Case 6

Case 6 involved finishing up the last unfinished parts of the game.
We had several backgrounds that needed to be done, and Yngvar was given the task of painting the backgrounds for chapter four and five. The themes of these chapters were lava caves and a temple.
You can see the result below.

The background for chapter four

The background for chapter five

For chapter four’s lava theme, we wanted the backgrounds to have warm tones. It increases the sense of heat in the chapter. As you move up towards the end of chapter four, the color shifts more toward a brighter yellow tone and cools off a bit. This way, the players should feel like they’re escaping the rising lava and that they’re moving toward the end of the chapter as they progress though the screens.
The colors used on the background in chapter five, move from brighter colors toward darker colors. This was done because the boss is found at the end of chapter five, and we wanted to have him in the darkest part of the temple.
In addition to making new backgrounds for the chapters, Yngvar also made new puzzles with visuals that match the menus and the puzzle we added earlier. The art for these puzzles can be seen below.

The puzzle visuals for the lava puzzle

The visuals for the final boss activation puzzle

For the activation of the boss through the puzzle in the last chapter, we’ve created a character animation where Dr. Bones holds up a magnifying glass and focuses a beam of light through the seven crystals he’s collected throughout the game.  This puzzle is the most elaborate visually, which fits nicely with its position as the last puzzle in the game.

A screenshot of the activation of the final boss

And for Hong was given the task to finishing bacground for cehapter two and three.The themes was mountain, and icecave. These background was paint using the same tecninqe used in the privious background. 

 

                                          This is chapter two.
In chapter two the backgrond was supost to go from mountain atmospere to a cold and snowy, almost ice astmospere. The whole painting is light and have a cold tones over it. It have a lillte touch of warm light from the sun in the top of the painting that makes it more relaxed. Tin the top right corner of the painting the rock got more cold tones and it can look a little bit like a frost.

This is chapter tree. 

And for this chapter the the tone is cold. It is inside a icecave so the color used in here is cold blue and it have a little hint of crey ang purple. Since we are going to use an overlay to this the backround were paint a little bit more grey then usual. It start with a cold tone and goes over to a warm brown. The main reason for this is the lasst paint is a normal cave.

She also animate torch fire to the last chapter. This torch were made in flash and have a more simple look and you can se a picture of it over in the "screenshot of the activation of the final boss". There is only one NPC in the game, and we want to have more NPC`s so Hong was given the task to animate one more because she have already disign a few NPC. The NPC is a mix of two animals. A fish and a frog. She used frame by frame and motion tween to animate this Fishfrog. Here is the Fishfrog.

 

Sondre has been further developing sound effects, atmosphere soundtracks and songs. Not much more to say here really, except to show off some new sounds. For some of the more melodic atmospheric sounds it has been hard to get them to fit along with the soundtracks. The solution has been to put those atmospheric sounds where the songs are at their ¨calmest¨, i.e. where there are least pump, or sounds if you'd rather. Sondre havs found it hard also to find good recording targets for some of the sounds. Fire, for the thorches in the cave levels, and bubbles, for the lava bubbles in the lave level, proving to be the most challenging. Fire, for obvious reasons, and bubbles because we can't really get them to sound like lava bubbles. The thing with water bubbles is that it has a tendency to sound like, you guessed it, water bubbles. That goes for most any sound though. But as we are wrapping this up, he will find some way to manipulate it into what we want it to sound like. Also, the mountain song has been updated with a bit of jodeling and some new riffs.

New mountain song 

Lavachase 

Boss song with scream 

Calm lava 

There are three things worth mentioning here. First of all, the screams from the boss are mainly Sondre's own voice. Secondly, if you listen to the calm lava song, there was supposed to be a subtle scrathing noise at the end. Although subtle, it was really the topping of the cake and amazingly weel performed with such a simple tool as the fruity loops scratcher. It sounded good and was a creative solution for this song. However, creativity, obviously, gets no warm hello into this group. Anything that goes even the slightest bit away from what's mainstream and commercial, only gets you a place outside in the cold winter night. The name passive-aggressive truly shows it's meaning in such a scenario. Finally, the song previously presented as the cave song, is now the temple song for our final level, simply because it made better use of itself there. 

