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[Son of Bryce]

First of all, if you haven't played it... PLAY DONUT GET!

http://www.sokay.net/play/donut-get

It's free on our site Sokay.net

NOW ON iOS and Android!

Get it for 99¢ for iPhone & iPad at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/donut-get!/id564813749

Download it for FREE at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sokay.DonutGet

• for iPhone/iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/donut-get!/id564813749
• for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sokay.DonutGet

As you can tell by playing it, it's a Unity port! My first Unity game

ENJOY!!!


Hello everyone!

My name is Bryson Whiteman, I'm a Los Angeles based Flash Developer. I would like to introduce ya'll to a game I've been working on for a while with some of my homies.

Donut Get!


View the Donut Get! teaser on Vimeo.

The game is the story of a moment in the life of a cop where his greed gets out of control and he begins spiraling into a world of trouble. In other words, it's a game about a cop catching donuts falling from the sky! haha!

From intro

He's not supposed to be a bad guy, or a good guy. Long ago, he had joined the police force to make a difference. Through years of abuse from the criminals he hoped to reform, and corrupted influences of his peers, he kind of stopped caring.

From intro


Screen from driving sequence


Screen from fight sequence

Donut Get! is 3 short games joined together through a scenario. It's meant to be a relatively short playthough, with several different outcomes dependent on the actions within the game. Way of the Samurai was a large influence for that part. I'm aiming to have it play similar to an interactive story.

With development, we've got most artwork in place and rough prototypes at varying states of completion for different parts of the game. Intro cinema is in first pass animation right now, sort of like an animatic with final looking artwork. I intend to post progress as we start filling in gaps.

The game is developed in Flash and planned for a web browser release.

Let's see how this goes!

You can follow my blog at http://blog.sokay.net and more info will be posted on http://www.donutget.com

Credits:

• Character design by Ricky Enriquez
• Animation by David Rodriguez -- http://www.drodder.com
• Music & Sound Design by Cryptic Circuitry -- http://www.myspace.com/crypticcircuitrymusic
• Game by Bryson Whiteman -- http://www.sonofbryce.com

[Alex May]

Awesome. Way of the Samurai is one of my favourite ever games.

Great meeting you at E3 This game looks fun, hope to see it online soon!

[Son of Bryce]

Yo Alex! Thanks for the kinds words and thanks for turning me on to this forum. I hope to see it online soon as well! haha

Way of the Samurai is a game I could play over and over and over again. I haven't played the original in a while, but I bought part 3 on Xbox. I didn't get too into it because it's kinda hard to figure out where the action is. I like the series because it has a low-budget feel but it's very ambitious.

Here are some sketches I've been collecting. Gonna use these as a base for a bunch of game art I'm planning to knock out over the next few weeks. Typically I sketch things out in sketchbook and do final artwork in Illustrator.



The panels are for short in-game cinema animations.

[Son of Bryce]

Here's a sketch by Ricky...


I'm trying to focus on some smaller stuff like UI icons...


One of my homies Ramiro Roman Jr. did some awesome fan art for us, based on our Deebone character from our game Thugjacker. This is a preview...


Ramiro's an awesome artist that does a buncha horror comics. You can check out his stuff on http://ebe-1.deviantart.com/gallery/ or http://redmuseum.web.fc2.com/ (NSFW). And here's an interview of him.

It feels like I'm mostly just filling in the gaps with the game. I'm focusing of the "Donut" gameplay now, where you're catching donuts falling from the air. It's starting to feel more like a game but it's still pretty rough and missing some important stuff. I'm hoping it's in a good state to show relatively soon! haha

[starsrift]

Way of the Samurai is such an inspirational game and sets a nice example - it's one of those things that is begging for more depth, enticing the imagination.

What sort of action are you focusing on with this? (I couldn't get Vimeo to play... stupid work browser)

Good luck, sir!

[Son of Bryce]

Thanks for the reply, starsrift! Sorry that you're having probs with the Vimeo link, here's a link to the Youtube version.

View the Donut Get! teaser on YouTube!

As for action, the game is like 3 mini-games connected through a scenario. I'm aiming for the game to feel like an interactive animation almost, where your actions in the game influence the story and you play it as an interactive toy rather than trying to reach any particular goal.

So there's a car driving part, a donut catching part, and a fighting game part.

