Hello everyone!
Welcome to our bi-weekly developers log, in which we will give some insight into the weal and woe of our studio and the road to creating our first mobile game, Henry the Cloud. For our first and second devlog please follow the links!
Over the past few weeks we’ve been busy working on the private beta for Henry the Cloud. We are currently testing it with a small group of friends and family, which will soon be extended for more rigorous quality assurance. We are happy to inform you that we are still on track for a May 2016 release. We will also be launching our Kickstarter campaign next week to give us that extra swipe, eh.. push in the back to help Henry travel the world.
Talking about swipes, in our first Devlog I discussed how we wanted to take swiping in mobile games to the next level. In our game you had to be able to steer the character through swiping. As you might have noticed from earlier devlogs, we succeeded at this in Henry the Cloud. In this Devlog, I will therefore delve deeper into how and why we made the design and art choices for our game.
As with most of the games - AAA, indie, mobile, you name it - many of the first sketches were made “on the back of an envelope”, as they say. This was no different with Henry the Cloud. Although the concept of Henry the Cloud was already there (“a little cloud that wants to discover the world on his own, helped by the player through the swiping of wind currents”), no concrete design or artwork was set in stone. We discussed that, with Henry the Cloud, we wanted to go for an artstyle that puts a smile on players their faces.
Furthermore, we realized that with a game like Henry the Cloud, being fairly small in scope, it should be playable for everyone: age, sex or location shouldn’t be an issue. We therefore needed to create a game that looked stunning on a wide variety of mobile devices. Obviously it had to support high resolution screens, but we had to keep in mind that the majority of people around the globe are still using phones with a resolution of 720p or less. The graphics of Henry the Cloud therefore couldn’t be overly complicated.
As many games have taught us over the past years (and this is a personal experience amongst the developers at Dual Cortex Gaming), games with a cartoony artstyle generally seem to resist the test of time a lot better, as long as they are executed in the right way. Because of this, we decided to design everything in Henry the Cloud very minimalistically, only using 3 or 4 colors for every character or object. Less is more! This meant that all the colors had to be just right: they had to *pop, the contrast had to be high and you should still be able to distinguish the characters and objects while traveling at a great speed through the map.
Although most vector-based artwork is developed using programs like Adobe Illustrator, for Henry the Cloud we chose to use Adobe Animated CC (formerly Flash). Animated CC enables designers to manipulate lines and objects directly and features a timeline which can be used for frame-by-frame animations. This is very useful when you are making sprites or animated objects. Admittedly, Illustrator does have some perks regarding the export of EPS and other AI files; files are easier to manipulate for other developers. However, for a small project like this where you want to create a design where not every pixel has to be aligned perfectly (although we did align them perfectly, but that’s our perfectionism), Animated CC turns out the be a great choice.
In addition, another benefit of Animated CC was - as you might have guessed already - that it enabled us to make an animated gameplay trailer with all the characters and objects we had already created for Henry the Cloud. We didn’t have to import PNG’s or other files. Instead, we could start right away. This reduced the time to create our gameplay trailer immensely and in addition made it look great, if we may say so ourselves.
“But does this mean that you did not have to use programmes like Adobe Photoshop?” Well, to be honest, we have been using Photoshop, a lot.. All files that were created in Animated CC were exported and made ready to be used as sprites for the game. Sometimes we decided we wanted to reduce the size of a sprite or wanted to retouch some minor things. You might call us lazy, but ‘tha shoop’ always had our back in these situations.
All in all, the design and art of Henry the Cloud proved to be more difficult than anticipated. Yes it is very minimalistic, but that meant that we had to make solid choices about what to include and what not. As Blaise Pascal once famously wrote: “Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” (I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.) ‘Less is more’ took a lot longer for us if that meant that we wanted to perfect every little thing.
Next time, Xander will be writing our last devlog before the global launch of Henry the Cloud. Don’t forget to give us some love and support on Kickstarter next week as we are are doing everything we can to let the whole world enjoy our extremely challenging and addictive game!
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Stay tuned for our last dev log: May 3!
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