On another note, no pun intended. Gisle had to play the bad guy and tell Sondre that the scratching in his song for the lava sequence was kind of inappropriate for the mood we wanted. Sondre of course, took this really personally and now hates Gisle and the rest of the group. Gisle have taken precautions and boarded up his windows and installed new and more powerful locks on the doors. We don't know if it's enough, because Sondre can scratch through doors like a zombie on acid, he's the scratchmaster and there's no stopping him!

Gisle has mostly been fine-tuning the script during this case; Finding and removing bugs, putting the final touches on events and puzzles. He's also been commenting the script, which took a while, although some parts of the script has more comments than others. Apart from pure programming, he's also been making and designing all the levels for the game. Despite the editor, this took quite a while, since every level had to be tested and fine-tuned for gameplay. The level couldn't be so hard and unforgiving that it was frustrating, but it couldn't be be too easy either. It took some time and testing to find a balance.

For this last case Asbjørn has made some animation and graphical work for the game. We wanted a different look for the temple stage, so he has made some new platform tiles. These tiles are made in the same way as the other ones. They are tileable in every direction; you can make ground, walls, roof and single platforms. The platform tiles have a unique design and got some symbol texture added to them, to make them look more “tempelish”. This is how they turned out:

He has also redesigned the crystals for the game. They now have a more realistic look and is now implemented in the game. It’s now necessary to collect the crystals to complete the last puzzle in the game. Here are the crystals before and after redesign:

After doing this Asbjørn designed a lever. The lever will be used to trigger puzzles and gates in the game. We wanted an animation for the lever so he did that as well. Here is the final animation for the lever:

The animation was made by using tweening and some frame by frame animation. To make it more realistic he made the stick not to lock at the extreme pose in the animation, the stick goes back and forth and then locks at the end.

We needed a falling animation for the last boss in the game. Also we didn’t want the boss to be visible when he appears at the boss stage. So Asbjørn created a silhouette of the creature. The boss falls down from the ceiling and lands on the ground next to the player. This creates a dust cloud around the boss. We did this to hide the silhouette of the boss, and when the dust cloud fades out the boss becomes totally visible. The dust cloud is made with some blur and adjusting the alpha of the layer. Here is the animation:

Case 5

For case number five Asbjørn has been doing some more animation. This time his task was to create the boss animations. When he got the boss concept design from Yngvar he immediately started to vectorize the drawings.

After redrawing the boss he went for frame-by-frame animation technique combined with some tweening. This is the same method as the animation technique for the albino-frog. As a reference for a four legged animal-walk he used “Animators Survival Kit”. In the last chapter of the book there is a chart for a dog walk cycle. It contains various poses such as contact, passing, high and low poses. After using this guide he ended up with this animation:


















This was not exactly what we wanted for the game. The walk cycle is very standard and “friendly”. The walk cycle doesn’t fit the character profile. This is supposed to be a creepy and scary boss, so Asbjørn were to apply these characteristics to the animation. After some more hours he ended up with this new animation, which is more suited for the personality we want to give the boss.


















When we were satisfied with the walk cycle he also created an idle animation, scream animation and a start-walk animation. These animations will also be used in the game at the boss stage. Here is a sprite of the animations made, as well as our charming Dr. Bones.















Now that our character can use vines to swing from platform to platform, he needed a swinging animation. Yngvar made this animation during case 5. The vine-swinging action is a little bit complicated, so it has required a bit more cooperation between the artist and the programmer than other character animations we’ve done. The animation in itself is a little bit cruder than some of the previous character animations. The reason for this is due to how the vines function. Gameplay-wise they work great, but (at our current skill level) it’s difficult to calculate exactly how the character will behave while swinging on the vines, and make animations that will fit in perfectly with this without spending an unreasonable amount of time getting it right. Some tweaks may be done to the animation towards the end of the project if our schedule allows for it.
 In addition to making this character animation, we’ve also made some updates to graphic elements involving the in-game menus and the cursor. The sound settings menu has now got a visual appearance that fits in with the rest of the menus in the game. The cursor has also received a visual update, and the in-game menu has been expanded with more options.

The in-game settings menu

The cursor

The system we currently have in place to show the character’s “sanity” required some drawings of the character’s expressions in different mental states. The following four images were made for this use (we may remove, replace or add more expressions were we find it appropriate).

