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[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

[Franklin's 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?

[Son of Bryce]

blinkok, good idea! I didn't even think of that. We'll see. The game's mostly done, will be switching gears to other stuff and tweaking it over the next few weeks.

Franklins Ghost, thanks for the reply. It's just 3 segments, but that proved more difficult than I imagined. A 4th segment would be the ending sequence, if you feel like counting that. A full playthrough takes about 5 minutes. I wanted to make it short but sweet, and encourage playing through it multiple times to discover the hidden stuff.

We'll be debuting the game this week during Sokay Play 8! Our gallery show during the Downtown LA Art Walk...

This week during the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk. Check some photos from  previous events on our Flickr.

If you're in the Los Angeles area, check it out. More info at our blog. We've been doing it every month so there's always next month!

So E3 was this week so I went out and hung out the homies. Playing some games, drinking, etc etc.

A lot of stupid times, but I had a blast!

Tried to get the word out on Donut Get! a bit, one step at a time! I had a blast though, nothing super exciting as far as games go from the show. But I had a blast with Wii U's Nintendoland: Luigi's Ghost Mansion (long name!). Fun use of multiplayer gameplay, great party game. I enjoyed what I played of Lost Planet 3 but I'm super biased cause some homies worked on it, generally not a big fan of 3rd person shooters but they put a lot of attention into the atmospheric details that I dug. And Resident Evil 6 is like one of the most polished and beautiful games ever...

So I'm switching gears from one hard part of the game (development), to the other part (letting people know!) I'm hoping that I can get the word out!

So some more images from the game...

So this is what the Donut segment is looking like

There's a progression as the shop slowly burns down and the gameplay donut drop pattern ramps up.

Here's a segment from the game's ending.

I hope I'm not showing too much! Hahaha!

Donut Get! Beta

So I'm starting to send out the links to the Donut Get! Beta. If you're interested in playing it a bit early, go to www.donutget.com and sign up for our newsletter. I'll be sending the link out soon. If you can give some feedback, that would be greatly appreciated!

[Son of Bryce]

So last week some of the merchandise I got made arrived...

Planning on selling these shirts online and during our monthly gallery show


Got these buttons too

We're planning to sell these on our website! Getting that stuff setup! Figuring out how to go about shipping this stuff as well.

So we showed the game publicly for the first time during our Sokay Play 8 show, during the downtown Los Angeles Art Walk.

We gave donuts to anyone that played through the entire game. Enticing for the hungry peeps that night!

Here are some photos from the event:

Wall of Art & Merchandise. I got art together from all of our games, and Donut Get! themed art from friends, each with their unique styles. The artwork caught people's attention even if they weren't into games. Lot of "what the hell is this??" kinda looks on peoples faces.

This is some guest artwork from a friend & game concept artist Lolita Sudjono, check her portfolio at http://lolitasudjono.carbonmade.com/. Awesome stuff!

A lot of people were out! Definitely because of the perfect summer weather. Peeps crowded around to see what the game was about.

Steve (Cryptic Circuitry) our music and sound design dude, and me posing for a pic after a bit of champagne.

More photos on our Facebook page.

Here's a video of a playthrough of the most recent version of the game...

Watch the playthrough!

All this crap and we've still gotta work on the game! haha! I'm going broke so I'm gonna be doing a bit of freelance work to pay rent and shiet. But we'll mostly be doing tweaks to the game from here on out. It was useful showing(playtesting) the game in public. I wasn't watching the game too critically and having it projected on the wall took me out of it a bit. People were enjoying it without any interference from me so I though that was cool. I was able to see more clearly where people were having problems and I came up with some solutions to issues people have been telling me about for a while. Stepping out of the code and tasks lists can lead to some moments of clarity! There's some adjustments I'm making to the donut drop patterns and the fighting game needs to be tweaked to work better with the animation.

We're still tweaking things so if you wanna check it out just hit me up through PM, twitter, e-mail, etc.

Planning to release it on July 4th! Looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Thanks for reading!  

[Son of Bryce]

Donut Get! is now available to play on Sokay.net

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

There's still work to do, but Fuck It! It's good enough!

Peace!

[Son of Bryce]

Hellooooo Ya'll!

