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[Jasmine]

Dude, this looks wonderful. I can't wait to hear the audio side of things..

I think this game would benefit greatly from binaural audio! I can already hear the waves and the wind rustling through the trees.
 Super excited for this!

[Pezomi]

I'm excited to see where this goes. I wish you the best of luck! 

[Join Indies]

Really nice vector art. Are you drawing it from scratch in Illustrator?

[dmcondolora]

Dude, this looks wonderful. I can't wait to hear the audio side of things..

I think this game would benefit greatly from binaural audio! I can already hear the waves and the wind rustling through the trees.
 Super excited for this!

Thanks a lot! I've only just begun roughing out some sound for the game, but I too am excited for it. It's amazing how even a small amount of sound will bring a world to life.

I would never have thought about binaural audio though! That's a really interesting idea, at least for the ambience. Have you done it before?

[dmcondolora]

I'm excited to see where this goes. I wish you the best of luck!  

Thanks! We're gonna need it, and some of that coffee.

Really nice vector art. Are you drawing it from scratch in Illustrator?

Glad you like it! The art is being drawn in Sketch, a Mac app that's similar to Illustrator, but more focused on web/mobile. Brooke, our artist, is a big fan of it. She usually starts by sketching in a sketchbook, and then moves to Sketch to create the final artwork, including animation. (Apologies for overusing the word 'sketch'!)

Here's an example:

[Daze Hill]

If it ever helps you with your overlapping burly men problem: I'd go with a system where each man have a target where he'll want to go, then you manage these targets according to one another to put enough space between them. Some simple movement logic to go from the current point to the target should do the trick.

Hmm, I'm posting this in good will, but being new, I don't know if this kind of intervention is wanted or not.

[Birdorf]

Some interesting, informative posts.

Looks great!

[Jasmine]

Unfortunately, I haven't, though there just might be a sound designer on this forum who has dabbled in that area before!

[dmcondolora]

If it ever helps you with your overlapping burly men problem: I'd go with a system where each man have a target where he'll want to go, then you manage these targets according to one another to put enough space between them. Some simple movement logic to go from the current point to the target should do the trick.

Hmm, I'm posting this in good will, but being new, I don't know if this kind of intervention is wanted or not.

Thanks for the feedback! It's totally welcome and appreciated!

Your suggestion is a good one, and I'm currently using something like it, which works well for walking to a specific point:

Code:

void SetBurlyDestinations(Vector2 destPosition) {
	burlyDestinations[0] = destPosition;
	burlyDestinations[1] = new Vector2(destPosition.x + (400f * currBurlyScale), destPosition.y);
	burlyDestinations[2] = new Vector2(destPosition.x - (400f * currBurlyScale), destPosition.y);
}

That function takes a single destination, and creates two more around it so that the Brothers Beard arrive in a nice spaced-out line. The problem is when they're walking in a direction or to a destination, and they hit an object that stops them in their path. Currently, if one Brother stops, the other two don't know about it, and will keep walking until they too hit the object and stop. Eventually, all three of them will be stacked up in the exact same spot.

Fortunately I have some ideas on how to tackle it. I wasn't able to finish it today, but I have a good start in my notebook that I'll start implementing either tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks again!

[Vakey Rujevic]

Love the concept of this project, specifically the focus on storytelling and putting the player as the story teller. Best of luck with your second game! And will you be releasing development builds for us to play around with?

[internationalfish]

I love this insight on the visual/animation design (which is amazing, by the way). Starting with a circle and then actually using it to make the animation fluid is brilliant. This has so much personality, despite being basically a static drawing of a chicken... it's really great!

Code:

currBurlyScale

Totally inappropriate for burly men, and out of character for me, but this variable name is so damn cute I kind of giggled a bit when I read it.

Keep at it! You two have a lot of really impressive things going on here; looking forward to watching you release a fun and engaging game.

[wizardfu]

Awesome! Looking forward to watching this one.

[dmcondolora]

Love the concept of this project, specifically the focus on storytelling and putting the player as the story teller. Best of luck with your second game! And will you be releasing development builds for us to play around with?

Thanks! I haven't really thought about releasing development builds. So the current answer is, I have no idea. Maybe!

[dmcondolora]

I love this insight on the visual/animation design (which is amazing, by the way). Starting with a circle and then actually using it to make the animation fluid is brilliant. This has so much personality, despite being basically a static drawing of a chicken... it's really great!

Wow, thanks! We're really happy with how the chickens turned out. One of these days we'll have to get Brooke to talk more about her animation process. She intentionally uses a lot of geometric shapes and constructs things in a way that is felt, but not noticed, when finished.