This last week, Gisle has mainly been focused on finishing, and tying together different parts of the script. Things like the ropes, puzzles and sound has been polished. 

He has also built early versions of all the levels, and put in events where they belong. He scripted two action sequences, one were you have to escape from rising lava, and one where you have to escape from the last boss. The last bossfight turned out quite awesome and got the adrenaline pumping, at least for us. We also made a new puzzle that will be used in connection to the boss, this puzzle turned out quite difficult, so we decided to add some sort of hint for the player to find.

Hong still working with backgrounds for chapter two and chapter tree, were she paint mountain and ice. She also draw the shelf that the main character will stand on in the last chapter before the boss is coming. this was drawn in Flash and have almost the same draw style like tiles, this was because it look more natural in front in the game. Since we only need one in the game we disided to use the painting number on the left. 

Sondre has been focusing a bit more on soundeffect and atmosphere sounds than music this week. The cronology of the levels has been slightly changed, which meant we needed new sound and songs. The ¨escape from lava¨ section also needed some sounds to fasten the pace. Two of the atmospheresoundtrack are now finished, you can listen to them if you press these links:

Jungleatmosphere & songCaveatmosphere & songThe atmosphere soundtracks will most likely not be this loud in the actual game, but these videos is only to demonstrate how it will work. You can also notice that the this cavesong is different from the previous one i posted, since we had decided to melt together the ice and the cavelevel.

Case 4

Because we now have a transition between each screen where the next screen slides in, and the edges on the backgrounds we’ve made so far create very visible and ugly seams, we needed to redo the backgrounds so the transitions become seamless.

We agreed on having five screens in the first level. This means we now needed a background for this level that covers five screens seamlessly. The obvious solution is to create a single background with a resolution five times the width of one screen in the level, and then cut it into five pieces once it is done. When using the five pieces in correct order, the seams become invisible.

In addition to creating seamless backgrounds for the jungle level, Yngvar also developed a better technique for painting backgrounds. The new technique is similar to the old one, in that it makes heavy use of gradients. But instead of messing up the gradients by painting onto them, the new technique revolves around painting on the layers’ masks. By painting on the masks, you can add or remove trees, grass, rocks, etc. and still maintain a smooth gradient.

The atmosphere of the levels’ backgrounds is enhanced by creating Overlay layers with gradient colors on them. We’ve experimented with using this to make it seem like the day passes into night as you progress though the area. This was done by using the gradient seen below.

Yngvar also made custom brushes for painting grass and leaves in a way that is easy for others to replicate. If you want to use these brushes, open the picture below in Photoshop. Once you’ve opened it, select the leaf or the grass with the Marquee Tool and go to “Edit -> Define Brush Preset…” Once you have the brush in your list, select it and adjust size, spacing, scattering and angle jitter to suit your need. 

This it has been a lot of focus on sound effects and music. Sondre is currently working on developing a large bank of sound to paint the enviroment. To further enhence the feeling of empathy for the character the player is playing and the situations he is in, fitting sound are a good means. They don't necessarily need to be realistic, (although that works best in most cases) but they do need to fit the enviroment. It's all about not breaking the fourth wall. Not unpurposely anyway. 
When we have enough finished edited sounds, we will use them to make audiotracks to every level. The audiotracks will consist of one atmospheric sound that will last the whole track, and several atmospheric sound that will randomly play every once in a while on each track. As an example, the first level, which is a jungle level, will be consisting of a 3-4 minutes long sound with birdsong, occasionally monkeys screaming and tarzan-shouts. 

For this case Asbjørn has been working on further developing the plans for the entire project. He has made a production plan including all our development documents. With this new plan we can easily navigate using the hyperlinks located on the contents page. This navigating is only functional using Microsoft Office Word. But still it comes in very handy to get a quick overview of the plans and its faster to make changes in different chapters of the document. Asbjørn has also made some changes to the frog animation. Now the frog stretches out his legs to prepare for the landing at an earlier stage. This was done by using pose-to-pose animating frame by frame, which is exactly the same method used when the frog was animated earlier. We have also found out another way to add details to the platforms. By using some simple textures we are able to use bitmap files with overlay blending mode to project details onto the graphics in flash. This way of adding details is less time consuming than drawing overlay details in flash. Here is a picture of the texture, and the texture added to the platforms.