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

*AHEM*

I've been on a bit of a Donut Get! hiatus. I was super burned out with working on it nonstop, doing the monthly downtown Los Angeles art walk show. And still having more work to do.

Fortunately I got the opportunity to do some freelance work to break up the monotony a bit. I worked on a project for Google Fiber for a guy I used to work with. That was mostly fun and different. I was happy that it was for a touch-screen kiosk rather than a typical website or something.

I had quit my job back in February with the intention of getting more comfortable with Unity. I've been an advocate for years but I haven't focused on any project to make use of my license. With Donut Get! mostly out of the way, it was finally time to start working on it.

But I had a bit of a conflict. I didn't do any spectacular launch with Donut Get! but I was just trying to move on from it because it's been consuming my life for a long time. Every time I showed my games at the Art Walk during Sokay Play people were always asking me if I "had an app" for our games. Nope!

Of course nobody realizes the work that would take to take something from Flash to mobile. In some cases the Air exporter would be fine, but in its state Donut Get! is something that can bring a desktop to its knees. Flash just isn't efficient enough. I had pondered a Unity port, but porting the 3 game engines, all the cinematics, etc, etc was just a dumb idea. So much of the tricks I use are dependent on the way Flash works. Way too much work.

One weekend, I started messing around with Unity. I put together a quick demo like before I went out clubbing in Hollywood or something. Came back to it the next day while doing laundry or something. I just dropped in art from Donut Get! and started getting things moving around. A couple menus... some simple touch controls. I had a pretty good proof of concept. This would work. I could do just a simple port of the Donut segment of the game. Just leave out unnecessary stuff. And it gave me an opportunity to figure out how Unity ticks.

I'd done a bunch of demos in Unity. Basically to feel it out and get a sense for how things worked. Our teams Global Game Jam 2011, Devoid, game was in Unity and that helped a ton. But making a finished game from start to finish is definitely another story.

Working on a Donut Get! port of Unity was actually very helpful. It gave me a clear goal. I had all of the art assets. So I just had to focus on figuring out a pipeline to get my Flash animation into Unity. I had all the sound, so I had to figure out how to get it them to play.

So I've been doing it in C# and it's been coming along pretty smoothly. UI has definitely been one of the biggest problems. Flash and UI go hand in hand. Not the case with Unity. Fortunately there were great tools in the Unity Asset store. After doing a bit of research, I decided to give NGUI a try which happened to be on sale. I paid about $80 for it, think I already got my money's worth just saving a bunch of time. It's got its issues, but working with it helped me to understand some things.

Anyway, here's what it's looking like!

Testing it here on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which I picked up on sale at Best Buy a few months ago to get a feeling of what Android was about and for testing.

I have a 1st gen iPad which is slow as hell in comparison to the Tab, but runs the game no prob so far. I think the framerate is a bit lower though.

So this is what the game looks like running in the editor. I'm literally only using planes for all the models, 2 tris. I found a great Unity script for creating models of 2 poly planes, since the default Unity plane model has way too many subdivisions.

Okay that was a lot, but there's more!

My 2012 Game Reel

Check out my

, which is many of the Flash games I've worked on over the years.

Peace!

[Son of Bryce]

ANNOUNCING -- DONUT GET! for Android Has Been Released!

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

Screens

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

ENJOY!!!

(iOS version coming soon!)

By the way, it's not the full game. It's a port of just the Donut segment, with a new stage layout. No story. More of a little high score game now. I considered it largely a Unity R&D project since I've been using it for years but never followed through a project to completion.

I spent about 4 weeks porting it. Like 90% of my time spent was wrangling with UI issues and getting used to Unity quirks. It's totally 'quick & dirty', there's a lot of things that can be optimized but I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. I implemented prime31's plugins for Android billing and Mobclix ads. Very much worth the price as they saved me hours and hours of time, even though it took me hours to figure them out. I integrated GREE's system into the game for leaderboards, achievements and whatnot. But I'm only using leaderboards right now. Their Unity plug-in works amazingly well, I'm guessing it's because of the Open Feint experience.

Much of the project was trial and error. Wrangling with new software, learning how C# differs from Actionscript3. All the gotchas. But I'm stronger now and look forward to making new games.

