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[Reilly]

App Store!
http://itunes.apple.com/app/id584927317

Hiya! We're just two guys that decided to jump into game development by making an Advance Wars homage for iOS.
Probably a dumb idea for our first project, but we've been working on it a long time and we've come a long way. Peep it.
Risky Lab
Warbits
Twitter

We've been designing in a box for far too long so it's time to share this junk.

[Zack Bell]

I dig the visuals and overall style. 

[clockwrk_routine]

sexy arts, I love those games

[mike_w]

Looks neat. I love Advance Wars, too!

[Reilly]

Thanks guys!

At the moment I'm going through and cleaning up/improving our UI stuff while Vanhail works on enemy AI.

Here's a mockup of the unit buying menu.

[Vanhail]

Hey folks. I'm the programming side of our 2 man team. I'm currently working on the AI for our single player. It's been a challenge trying to organize something as abstract as strategy into an object model, but also very interesting.

Here's a brief preview of some gameplay. The pop up at the end is how we plan to handle chat in our game. We wanted a simple and integrated way for players to communicate with each other, without breaking the flow of the game. Players can broadcast a message once per turn, the message is show to the other players in context.

[Reilly]

A wild manbaby appears!

[ephoete]

Hey great tactical games are getting even more trendy in 2014 or what?
Great job.

[FanFan]

Ohh that vector style, man!
I love Advance Wars and i *will* love this one too. Nice work, keep it up!

[Reilly]

Hah, thanks. I do all my work in Adobe Illustrator. I'll probably gather my thoughts and write do a little write up of my process later this week.
Could be refreshing for some people since we're new to game development.
Or you guys could be more like, "That's dumb, don't do it that way."

In other news, we wanted some "box art" that would be completely removed from my style so our pal Andrew Wilson knocked out this amazing image.

You can check out more of his work here http://andrewandavid.blogspot.com/

[Blambo]

I dig this so much

[Reilly]

Vanhail and I are a bit of an odd team so I thought I'd jot down a little bit of our process for you dudes, might be helpful. Who knows.
First a little background. We have been working part time on Warbits for about 2 years. We live in two different states (Texas and Massachusetts). We have never met in person. Our wives have not left us yet.

Whew!

First: We communicate CONSTANTLY via Google Hangouts (was gChat) and we have fairly regular video and voice calls.
Second: Dropbox! Our entire project lives in a shared Dropbox folder and I don't think we could function without it.

So I do almost all my work in Adobe Illustrator. I think I started using it because I needed assets that I could easily scale and export at different resolutions because of different device capabilities. Right now we support the iPhone 3GS/iPad 1 up to current retina devices.
Each asset has 3 versions, SD, HD, and iPad HD. SD is used for the 3GS, HD is used for retina iPhones and non retina iPads and iPad HD is used for the new retina iPads.

Newer versions of illustrator will allow you to have up to 100 multiple art boards which can be great for sprites, tilesets, and mockups.
This means I can have a bunch of sprite frames in one document and export a bunch of PNGs all at once.
For example this is what the red gunner Illustrator file looks like. Every unit has file setup exactly the same.


When I'm designing a new unit or animation I constantly export the PNGs and open them in Photoshop to preview it as a GIF.
Adobe Bridge has a great feature that will let you select multiple images and open them as layers in photoshop.



When I'm happy with the result I run an action to export all those frames to a dropbox folder at all the different resolutions. Once all the units and colors have been exported Vanhail uses TexturePacker to compile all the sprites into one sheet so it can be used in game.


So I hope this post was interesting in some way. Here have a full res iPhone 5 screenshot!


Let me know if you have any questions/suggestions/whatever

[IndieRex]

The art style and UI are really fantastic. Any thoughts on a PC port?

[jcstranger]

wow amazing art style, looks so clean and polished. fancy sharing your background?

[Ruxar]

That's a helluva sprite sheet.

Looking great

Whats the plan for release paid app on mobile exclusively?

[Reilly]

Appreciate it, guys!

wow amazing art style, looks so clean and polished. fancy sharing your background?

In college I studied graphic design and illustration. From there I bounced around a few jobs while doing freelance illustration and design on the side.
Currently I'm a full time apparel artist.

You can check out some of my old art at http://reillystroope.com/
I haven't updated it in years.

Whats the plan for release paid app on mobile exclusively?

That's the plan.


Edit: Oh no new page! Must include image!
A tiny tile planet appears!

[Reilly]

We need a very simple website for our company (Risky Lab LLC) so Joe and i have set this thing up.
Only functional on desktop browsers and none of the links work right now.

http://riskylab.com/dev/riskyvideo.html

This is what it'll look like on mobile devices


In related news, we've found out that both RiskyLab and RiskyBlog are empty inactive users on tumbr... 
So if anyone has any good alternatives I would love to hear 'em!

[Reilly]

We're thinking of adding a ranger or sniper unit to the game, any preferences/suggestions on my quick sketches?

The idea is that he would be a ranged infantry unit and the range would increase on mountains and decrease in forests.

Here's the rest of the units for comparison.

[Hangedman]

I like the one with the visor. Maybe instead of the cloth, which seems a bit out of place on a robot, give him a team-colored camo pattern?

[sakuyo]

This looks gorgeous and really fun too.

I'd go for d or e for the character designs.