The textures can either be drawn from scratch or made out of photos. To create these textures we use Adobe Photoshop. To make the textures match up with our graphical style we reduce colors and details by using simplifying effects such as cutout and replace color.

During the last week Gisle has developed two new gameplay elements; Ropes and trampolines. These will help us create more varied gameplay and levels. Coding the ropes was a big challenge and caused alot of frustration, due to limited mathskills it took some time to get the ropes to act at least semi-naturally.
After finishing with the rope, Gisle got on with the actual case, which was to create support for music and soundeffects. This was pretty much already done during case 3. All he had to figure out was how to control the volume, so he made a temporary soundmenu and read a little on the internet, twenty minutes later it was functional. It probably needs a little more work, but for now it'll have to wait until more sounds are ready to be put into the game.

Hong have been asked to animate lip sync to a character according to this case. The character is a  history teller that tells the tale of Dr. Bones. The lip sync is a complicated process and it look simple but it takes time to animate the lip to what the character is suposed to say. The mouth have to macht the face expression and body movement. At first we have to plan the dialog for the speech anh sound. Hong draw the mouth expression fist to the manusscript. She been drawn the mout after every words in the manusscript. There are some words that use the same mouth expression.


Here are the mouth dialog she used to animate lip sync in the movieclip. 

As you can see there are more than words for a mouth. When animate she have to use a mirror to se how the mouth looks like when she draw to the dialog. Since the sound are not completely done she draw these mouth and the character and background for him. 

Here is the video of lip sync. The voise used here are of  josh grafton.

 

Case 3

Asbjørn has been chosen as the project leader for our work. So for this case he has been working a lot with project management. He has created a custom word template for all our documents in Passive Aggressive development, and he has also designed a unique style for the layout of the documents. After doing so he renovated the old plans and schedules, and put them into a more lucid and user-friendly overview. We now have improved plans for meeting schedules, milestones and sprints. He has also refined our product backlog, release backlog, project directive and the game plot with our new design. With these new plans we will achieve a better workflow and we will have a clearer view of what’s going on and what is left to be done. All the documents can be found at this blog, in the left side bar.

He has also continued working on the tiles. The tiles now have a uniform color, with low saturation and mid-balanced brightness. This makes it possible for us to easily change the color of the tiles in different scenarios with a simple color overlay. For example, for the jungle stages we apply a green overlay to recolor the entire scene in green. With this technique we save a lot of time, we don’t have to make individual platforms for every stage.

Asbjørn has also animated the frog which he vectorized last week. For this animation he used mainly straight ahead animation technique, combination of frame by frame and tweening. In the anticipation part of the animation he used tweening in the bending of the knees and joints. To achieve the right spacing in the jump, Asbjørn used frame by frame from the moment the frog shifts its weight upward on to the jump and until the landing. To get a smooth bending in the joints for the frog to get into its original position after the landing he used tweening again. Here is a preview of the animation:








In order to use tweening technique, except for the shape tween, you have to create symbols of the graphics you want to animate. He separated all the body parts into individual graphic symbols and moved their rotation point to the joints of the figure. By doing this it is much easier to keep the parts in their right position, and also moving and rotating them along the arcs of the figure. To create a consistent illusion of the frog he implemented some squash and stretch in the jumping animation.

At last he and Yngvar worked on implementing the story into the story slides. For this case the game has got all the back story of the character integrated in the intro sequence as a comic story.

Yngvar was given the task of finishing the last remaining animation for the character by creating a death animation. Now we have a set of animations for the main character that display all the main actions the character performs – running, jumping, dying, and standing idle:






Other animations may be added later on to give the character more “life”, but these four animations are the most important ones at the moment.

Finding a death animation that worked well, took some time. The main problem here was finding one that works well and looks fairly natural in all scenarios, for example both while jumping, while running, and while standing still. Several death animations were experimented with, and the one we decided on was inspired by the character death animation you’ll find in, for instance, Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, or Braid. When killed, a falling animation is activated, and the character falls down in front of the platforms and out of the screen.

