Hello, I'm the animator of Team Elarooh, a group of five students from switzerland who have worked the last few months in their spare time to make a point&click adventure for iOS and Android.
Elarooh is an adventure with a cute story, challenging puzzles and fun minigames. Visually we offer lush, hand-drawn backgrounds and huge, animated characters. Several music tracks accentuate and finalize the mood of the game. Another unique selling point of our game is a spell system, which can be used to alter the visual appearance of each scene (day/night cycle, making things grow, etc.)
We're currently in the final phase of the development and would like to share information about the game and its development process with you. Since a few weeks we're mostly bugfixing and polishing. We release Elarooh this April, or at least that's what we hope to
Here are a few
screenshots to give you a first impression of the game:
(thumbnails, please click to see the full-size screenshot)We have a Demo Version of Elarooh for download. Please go to our specific post
here!
Development Process:I'd like to share some information about our process which might be special or interesting.
- All backgrounds are painted with watercolor on watercolor paper by Moro. She scanned these paintings and refined them in Photoshop by painting over them and adding photo textures. After she finished all backgrounds she took them and reworked/refined them all one more time. With 30 scenes, each having day/night + several states, this was a massive undertaking. But damn it was worth it
- All characters were directly painted in Photoshop by Moro and then animated in Anime Studio by me. I cut the characters in several parts and scaled/rotated them to breath life into them. The huge characters imposed several problems on us. I used TexturePacker to make spritesheets. Because of device limitations, we're limited to 2048x2048 pixel atlases and for some animations I had to remove frames to make them fit into one single spritesheet. Since our game features such many unique high resolution graphics, we're still fighting to get below the 100MB limit. And at the beginning of the project we targeted the old 50MB limit. Thankfully Apple released iOS7 and increased the on-air download limit
- The game was actually coded twice One time in GameMaker, a "quick-and-dirty" prototype by Noshire, completely playable and feature-complete. And one more time in Corona SDK by beatbeet, with a "beautifully-written" engine which can be reused if we decide to release a sequel or another, similar adventure game. Some might think the rewrite or prototype might be a waste of time, but it helped us tremendously to prevent and fix logic-errors early in the game design process.
- The game features several animals, which each have a different personality. To push the differences, each team member took one animal and wrote the dialogues by incorporating his own experiences and character.
Team:Our team consists of five students. Four of us are Game Design Students in the same class, sixth semester at Zurich University of the Arts (and now parallel working on our bachelor thesis ^^) and one finished his bachelor in neuroinformatics during the development.
Moro : She's our project leader and main artist. She initiated the project, wrote the story, did game design, painted all the backgrounds, characters, UI and so one.
Rosse : I did all the character and background animations, made the graphics for the minigames and helped with the game design.
Noshire : He thought up most of the puzzles in the story and designed the minigames and all of its levels. He did game design and programmed the first prototype of the game.
gargaduk : He did all the music and sound effects throughout our game.
beatbeet : He's our programmer and is responsible for the final build of our game.
Outlook:If everything goes well we release the game April 2014 for iOS and Android. We also plan to release the game for the japanese market and are currently looking for partners to make this possible. The game will be a paid app and will cost $2 at the time of its release.
We also begun marketing our game. If you are a reviewer for mobile games or adventure games and would like to write something about Elarooh, please feel free to contact me for additional information and a build for reviewing-purpose.
Links:Thanks a lot for reading this far. I'd like to update this thread as often as possible. Please feel free to ask any questions, also concerning our development process and I try to make my other team members post here as well
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