshot of the game with the new non-moving tile sprites implemented.

See you tomorrow.

Polished Drawing and Fonts

So I started today off with doing some drawing. For a change of pace I decided not to do a study or quick sketches, I decided to make a more polished piece of work for a change of pace. I worked on it for about 3 hours and saved the state it was in at the end of each hour.

So last night I was talking to my girlfriend about something and she misheard something and thought I said “Mer-kraken” and so I decided to draw her an actual Mer-Kraken today. This is my outline at the end of the first hour of drawing. I decided to have the moon behind her head to create a menacing lighting effect. Another small detail is that I made her eyes look like octopus eyes for that extra monster feel.

End of hour two I had blocked out the base shade of everything. Moon being the brightest, then the water then the rock then the Merkraken herself and finally the night sky being the darkest. I made the Merkraken pretty dark so I could get some nice contrast going as well as allowing me to draw the sliminess of the tentacles a bit easier.

End of the third hour I had put in the shading for the background. I had also upped the contrast on her body a bit more. I might add some reflections on her tentacles tomorrow, but apart from that I am done working on her. I think she turned out appropriately horrifying.

The remainder of the day was spent fighting with Unity and getting a new custom font for my game to work. It was a battle that I did not win. But that is what tomorrow is for.

More Art Studies and GUI’s

Did two things today. First was finishing off what I was doing on Friday last week which was a nice animated bit of GUI for my game. I’m pretty sure you can guess what its for.

I wanted it to be pretty garish and bright to show off to the player that they beat the level. Most of the GUI in the game are actually no where near this high in color value. They are still bright but no where near these levels. But this button does share some similarities with the other elements of the GUI. Mainly in shape. Each GUI element has a five pixel wide border and the text in the game all follows a 5×7 pixel all caps sans font format. Which you can see here.

I also continued working on doing art studies of Rebecca Sugar’s work. Today I did Garnet. I’m not going to lie I find Garnet really hard to draw. She has been consistently difficult for me to draw. So much so that my last sketch I drew straight from reference. I didn’t trace over so its all still my own line work but it is not my own composition.

Anyway so that’s my work for the day. See y’all tomorrow.