In addition to doing most of the protagonist’s animations, Yngvar has been in charge of doing illustrations for the presentation of the story, as was mentioned in the previous blog entry. These have now been finished, totaling at nine images. The illustrations have been done in a way that presents the story in the form of a comic book. Doing this instead of doing animated cut-scenes saves us a lot of time that we can instead spend on optimizing the visuals in the more interesting parts of the game. Below you’ll find a selection of the images used to illustrate the story of the game.

Yngvar also made another background for the jungle levels of the game using roughly the same technique shown in the video in the previous blog entry. The technique here differs slightly in that it makes use of Pen Tool paths with stroke applied to them in order to create the more smooth organic lines in vines hanging from the trees. You can see the result below.

Game background for a jungle level

 The last things Yngvar did during this third case, was creating a proper start menu for the game, in addition to creating the screen showed upon death. The start menu had been made earlier. However, this one was only a placeholder, and a new and better looking start menu with proper gameplay instructions has now been added.

The screen which explains how you control the game

Sondre has during this case almost finished the snake-giraffe, with just a few minor details remaining. Most of the music for the game are roughly finished, even though most of them will be sounding quite different in the finished game. We will not change the structure of the music and sound effect all that much, but we will likely change the instruments themselves. He is developing a big library of sounds to my fruityloops engine, the problem of course, being to make them work in this program. Certain gig. files are not easily read in fruity loops, as an example, so he has tried quite a few different plug-ins and programs. This is again a big challenge. As he have just started making himself known with one program, he has to go on to a new one, Halion beeing the newest. You can listen to some of the songs here accompanied with some beatiful backgrounds, also from Mr.Bones adventure:

Mountain Song
In the scary cave
The adventure starts, jungle
Funky ice



Another problem that has occured with the sounds that were default in fruity loops, is that some of them have some ¨slowness¨. Let us explain with an example: If I put a sound in excactly the start of the first bar, it doesn't neccessarily start excactly at that bar, but a few miliseconds later. This can really kill the flow in the tunes. If you listen to the scary cave song, you can clearly hear this in about 1.20 and again in 1.35-1.40 with the deep canon-like drums. We couldn't really get them to fit perfectly. We have now figured out how I with only some small adjustments can make them fit and but I will keep the old song posted here as an example.

Besides of the pure technical parts, the biggest challenge is to make music and sounds that fits the atmosphere and mood of each level. This also makes it easier somehow to create audio, since it gives us a ¨launch pad¨, we have something to work out from. He has been listening a lot to music from other games, mainly super nintendo games. A lot of them have really good soundtracks, especially Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3. The reason why he listened most to old soundtracks, is because it fits the ¨simple¨ flashstyle better. The audio needs not only to sound good, but to also work well together with the rest of the design in the game.

Gisle has focused on implementing the graphical user interface (GUI), music and items. It was a challenge to get all the pieces working fluently together. For example, we had to find a way to hitTest an item, send it to the GUI, place it in the inventory, and remove it from the map, all this happened across four different classes.
We also had to think out a clever way to "save" the items you already had picked up. So that when you died,  they were still in your inventory, and also did not appear on the map. This took some brain-twisting to figure out, but we finally made it with the help of a few extra integers here and there.

We also finished a fully functional puzzle, this posed some new challenges, since we had to make strict rules about how the puzzle were to be solved. It took some time to figure out how to check if the puzzle was completed, but it finally worked and it's now both fun and challenging!

After the puzzle was finished we also had to implement the hints about how to solve it. This was fairly easy because we had already planned the GUI setup to be used this way.

In this case Hong has still working with lava tiles and animate bubble tiles.  The tiles look more like lava, but it had to much waves on it and look to much like water. But since we do not need lava tils yet, we deside to let Hong work more with it. We deside to make 3 different bubbles, these can be placed anywere. The technique use in these tiles were frame by frame and shape tween in Flash.


We also decide that we have to make a puzzel during this case, and Hong was given the task to make some symbols. She designed some symbols and we choose seven of them in the puzzel game.  Here are some of the symbols that were made.

 

 

 And at last she made a new background that is inside an ice cave. This background will be use later in the game. 

 

 

Case 2

Gisle:

During this case I have developed the level editor further. It now supports starting points for the character in each level, so this no longer has to be scripted manually. I have also added support for foreground editing.

