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[Son of Bryce]

Since my last post I've been scrambling and scramblin. I've been working on an update to my homie Chris J. Rock's top-down shooter game, Rush Hour Plus. I've been showing my games Thugjacker and LUV Tank during the Downtown Los Angeles art walk, in our Sokay Play event. Some photos and video here... http://www.sokay.net/extra/

It's always more work than I anticipate but each day it feels like we're getting closer to just filling in gaps and polishing things off.

Some artwork I drew for the in-game awards...

New Guest artwork from the homie Eric Gazca...

A large focus recently has been working out the game's ending. It's been confusing to figure out because of the non-linear aspects of it. Regardless of how the game plays out, you end up reporting to your boss. And the dialogue sort of branches based on how the actions have played out.

When I set out to get the ending worked out, I realized that I didn't finish setting up the hooks for short cinema scenes that would play in-between game sequences, and I didn't realize that I need to freeze the state of the donut game during the fight game in the case that you actually win it.

I've got the tricky stuff worked out for the endings, things are roughly in place. Gotta thumbnail some boards and draw out more art, but that's easier for me than figuring out all the logistics!

[Son of Bryce]

Last month I quit my job to focus on getting some of my never-ending projects wrapped up.

Monday we finally released Rush Hour Plus, which was featured on Newgrounds.com for a few days. It was a game created by my homie Christopher J. Rock. It was intitially a short 2-week game, I upgraded it a bit with additional artwork and gameplay.

Scene from Rush Hour's intro

It's a top-down space shooter, you can play it at http://www.sokay.net/play/rush-hour-plus.

So that means I'm back on Donut Get! Focusing on finishing up some short cinema scenes, and David Rodriguez has been polishing the fighting game animation weekly for the last couple months.

Here is some artwork I just finished drawing...

Gonna work on animating it and getting it into the game soon!

[Son of Bryce]

Hey Ya'll,

I have been busting on Donut Get! Been focused mostly on drawing art and animating. Got the first actual Cop animation into the "Donut" game today and I'm excited that it's starting to look finished.

Certain actions during gameplay will result in you taking a trip to the LUV Doctor, references to our game LUV Tank.

I drew this scene for the game's ending sequence.

A large part of the game has been centered around the ending. The game's super short, but the actions you make during the playthrough affect the ending. This has been time consuming planning, drawing, coding, etc but it's been I've been obsessed with seeing how it turns out. I got a good first pass at all of the ending artwork and animation in over the past week. And got a rough pass at all of the scenarios in the game. I was a bit saddened that everything didn't turn out "perfect" the first time around, but I'm happy with the direction its headed and looking forward to polishing it up!

Next steps are... more character animations for the "Donut" game. And filling in some gameplay elements missing, like falling debris, and iteration... iteration... iteration!!

[blinkok]

supoib work mr bryceman! some awesome illustration and i particularly like the in game top down of the road.

[Son of Bryce]

BlinkOK! I'm happy to see my Flashkit Brethren around here! haha! What you been up to???

I actually lost about 5 or 6 hours messing around with a stupid Flash bug today and yesterday. Dreaded "Error 5005: Unknown error optimizing byte code". Which happens when you have too much code(?) in the project FLA and it overloads the Java virtual machine and fails to export the swf. I managed to find a solution in Flash CS4 on OSX by editing the preference file and setting the allotted JVM memory heap size to 0, which I believe makes it automatically allot memory. I believe that's what got it to work, and I'm hoping I haven't jinxed myself... haha

But Blink, thanks for the kind words about the art! I spent a lot of time putting detail into the top-down part even though its kind of a short segment of the short game, haha.

For the backgrounds in the game, I sketched out the artwork on paper, scanned, did linework in Illustrator. And dropped color in Photoshop. I use a technique I learned from an instructor in college, that used to work in comics, to overlay texture onto solid colors to make things look fancier than they actually are. i.e. this image I made in college:

[Son of Bryce]

Last time I posted I was animating the cop and got super frustrated when I couldn't test the animation and the game wouldn't compile. After that, I finished animating the cop and the game was brought to new life.

The following are a couple examples of how the artwork for the car portion of the game was created.

I used these sketches as reference when doing the vector linework for the game.

I imported the linework into Photoshop and added some color for the final look used in game. I used textures to bring some life into the flat colors of the artwork. Simple gradient overlay makes it look fancier than it is and gives a "night-time" effect.

For the past couple weeks I've been animating characters for the donut portion of the game and polishing gameplay.

Shown in this animated gif are Mr. Sprinkles and Officer Brown. Mr. Sprinkles is an NPC that will hang around and grab donuts as well.

I finally implemented new elements to the gameplay. Your objective is to eat falling donuts but you now have to dodge falling debris. Now that I started getting NPC animation in, I started filling in their different behaviors (like Mr. Sprinkles eating donuts).

The story is unfolding as gaps are filled in, I look forward to finishing the animation for the remaining NPCs.

David Rodriguez is just about done animating the fighting game segment. Tonight he sketched out some storyboards for a couple cinema scenes related to that segment. I'm very excited to have his animation in the game and playable!

Till next time...

Peace!

[jamesprimate]

oh man, the style, and everything about this is amazing!

[Son of Bryce]

Thanks for the nice words, jamesprimate!

My recent focus was finishing up some fight scene cinematics. Last time I posted, David Rod had sketched out some storyboards to help me out, here's what that turned out like...

