Kana Quest Devblog 17/06/2017

Hey. So this week was the monthly IGDA (International Game Developers Association) meet up and I went to that to do a playtest of Kana Quest.

So my play test process has been polish to a stable state, give to players, see what breaks and what players don’t like. The main points of feedback from this playtest were quite different from the last one I did. The main point of feedback from the first playtest was that my tutorial was awful and levels got too hard too fast. Now in this playtest as the tutorial is less awful (still not perfect) and I’ve smoothed the difficulty curve, players gave different feedback because there weren’t these big glaring issues.

So the list of feedback I got was as follows.

• Click and drag action for moving tiles needs more visual feedback
• The move limit is frustrating
• The next level sign and the tile matcher effect clashes with the rest of the art
• levels should immediately proceed to the next level
• I should have an option at the end of a level to show all the English at once
• The new kana effect does not read well.

There were other comments and suggestions but these were the most consistent across players.

So this week I have been trying to implement changes based on these problems. But sadly I only really got to two things on this list.

The first thing I addressed was the visual feedback for moving tiles. And this took way longer than it should have. Still has some bugs but it doesn’t break all the time any more (only 5% of the time which is still not good but its better than 50%). So now if you click and drag a Kana it will move with your mouse, and the tile that is being swapped with the current tile will move too. 

So the bugs that remain are as follows. Sometimes if the player drags really far sometimes the two tiles will end on top of each other. Then the other problem is that if the player drags in one direction and then changes the direction you get this nasty looking pop that you can see when the blank tile is being moved above. And lastly you can get the tile dragging while it is showing you the English side, which just looks kinda clunky.

Secondly I have started working in a “three star system” like in a lot of mobile games. It allows me to have a variable difficulty that the player chooses and lowers the barrier to entry a little bit more. Except I will do it with medals, gold, silver and bronze. You can see the silver medal above in the gif.

The last thing I did this week was not done in the game but was still important. I made my business card.

I’ve been putting this thing off for so long. And now it is done. Yay me.

That’s all from me this week.  Next week I will finish the “three start system”, I will try squashing the last of the movement bugs and I’ll get to the rest of the problems on the list.

Bogan Bots Page 6 and Monsters Inc

Page 6 of Bogan Bots is done. I decided that I wasn’t executing on the color well enough so for now Bogan Bots will be drawn in black and white. But now this gives me more time to polish my line work a bunch more.

So this piece needs a little bit of explanation. My girlfriend wanted to get my dad a uniqlo tshirt for Christmas which is of Mike and Sully made of ivy. My dad’s favorite movie of all time is Monsters Inc and he loves gardening. One problem that shirt is only available for women. So we decided to do a joint present where I would draw a similar piece except with native Australian plants and my girlfriend would pay to get it printed on a shirt. The trees in the piece are a Jacaranda, Morton Bay Fig and a miniature Ghost Gum.

 

Bogan Bots Page 4, and Pathfinder Character

I have two things to show this week. First is page 4 of my web comic Bogan Bots.

Next up is a portrait of my own character in an upcoming pathfinder game. 

Apart from these drawings I did some work on my games and started writing a review for Pokemon Sun and Moon that you can expect shortly.

Re-colored Cover Page for Bogan Bots

The coloring for the cover page that I uploaded yesterday was bothering me so I went back and re-did it. I Also re-proportioned Sheila’s head so she isn’t as alien like. Anyway updates of Bogan Bots will be on Fridays.

Finished QWERPLine Cast Poster

Here is the finished QWERPline poster that I gave to Loading Ready Run at Pax Aus yesterday. Its super nice to have this thing done and printed out. It took me two full weeks of work to draw it all.

I know I have’t posted in a while. I think I will switch to  making weekly updates rather than daily that way folk on facebook don’t see a bajillion posts ever week. And this way I get to show more stuff for the week and more interesting stuff.

Just a heads up with the above image, that’s the half sized image as the full thing was too large to upload onto wordpress (115cm files are large, who knew). So if you want the full thing just send me a message via wordpress or to my email kipentheodor@gmail.com and I’ll send it to you.

QWERPLine Progress

 

So a lot of changes today. The characters that got added today is Mrs. Snubstitch, Lance Clint, Barbara Doolie, Raphael Krinklestouf, and Granton Bumper. I also once I got tired of adding new characters decided to start the clean up process. So you can see hard black lines around quite a few characters. Eventually I will use that as the outline for everything. I also added in Jimmy Jams and the Prank Patrol in the background in the currently obnoxiously white Prank Tank. I plan to have ALL the characters drawn in by the end of the week so I can start working on polishing all of this. Hopefully my computer doesn’t start crashing from the file size.

QWERPLine Fan Art

So there is this podcast that I watch called QWERPLine which is about a radio station called QWERPLine. And the makers of it are coming down to Australia for the first time for PAX. So I decided to make a full cast photo of all the QWERPLine characters so far (31 in total). This is my WIP

I posted another two characters in another file the other day. Which brings me to 11/31 characters drawn. Its starting to come together and I’m enjoying putting in a bunch of small references through the image. For example Ball Hinkley’s bottle of “Ray Romano” perfume, and the light rail trail that has crashed into the radio studio.

Drawing and Kana Quest Fixes

Did some drawing of realistic noses and mouths for the sake of practice as well as started a longish term project of creating a full cast picture of all the characters from the excellent QWERPLine by LoadingReadyRun. Today I drew Richtor Hammockslam and his occasional co-pilot Joy. I also started work on Kana Quest again. Today I just worked on making the game work with all resolutions. I have to say taking a break from Kana Quest was a good thing to do because now I can see all these things I can do to make it better.

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.