Apart from that I have added a levelmanager, and support for deathevents and cutscenes. This works through a switch syntax that checks the current status and then run the corresponding procedures. I have also built in a startmenu and an in-game menu. During all these changes to the script, I have made quite a mess of the code, and regrettably I have encountered some lag after a few restarts. So my first priority now is to clean up the code and make the current build run smoothly. From there on I have to add support for NPC's and hopefully figure out a better way to do the physics.


Asbjørn:

”For this case I have continued working with the platform tiles. It’s now possible to combine walls with the ground tiles. This is effective and useful for creating cave levels. This week I have also fixed the idle animation for the main character. In this procedure I combined a lot of animation techniques. I started separating the character’s body parts and creating them into single graphic symbols and divided them into several layers. For the arms, head, backpack and feet I used classic tween. For the tie I used straight ahead frame by frame animation. This was a bit hard to accomplish, the animation runs at 30 FPS and I had to make a smooth animation for the tie to follow the chest as the character breathes. When animating the chest I found out an easier way to get a smooth movement. I went for pose to pose animation; I drew the pose for the character when the chest was at its maximum level, and another pose of the character when the chest was at the smallest level and used shape tween between these two poses. After doing this the character looked completely “!smashed” so I had to add some shape hints for the shape tween to work properly. This helped out a bit, but for some reason the outline of the chest disappears during the tween. To get control of this I converted all in-between frames to keyframes. Now I just had to apply the stroke to all keyframes and I could adjust each frame to create some more realistic spacing in the animation. I have also been working with some project management and planning our work and future goals. The plans and backlogs are available here:”

Product backlog
Release Log
Meeting plan
Sprints
Plot

”After getting this done I started drawing an NPC in flash. I had a design done by Yngvar, my work has been to vectorize and clarify the NPC for Animation. Here is a look of the NPC from the concept art to the flash version: ”

The Albino-Frog-Anteater

Sondre:


"This week has mainly consisted of further developing the songs and puzzles for the game, as well as starting to animate a NPC. The NPC turned out to be hard to animate, since the NPC is a snake-giraffe. That means a snake with giraffe-legs looking exactly like this”:

"Not only does this ¨animal¨ have four legs with spesific patterns on each of them, but it's also got a long body with a knot on the middle. It will work itself out though and be finished at the end of next week. As for the music, it has turned out to be a challenge as well. I know in my head and can play on the guitar what the songs should sound like, but to move them from there and into the computer is no easy task. I have become somewhat familiar with fruityloops and have made all my song there. The riffs are coming pretty easy to me, but the mixing with sounds and to make only digital instruments sound good is the hard part. On one of the songs if have used a real guitar for a guitar solo, and i'm planning to use as much non-digital sounds as possible, like for example clapping which appears in one of our songs. I am planning to post some of my songs here in the near future, as soon as my youtube account is good to go. The puzzles are still only sketches, but we will need a lot of them, which means we will be needing a lot of ideas. I could have posted some of them here, but I don't want to ruin it for ya.”

Yngvar:

”My assignment for case 2 was to finish up the main character’s run cycle and also create a jump animation for the character. The run animation ended up looking a lot better than the first one I did, so it’s a good thing I decided to redo it, like I mentioned in case 1. I’m also glad the character’s visual style is simpler now than it was, because it let me animate the jump a lot more easily than I would have in the previous style.

In addition to doing more animations for the character, I also tried to work out a simple technique for drawing backgrounds for the game. I have seen a technique used by some artists for doing quick digital paintings that look clean and the technique uses only the lasso selection tool, the paint bucket and the gradient tool. The resulting look of the paintings fit well into Flash’s vector-based visual style, as seen below in my attempt at the technique. The same painting tools are found in Flash, so the technique has the added advantage of creating backgrounds in either bitmap or vector, depending on which works best for the game.”

”I also made a video showing an example of how I paint these backgrounds in Photoshop so the rest of the group can take inspiration from it when they paint backgrounds if they choose to. The following video has been sped up 280%, so the actual time it took to paint the background was about 28 minutes.”

”We decided to use a series of drawings to present the game’s story to the player in small cut-scenes. This week we fleshed out the story with more details, and my last assignment for case 2 was to sketch up these drawings so they would, when accompanied by text, introduce the story in an understandable way. I managed to finish up eight of the nine drawings I had planned, but we need a couple more drawings to make it work well. I will post these drawings in the blog entry for case 3 when they’re all done.”