Storyboard by David Rodriguez

I used most of the shots from this and drew them in Illustrator, and animated them in Flash. They turned out looking like this...

Cinema artwork by myself

Now these are animated and in the game. With this major task complete, that means one less major task to think about! We're getting super close, just a few weeks left till we'll be wrapping up.

Also, in the last few weeks I implemented a quick 'n dirty localization system so the game will be able to be in multiple languages.

Next on my to-dos is to finish the NPC animation in the Donut Segment.

[Son of Bryce]

Last time I posted, I was wrapping up some of the fight sequence animations...

Then I focused on finishing up a bunch of NPC animation for the characters running around in the game...

The perfectionist in me isn't satisfied with some of the animation but its GE (Good Enough) so I managed to move on to other things.

The game will be localized in 4 languages: English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish. Many thanks to my homies with language skills that were willing to throw down. So far most of the Chinese is complete, Russian is almost halfway.

The localization stuff forced me to finalize a buncha lingering UI tweaks that I never got around to. Sound toggle buttons... high scores... I actually added in a "High Scores" system that pulls in the latest Twitter messages with a #donutget tag. Wondering how that will work.

I've been doing a monthly show during the Downtown Los Angeles art walk for a while now, Sokay Play. On May 10th we had the 7th show, I share a gallery space with artists and show my games. Here's the flyer from last one...

During Downtown LA Art Walk, every 2nd Thursday

And some Facebook photos...

I added a coffee power-up to the game, temporarily increases your speed and jump height. I need to take another pass or 10 at the donut drop patterns since it's still super temporary. The power-up makes it a lot more fun though, aiming to make it so that there will be a flow to collecting the donuts and coffee powerups, while avoiding falling debris and hazardous NPCs.

Sound is another area I tend to neglect. Thankfully we've got a dedicated sound guy. Cryptic Circuitry has made some awesome tunes for the ending, fight scenes and cinemas that I recently got into the game. When integrated, it helped the game a lot!

I finally got in David's Fighting Game animation in the game! I should've really done this a long time ago but I wanted it as finished as possible before I integrated it. I tried to give him a "template" to animate from early on, like over a year ago. But over time he slowly strayed from that, we weren't meeting up regularly for a while so I wasn't over his shoulder nitpicking him. But anyway, I had to reorganize things a bit, give things proper frame names and instance names. And also figure out all of the new animations and states he added in the process. The animation is great and he acted as a game designer in the process, now I'm taking passes at making the animation work with the gameplay. Tweaking things to make them fun as possible without reworking it too much.

This stuff is looking sweet!

And with that, the major stuff is now in the game. From here on it's mostly polishing and tweaking what's there, and adding in whatever "nice to have" things I can afford into the game. The game is in *BETA* stage now, and I'm testing it with homies to get feedback (that I'll mostly ignore).

Soon!

More info on the game at http://www.donutget.com

Peace!

[Son of Bryce]

This week I started cleaning up some promo art that Ricky drew...

Planning on making a Donut Get! t-shirt with this artwork.

Sent out a Beta link to a buncha peeps yesterday, thinking through the feedback to see what I should try to address and what I'll decide what is "intended to be like that!" haha! It's a tricky thing for me because there are some things people want/expect to be explained clear as day, while I intend for the game to be a bit of an exploration. You'll figure out more about it the more times you play. But the major issues I'll need to address first will be things that make it easier to replay -- shortening slower parts, making it easier to skip parts, etc.

I've been reworking the Donut drop patterns which have been super rough. Trying to create a flow to it.

These are the items that fall from the sky in the Donut segment

There are 3 types of items that fall...

• Donuts: variety of 5 types, these are like points
• Debris: these mess up your day, fall on your head and make you drop to the ground
• Coffee: speeds you up, makes your jumps floaty, lasts briefly

With the unspoken objective of collecting as many donuts as possible, the player runs back and forth collecting donuts. Bouncing on the heads of the NPCs allows you to jump high into the sky and lets you collect many more donuts than you can get on the ground. You must do this while avoiding hazardous NPCs that knock you down or fight you. Also debris is falling as well so you need to avoid it. The coffee powerup is meant to be a temporary speed boost, I'm trying to design the pattern so that you can get a flow of coffee boosts if you navigate through the obstacles well.

Working on the donut drop pattern is a tedious mess because I'm doing it with a ghetto array and it takes a while to build the game and test changes. I would do this a completely different way if I was starting the project today but that's another story... haha!

David's waiting on me to do some more animation, I'm gonna setup some additional characters that will be added to the game sooner or later. And I need to take another pass at the fighting game...

[blinkok]

looking insane mr bryce. i really think this will go large man!

[amidos2006]

That look nice when you expect to be finished?

[Son of Bryce]

Thanks for the replies guys!

I'm actually expecting to release it within the next couple weeks! It will be free to play at http://www.sokay.net . There's some stuff we've cut so we'll probly be doing updates sporadically for the next month or so, depending on what the reaction is like.

I'm shifting gears towards promoting it now so I'm hoping people like it when they get the chance to play it!

[blinkok]

i would definitely run this by www.adultswim.com. i reckon they would really go for something like this

[Franklins Ghost]

Game's turning out really nice. How many different game segments are there going to be? and how long are you expecting a play through to take?