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[eigenbom]

It's finished!!

AppStore Link





Hey tiggers, here's a project I've been hacking away at for the last year. The project is a collaboration between myself and Jakob Haglof (aka CEDE, aka the guy who drew the TIG devlog post-its.) The game is called Shade Dogs: an all ages puzzle game, the goal of which is to shade the dog in each scene by moving and interacting with objects. Some puzzles are physics based, but most are just logical puzzles that require experimentation. We are only a few weeks away from publishing it on the App Store, so this devlog will be short!

Process-wise, Jakob draws everything in Photoshop, then sets up the scenes and animations in After Effects. We use a script to export the scene which is then imported into our engine. I used cocos2d-iphone v1.1 to do all the scene management and animation, and box2d to do the physics stuff. Although we live on opposite sides of the globe, and have never met IRL, we meet online to discuss the various things we need to do and things have worked out well so far.

Anyways, here are some screenshots! Look out for an announcement of the release soon, after which we'd be very interested in what you guys think about the game.

[Eigen]

Looks super cute!

The second screen seems very busy though, especially the background. With the other two it's more clear what's interactable and what's not. The objects stand out.

[happymonster]

Interesting idea!

The colours seem a bit bright, but that may be what you need to appeal to people I guess.

[poe]

I like the idea, not sure if it appeals to me entirely but I would definitely like to see how difficult the puzzles will be.

[jctwood]

Interesting idea!

[eigenbom]

Thx guys, it's definitely a super casual puzzle game, which I like to think of as a short "story book" of simple puzzles. The target market has always been kids, hence the bright graphics and simple puzzle design. It's not a game that TIGers would play, but nonetheless it is an indie game, and to anyone who has kids: we'd especially appreciate feedback from them when it's released.

@eigen I agree with you, actually most of the stuff in the robot city screenshot is interactive, except for the hover cars streaming in the background and the buildings.

[poe]

How did that dog even get into robo city? 

[eigenbom]

robots like to have pets too!

[CEDE]

The look and design changed quite a lot from the initial concept to now. I'll run through some of the evolution.

This was one of my earliest mock ups for the game:



And at one point I tried out the dog in polygons:



I soon gave up on the whole polygon / 3D model idea and stuck with sprites. I began testing some background stuff to see things in motion:



And continued to refine the look:



The first time it became clear that the aesthetic needed to change was when I was testing out art directions on the title screen. This one was based off vintage postcards:



Around that time Eigenbom and I were figuring screen dimensions and how the panning would work. This led to us sticking with a fixed view and opting to keep things simple:





The first major shift in the Dog design happened during another level menu mockup test, while still trying to work with the postcard aesthetic:







We stuck with that dog design for a while, as other game elements were being designed and built - like Eigenbom's early tests for casting shadows:




Eventually it became clear that the dog design needed to be lighter and more fun. The current version seemed a little too serious and plain. So we switched it up so the dog felt like it had more personality:



This guy felt close, but not quite there. So we kept working on him until we got to the version we have today:



With his design locked in, the style of the remaining dogs came together quicker and more naturally.

[poe]

I like the postcard idea!

[eigenbom]

Thx. We had a system planned where the postcard would flip over and the level stamps would be on the back, along with notes and other things. That idea stayed quite a way through development, but was eventually dropped and we now have a simpler and better system.

[eigenbom]

Update: wrapping up the title screen and level select. The concept is that when you finish a level the panel is coloured in, and so completing the whole game rewards you with a full colour comic.

[kleiba]

Update: wrapping up the title screen and level select. The concept is that when you finish a level the panel is coloured in, and so completing the whole game rewards you with a full colour comic.

That's a lovely idea! 

[eigenbom]

Update: Spent the weekend working on the sfx. As each level is basically a new game, there are a tonne of sfx *relative to the smallness of the game itself). My basic workflow is to find sounds mainly on freesound, edit and master in Audacity, and then run a script to convert all the .wavs to apple's .caf. I've got about 40% of the sfx left to add to the code, which is fairly straightforward, except for the looping sfx which I have to track a reference to and restart and stop as appropriate. Once that's done there are about 5 or so more complex sfx which I have to make, and about 10 or so sfx which I need to replace. It's tedious work and in future I might just either (a) hire someone to do it, or (b) purchase some sfx packs, which'll save time on mastering, etc. So far we have over 100 sfx:

[eigenbom]

Another random bit of info for this hot Monday morning! Each After Effects file has a bunch of image assets associated with it. These are all collected and sent through TexturePacker to create a single spritesheet. Most levels consist of only two spritesheets, and where possible the sprites are batched (using CCSpriteBatchNode) to reduce draw time.

Here's a typical spritesheet:

[poe]

So much legs

[cragwind]

Interesting to see the art iterations, and I like how you're reinforcing the style/theme using the comic panel format. Wonder if we'll be seeing any Comic Sans...

BTW, where'd the original idea come from?

[eigenbom]

Cheers! Ha, no there's no Comic Sans, we tried very hard to keep the game free of text, and the little text that's in there is just hand written. I remember Jakob proposing the basic idea to me back in January of 2012, but I have no idea where he got the idea from.

[eigenbom]

Doing some profiling. It's so many layers down to where the good stuff is ..

[kleiba]

Doing some profiling. It's so many layers down to where the good stuff is ..

Please allow me a noob question: how come you're inside two "onExit" functions? (Please only reply if it doesn't take 10 paragraphs to explain) ;-)