Hong: 

To this case I still working with background and Npc`s. When I was done with the background I found out that I cannot use this background. It looks totally different from the rest of the other drawing. It also took a lot of time to make, and that’s a little difficult if all the background will take so long time to make. However I look at what Yngvar have done and he shows me a technique we can use to make backgrounds. This technique is a lot easier to follow and it also takes less time to draw. Since it’s more than one who makes background was this a perfect solution to get the same style of the game.

This is the first background style:

And this is the second and the one that we shall use:

I also start with making lava and water tiles. At first I think this is easy and I already have the illusion of how both lava and water shall look like. But when I start to animate this it’s a lot more complicated then I think. The wave and bobbles and texture will not move as I want. I start with using frame by frame technique but it turns out to look like nothing but amoebas so I have to work more with this problem to next week.

Case 1

Asbjørn:

"In this case I have worked with some of the design work for the game. I started out trying to find color combinations for creating tile based platforms. We have been thinking of creating a variety of scenarios with different settings and vegetation. I started out making the platforms after I found some matching colors. The platforms are 30 x 30 pixels in size and they can all be aligned alongside each other. This makes it very easy for us to create many different levels and designs with the same objects, combined in different order. I made some color sets of platforms that we can use in different settings. With the tile sheet I have made by now we can easily create standalone platforms in any length we would want, and it is also easy to raise the ground level, and create walls using the tiles. These platforms are very “mountain/rocky-like” which is suitable for caves, ruins and such. For the outdoor scenes I have created some platforms in a “tree-looking” way. These platforms have also mirrored edges and can be tiled continuously. I am not sure if we will use these in the game in the way they look right now, but they are good enough to try out various design and configurations."

"I have also started working on the GUI design for the game. The GUI is a frame in the lower part of the screen, made out of bamboo sticks, using the same drawing style as for the platforms. The GUI will consist of a portrait frame, inventory slots, notes and so on. More details on that will be added later."

Yngvar:

"At first, when we had only loose ideas for the story of the game, I designed a character inspired in large part by Indiana Jones, as seen in the picture. The group seemed to like the design, and we were able to develop ideas for the story further based on the design.

In addition to designing the main character, I also created an idle pose and a run cycle for him. The first run cycle I made was drawn in a way that would create a lot of work when creating additional animations, so I redrew the run cycle and idle pose in a simpler style."

"The loss of detail in the character hasn’t been a bad thing. The character will only be 90 pixels tall on screen, so removing any unnecessary clutter in the design will make him look better in addition to making him easier to animate.

I also did a few monster concept sketches and a suggestion for the title screen art and instruction screen art."

Hong:

"In this case I`ve been worked with drawing various backgrounds and level design. I`ve worked with backgrounds inside a cave, since a lot of the story in the game is inside the cave. I`ve been sketching different levels inside the cave and mine. We have not quitedecided how all the levels should look like and the path should be. Therefore, I have justpainted examples that can be used in the design. I also draw a lot of NPC (enemies/monsters) to the game that we can use later. These enemies/monsters are basically a mix of two or three animals. Although this was not entirely to this case, however I think it is okay to have it half way done."
Here are some of the disign of NPC`s.

Sondre:

"In this first case, my priorities have been to make up puzzles that we can use in our game and to make soundtracks. Since we don't excactly know what the game is going to be like yet, i have just randomly made song that i figured just has to fit somewhere. I think, in the future, I will be focusing on further developing songs and puzzles, and also to make som enviroment and levels that fit the puzzles we have been working on. The story, the gameplay and the enviroments are starting to take form, and I am truly optimistic for how this project eventually will end up."




Gisle:

"In this case I have been mainly focusing on scripting, I started planning my infrastructure from the very beginning. Since we were making a tilebased game I had to find an effective way to set up the maps. I had read a little about XML previously, and decided to try and implement this. After much frustration I managed to build a map editor that saved to XML, and then import it to the mainscript. Apart from that I have also made an early version of the game engine, in which you can walk, jump, and fall at the speed of gravity. 

During the next case I have to develop a system for managing levels and puzzles, and hopefully I can also create a working system for moving the "screen" in order to create larger levels."