Thanks for the encouragement!

[jm999]

David, thanks for keeping us updated on your progress - the game looks great and it is fantastic to see behind the scenes.

I'm curious if you are doing a "typewriter" effect of revealing the dialog one character at a time, or something else. I saw the part about the ship's wheel vs anchor, which seems like a nice design. In some games I've found it frustrating that I keep having to tap or hold down a button to get the text to go faster. Maybe I'm just a fast reader. Cave Story, one of my favorite games, was the worst in this respect - especially in multiple play-throughs. Does the text plugin you're using handle any of this?

-josh
(yes, that josh

[dmcondolora]

I'm curious if you are doing a "typewriter" effect of revealing the dialog one character at a time, or something else. I saw the part about the ship's wheel vs anchor, which seems like a nice design. In some games I've found it frustrating that I keep having to tap or hold down a button to get the text to go faster. Maybe I'm just a fast reader. Cave Story, one of my favorite games, was the worst in this respect - especially in multiple play-throughs. Does the text plugin you're using handle any of this?

Great to see you on here Josh! And good point about the frustration of having to wait or hold a button to make text go by faster. Currently the text appears one character at a time, but if you click/tap once, the entire line appears. Hopefully that keeps the advantage of deliberate pacing/tone while still allowing you to read at your own pace.

Hope you're doing well!

- David

[dmcondolora]

This DevLog has been neglected for awhile, but for good reason, as we've been working incredibly hard on Burly Men at Sea. In fact, perhaps a bit too hard:

After a big push on the game last week, my wrist started hurting badly. Another push this week means that it's only gotten worse, but the game has gotten better! So maybe that's a worthwhile tradeoff. In the meantime, I've been wearing this brace.

Lest the only image you receive be a grainy one of my padded wrist, here's a mysterious bottle that may or may not reveal part of the new direction of the game:

We'll be revealing more information soon, after we've recovered from festival submissions and late nights. Until then!

- David

[Jasmine]

Yay! Glad to know that you're taking "no pain, no gain" seriously!
Looking forward to the next update!

[missionctrl]

Fantastic design work.  That chicken is the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.

So far the gameplay sounds very interesting - an adventure game where you don't control the character(s) directly.  I'm really interested to see where it goes. Best of luck!

[dmcondolora]

Now that my wrist is largely healed and we’ve returned from a few weeks of traveling, it’s time for another post. Let’s talk about animation!

Brooke, our sole artist and animator, is a big fan of classical hand-drawn animation. (In fact, she’s reading Hayao Miyazaki’s second book, “Turning Point,” and recommends it so strongly that I’ll forgive you if you buy a copy before continuing to read this.) Doggins was full of frame-by-frame animation (some of it even originating on paper), but we had large characters and a lot of frames, and our sprite sheets were sometimes 4096x4096 (for @2x versions). With limited texture memory on mobile devices, sprites ended up being something we fought with a fair bit. When we were considering our next game, the natural solution to me was something like Spine: not only does it save overhead, it allows greater reusability and faster iteration of animations. But while Spine seems like a great tool, there is something about true frame-by-frame animation that we just couldn’t let go of. How could we retain the charm of classic animation but still reduce overhead? Fortunately, this is an area where our vector-graphics pipeline came in handy.

Here’s an older version of Brave Beard’s walk cycle (with a different hat and muted coloring):

Rather than export each frame of the animation and assemble them on a sheet, each animation receives its own SVG file, which contains all of the animation frames. In Sketch, it looks like this:

Brave Beard looks a little discombobulated, but that’s just because you’re seeing all 16 frames of his walk cycle stacked on top of each other. Brooke hand-crafts each frame in Sketch and plays them back as an animation in Photoshop. When she’s satisfied with it, she sends me the SVG file. After importing it into Unity, it looks like this:

Each frame becomes a Game Object, and I then create an animation in RageSprite (from the RageSuite toolset) that cycles through those frames. It essentially creates a standard Unity Animation that turns each frame/Game Object on and off, depending on the timing I specify. It’s simple, but effective. I should note however, that while this saves texture memory, and SVG files themselves are quite small, once in a Unity scene the artwork becomes a mesh, and therefore takes up a good bit of space. This is a tradeoff I hadn't anticipated, and it may lead to the download size of the game being quite large. An alternative would be to generate the meshes at runtime, but this would lead to a big loss of control and increased loading time, and isn't really practical.

I'm generating some small bits of animation in-engine, such as simple waves on the water’s surface, steam rising from an espresso cup, and UI animations. But we're glad that the majority of the animation in the game is hand-crafted. It’s one of the things that drives us, and I’m sure we’ll carry it to every project we do.

- David