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."

Passive-agressive. The assignment!

Hi! We are a group of students that at the beginning of this week got an assignment that we were to make a flashgame from scratch. The game is to contain several functions and gamestuff which we not yet have been informed about. We will with each week get a new ¨caseassignment¨, which tell us how we are going to further develop our game. We will regularly, at least once a week, be updating this blog to keep you all informed on how our game is starting to form into something one would enjoy to play

The group...

The group, which we so creatively have named Passive agressive, consists of the following members:

Sondre, Gisle, Hong, Asbjørn and Yngvar