I'm focusing on the donut part right now, as the car part's pretty much done and I'm waiting for the fighting animation to be completed. Here's sort of what the Donut part is looking like:



We've got a lot of NPC characters and in the past couple of months I've been getting in artwork for their various states/reactions. We're gonna have to do some passes at animation as we get it together. I'm trying to get the game to feel right and it's progressing, but a lot of the good feeling of playing is actually in the animation. The NPC feedback of jumping on their heads and pushing them around shows you what it's all about! haha

So yeah, a big part of the game is about dicking people around because you're a cop and there's nobody to stop you. But with every action there is a reaction, right? That's what I'm aiming to explore.

[Son of Bryce]

Been scrambling to get a full site together...

New DonutGet.com

Also showing our "box-art" illustration created by my homie Matthew Harris, an artist in the San Francisco area.

Our team had a rare team meeting a few weeks ago and everything's progressing, slowly but surely. Busy, busy, busy. Life is amazing, isn't it?  

[Son of Bryce]

Here's a Donut Get! guest illustration by the homie Ramiro Roman Jr., creator of the trippy comic SKINCUBE.

It features Deebone from our first game Thugjacker, which was a beat 'em up. Deebone makes a return in Donut Get!

Check out more of Ramiro's work at http://redmuseum.web.fc2.c​om/ and http://ebe-1.deviantart.co​m/gallery/

[moi]

thugjacker is nice

[Son of Bryce]

Thanks for playing Thugjacker moi! I'm glad you liked it.

I was moving all last month and I was slowed down with production for the game. I'm getting back into the flow of things.

Cryptic Circuitry has been experimenting with the donut collecting sound. Trying to not make it too repetitive. After a few rounds of ideas, I think we've got a set of sounds which we can run with. We'll find out how they work as we get everything together.

I've been tackling the animation for the donut shoppe burning down. Here's a video of what it's looking like now...

It's comin! haha

[Mikademus]

There is a very big difference between the concept and box art and the in-game style. I love the concepts but I fear the actual game visuals might not be up to the expectations created from the other material.

Your blue pencil sketch of the police is great, and what separates it from the in-game graphics are the use of shadows. Perhaps that might help the presentation? And the comic-book images have vivid and psychedelic colours that also might benefit the game.

Cheers! I look forward to more progress reports!

[Son of Bryce]

Hey Mikademus!

It's understandable that the game visuals may not be up to the expectations created from some of the artwork. That's kind of the point!

My direction to Matt was essentially to illustrate something exaggerated and realistic, while being loosely related to the game concept. Similar to the kind of NES box arts we growing up. This was the artwork that hyped us up to buy the games and after we had them, helped us make sense of the vague blurry worlds.

Zelda 2 was one of my faves and had me dreaming of epic battles like this:

When the game looked like this.

And this Bomberman one always makes me laugh...

I guess it's sorta what the game is like, right? haha

And the Super Meat Boys guys did a similar thing recently as well.

That box art and the guest illustrations aren't created by artists working directly on the game. The art for the game's consistent. But I dig having other artists have their take on the characters and have fun with it.

Even within the team we like to experiment with different art styles, like that blue pencil cop sketch from our character designer Ricky. With each game we like to experiment with different art styles.

[Son of Bryce]

Updating project status from 70% to 80%. Hoorah!

Just got finished drawing icons for Awards in Donut Get (i.e. achievements). I sketched them out and drew the final artwork in Illustrator.

Some of these will make it into the game, some won't.

As I've mentioned, the game is essentially 3 games tied together through a scenario. Because of this, I've had parts of the game developed independently of each other. Over the past few weeks I've been hacking away trying to get everything integrated smoothly and get a preloader shoved in front of it. This took much longer than expected since I had to work around the quirks of Flash but I've got most of it tied together now (mainly, the fight game is in the main game now instead of the temp animatic we had before).

Here's what the loading screen looks like. I'm glad it's integrated now!

Besides that, I got the Donut shoppe animations into the game and have started seriously working out the drop patterns for the 3 stages of the Donut collecting part. I'm digging how it's going but there's still a while to go. But I've made it to what I consider the good stuff, level balancing and adding in the polish and fun details. Much of the difficult stuff is behind me!

Indiecade weekend now so I'm looking forward to checking out the show and hanging out with some good peeps!

Peace.

[TacoBell_Lord]

So awesome lol, can't wait to see this

[Son of Bryce]

I finished animating game's intro.

Now to fill in more gaps...

[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: