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[Limne]

Codename: Project Sumo
Dev. Team: Jared Thomson (xoorath) and Laura Lake (Limne)

Having had the pleasure of working with Jared during this year's 48-Hour Game Jam I'm pleased to announce the resumption of our successful collaboration. Jared is of course an awesome coder (with artistic ability) while I'm a decent artist (with coding ability) so our skill sets tend to compliment each other.

Our concept is still taking shape but as things stand we're working with the idea of a 2D fighting game in orthographic space. So far the idea is to have something like River City Ransom-style brawling with the out-of-bounds-style gameplay of Smash Bros; besides standard attacks you can pick things up (including other players), use them as weapons, or throw them like projectiles. We'll see how our concept evolves. Below you can see a very rough mock-up I rigged up to help put what I'm currently thinking into tangible for:



As  for the Dev. log, this is actually my first time keeping one and I'm just about as new to reading them so please bear with me. Luckily, I have the guidance of my esteemed colleague. We are planning on keeping an update schedule as follows: I will be providing updates Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays while he'll be updating Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. For now, we'll be off on Sundays.

I did a place-holder logo on paper (above)... It's pretty much egregious but at least it's there.

Today was mostly spent consolidating a few of my character design sketches. We will be working with node based animation. I am particularly excited about this as, though I have experience working in animation and sprites, node based animation is completely new to me. Jared has been hard at work on a keyframe based editor. For my own work, over the last few days I I've been trying to design characters with a great deal of variation in their body types and sizes and I've been sketching all kinds of different constructions. I didn't see fit to post these because they don't look like anything. Here's what I do have:



What I have now is some rough designs in color. They don't follow any particular theme, I just drew the first thing to pop into my head. The result is fairly not dissimilar from any standard page from my sketchbook, which is a bit disappointing. As I progress I'm hoping to achieve greater thematic unity in my designs while still allowing my characters to maintain their idiosyncratic personalities. I love variety, but in doing something as complex as a game I really like to think I can express something meaningful as well. We'll see how that shapes up.

In any case, I'm still working out designs and I'll want to some consultations before deciding on anything final... Well, actually, I kind of like the bird man and the idea of animating those wings kind of like a cape. I don't so much know about anything else. Feedback would be much appreciated.

[delete me]

Thompson

I quit.

[deathtotheweird]

ouch that was fast. (kind of rude too)

concept sounded cool though.

[PleasingFungus]

Wow. Assuming Jared is serious... I wish you the best of luck! The game looks cool, it's a shame it has to encounter this kind of setback so early.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

if that quitting thing was serious, check the times: it took literally 13 minutes for this game idea to fall apart

if it wasn't serious, good luck

[Belimoth]

Thompson

I quit.

I lol'd. Names are important you guys.

[hyperduck]

I thought the p looked nice in there.

[Uykered]

I'm looking forward to seeing more stuff!

[Limne]

Thompson

I quit.

Thompson? Who said Thompson? I don't see any Thompson in my original post By the way, your name has no P? That totally blows my mind. I’ve heard of “Tompson” and “Thompson” but this lack of a plosive phoneme has forever expanded my morphological horizons. Also, that introduction was posted two hours after I should have been asleep.

And as much as I love the publicity this little drama has generated, I regret to inform you all we are on the best of terms and will in fact be seeing each other this very day.

[delete me]

Lmao. As Laura just said: I was not serious at all guys.
Haha. I didn't expect anyone to think i actually quit, publicly, within minutes of starting, because of a spelling mistake.

[PleasingFungus]

Lmao. As Laura just said: I was not serious at all guys.
Haha. I didn't expect anyone to think i actually quit, publicly, within minutes of starting, because of a spelling mistake.

I didn't notice the spelling error!

Good luck with the game regardless.

[deathtotheweird]

o as if anyone here knows your name, I thought you were serious.

[delete me]

Yeah, Yeah. You guys are right. I thought it was funny when I posted it. Oh well.

[Belimoth]

PUBLICITY

[delete me]

PUBLICITY

Well, im getting dinner and beer. I'll let the publicity stew, then I'll do my log post.

Edit: tomorrow.

[delete me]

Yesterday I made a post in the terra carve dev log about the animation editor I'm working on for this game. I've been talking a lot with Laura on how we're going to design this and so far I've got this as my general idea for a node based animation system:

All data in and out is defined by a lua script. You will have an import and export folder and as long as you've got a lua file in there with the format you want it will add it to the save and load routines. This will be helpful when I release the editor to the public so people can either use my pre-packaged scripts or write their own to load in their existing animations and save out to what ever format their engine will want them in.