I'm planning to release the iOS version within the next few weeks. The main difference will be implementing the iOS versions of the ad/billing systems and figuring out what the approval process for the App Store's going to be. Not looking forward to it... HA!

Thanks for reading!

[Son of Bryce]

We've had about a whopping 10 installs of Donut Get! Android since Friday, haha. And the majoriy of that is likely my Facebook friends checking it out. It's quite obvious from the getgo that discoverability is a major problem with the Google Play store since there's not any way to see the recently released apps. But it does make it easier to find more apps by the same developer, which seems very beneficial if you have multiple apps up already.

I'm starting to run into all of those wonder Android issues I've heard so many complaints about. Of course it runs perfectly on my tablet, but I have a friend whose HTC Sensation run the game with distorted textures for whatever reason. It booted up fine, then after a while it started to look like shiet. What sucks is that the older versions ran fine. Another friend's phone just crashes when the game starts.

It's not supposed to look like this...

Oh this is fun, haha.

I'm not optimizing as much as I can with textures and object pools so I may bring down the resolution of the spritesheets a bit just to accommodate older devices which may not have as much ram. From what I've seen so far, phones purchased within the last year seem to work just fine.

I've been working on implementing the in app purchase for the iOS version right now. That and a few more tweaks...

Also wanted to point out that our shop is active at http://shop.sokay.net

We've got shirts, prints and button/sticker packs.

[Son of Bryce]

Last week I spent some time prototyping our next game in Unity. Of the block matching puzzle game variety.

This week I jumped back to focusing on Donut Get! iPad version and finishing up where I left off with the in app purchasing. I was running into a problem of it just crashing when a purchase started so I had to do a bit of optimizing to prevent that. So far so good, as now I can at least get it to work!

In app purchase screen to remove ads.

Thank you screen!

The textures for the sprite animation is eating up a ton of memory. I've tried to keep the cop animation sharp and crisp but I've had to bring down the res a bit to accommodate all the lower-end devices it keeps crashing. So for now, I'm trying to stop crashing Android phone! haha

Later I hope to do some research to switch between spritesheets based on the memory available on the device. Not quite sure if that's possible/reasonable yet.

Donut Get! Android is available on Google Play so check it out if you can. Let me know how it works for you!

iPhone version available soon!

The OG Flash version still at http://www.sokay.net/play/donut-get

Thanks for reading.

Peace!

[Son of Bryce]

Updated Donut Get! on Android today (v0.910). Optimized it a bit, hopefully it doesn't crash as many phones!

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

I spent a couple hours today trying to hunt down that display bug on my homie's HTC Sensation phone, turned out it was a problem with a Unity shader I was using. Success!

[Son of Bryce]

Indiecade is this weekend in Culver City. I'll be loitering around on Saturday and Sunday. I had ordered some stickers on a site like a month ago but they still haven't even been printed yet. So I had to come up with some last minute stickers I can make ghetto styles myself.

Here's what I drew up in Illustrator...

I printed about 240 of these, 3" stickers. Plannin to hand them out to random peeps at Indiecade. Gotta get the word out some way!

[Son of Bryce]

Spent about 12 hours today busting on the Flash version of Donut Get!, readying it for release. Last week I integrated it into Newgrounds' hi-score and achievement system, as well as Mochi's Leaderboard system.

Today I mostly went through and polished up some things I've been putting off, like adding in updated callouts for our Sokay Shop and new ones for our iPhone/Android app. Adding some new sounds as well.

The other half of the day was animating and integrating a new NPC, the Hippie. He was the last character planned for the game. I got inspired by the Occupy stuff living in Downtown LA around all the protesters last fall, marching along with the parades and whatnot. A protesting hippie seemed like a match made in heaven...

Ricky drew this guy way back when but I just got around to getting him in the game. I dropped him because I had to animate like 4 or 5 characters in one week.

Everything's looking good to me now. I'm gonna do some testing and call it a wrap... for now!

I'm planning on making some tweaks to the iPhone/Android App version of Donut Get! based on some feedback and testing. Just quick stuff to make it quicker to allow people to jump in and play, and some more optimizations probably.

I believe it's true what they say about the light at the end of the tunnel... :D