In the editor I plan to have a Photoshop style layers and groups system. This will let you name and organize your assets, as well as control them in groups easily. There will (read:might) be a toggle for effecting your layers and groups globally or on a key-frame basis. This might be useful when you have an animation that requires certain assets to swap their depth.

Keyframes will be free form and can be placed anywhere on the timeline with floating point accuracy. Almost all values in the editor that are placed by hand will have a text input field to type in exactly the value you mean to have. for example: You quickly drop some keyframes on 1.0064 2.0146 and 3.1001 you can easily change that to 1, 2, 3.

Here's what it looks like so far. I'm writing this editor in C# with windows forms and XNA. This tool unlike the game will be windows only.



Today I got back to the actual game engine and started plugging away at fixing my rendering issue with textures in openGL. This is super trivial so I'm kind of annoyed that I'm having troubles with it. My biggest issue is that it's difficult to find. There are no warnings, or erros, just a black square that should have a picture of Pikachu on it.

Thankfully I got it working today after a few headaches stepping through each routine trying to verify correct values and call ordering. Anyways, I'm going to try and stay away from technical discussions on this game. To read more about this issue, and other technical things I've been doing today you can check out entry 13 of the terra carve devlog.

Here's the game window as it is. Click for full image.

[Limne]

Unfortunately, today was busier than expected so I only had about an hour and a half to draw. On the other hand, I had a lot of time at my job to look into my programming. I'd really like to start learning memory management techniques and data structures so that I can start doing some more interesting things in code. Also, I'm becoming more and more interested in learning C. That I need to learn OpenGL goes without saying. In fact, it's about the last thing left I have any interest in doing through my school and might very well drop out once it's out of the way. I figure that programming is as necessary to being a good artist in gaming as being a good draftsman is to being an animator.

Anyway. This is what I did today in that hour and a half:



I drew this on my Cintiq to help get me used to the idea of putting together segmented character designs in Photoshop. It's really quite rough and will need a lot of work as far as overall design, construction, and proportions go. I'm always dissatisfied doing my colours in Photoshop; somehow, they always seem that much less vivid. In the future I'll probably more closely reference my hand drawn colours until my instincts have been properly honed.

I've also started thinking more about how to animate these things. For instance, in this case I tried to go for more of a Muay Thai stance. Being a martial artist myself, it's very important that my characters have postures and movements that are credible. Over the summer I spent some time rotoscoping Bruce Lee so maybe some of that will come in handy. In any case, because I don't have much else to show tonight, I thought I'd also include the following sample:



It was my first design trying to outline my thoughts on constructing a node based character. I'm leaning towards designs with flared limbs simply because I have a sense that it helps to assist the continuity of vision effect when limbs rotate (the proximal ends of limbs moving much slower than the distal ones, more width is required to create an overlap with the previous frame, a technique which assists in continuity of visions). Perhaps this is a holdover from traditional animation that might not be necessary at 60 fps, but I'm sure it couldn't hurt. Besides which, the extremities are very expressive, albeit, perhaps more subtly than say, gigantic sparkly eyes *jaded sigh*.

In any case, you should expect a much more meaty update on Sunday. I'll pretty much be spending the whole weekend doing the art for three different games, this one being high on the priority list.

[Uykered]

Looks interesting.

[Limne]

It's going to have to be a truncated entry tonight, I don't have the time for a full post. Maybe tomorrow I can fill in the rest, or maybe I should rethink my original update schedule. Anyway, here's some more work from the old sketchbook:



With this, I think I've got pretty much all the body types I'm currently looking at drafted. I might borrow others from the rest of my sketchbook though. The overall designs are liable to change significantly.

The other thing I was working on was a cleaner version of the bird man. It's coming along slowly because I'm being finicky about the design and getting hung up on needless details. Somehow I can never never get my finished designs looking quite how I like them. I think it's a shortcoming in my sense of constructive anatomy. Hopefully I work at this steadily I'll loosen up some. I was working on some finished art for my solo game but getting this polished is taking way longer than I imagined. Perhaps it's that I'm trying to work out the principals of reflective lighting as I go. I'm going to have to think hard to figure out how to implement designs that look good without taking forever to do.

[delete me]

Ugh, I really want to finish this animation editor. Can't wait to see your work come to life.