Wednesday, July 7, 2010

"Castle Ninja"

I feel like I should make a bit longer post about this project than just a couple words on facebook especially since some people aren't using FB.

Me and Michael are working on a video game - it's quite a big project even for a small game. The game is for Xbox and after we are finished anyone can find it on xbox market place under Indie games.

Since there are only 2 people working on it one of us had to do the graphics... which is me. And Mike is doing all the programming part which I would gladly share but he can't share the graphics part so it will be a big waste of time for now, for this game.

Anyway.. it's a puzzle game where you have to collect diamonds which are all over the screen. however you have to avoid being hit by canon balls and can push a brick block in front of the canon in order to do so. There are gonna be 20 levels and level design is gonna radically change after each 4 levels.

Needless to say I've never done such a thing in my life - I stayed pretty far from "designing" stuff and mostly worked on pre-made images. or at most made some buttons and small design elements for websites. but doing a game from a scratch? opening a white paper and creating things from nothing? that seemed challenging.

But that was only smaller part. What really was a challenge was animating the ninja - making him walk, jumping happily at completion of the level, or making him disappear ina cloud of smoke. I NEVER did any work related to animation. Moreover I didn't even know the first thing about it :)) And I know that the civilized way of making an animation is in software designed for that. at very least i should've done it in some program that's good with vectors like corel draw or illustrator. but i went the barbarian way and did it all in photoshop :)) i figured at least i know that piece of software like the back of my head and to save some time will start there (and finish as it turned out).

I only had to do pictures for every frame of animation - the rest Mike did in code. So for example ninja walking to the right meant 3 images - 2 of him stepping with each foot and 1 in between. That was... interesting lol. Now I know what choreoanimators have to deal with. no offense but it's kind of dull and boring - i enjoyed designing levels a lot more.

Level-wise the sets are plains, forest, snowy mountain, volcano, castle. The only remaining is the forest but for that I have to wait to get actual puzzles from Mike as what I'm planning to do is gonna be individual for each level I think. The rest is easy - i just apply the designs I made to puzzles he wants.

My estimate is that we're gonna be done in a month or so. Even though we are pretty close on finishing the actual game there is a lot of polish that I'd like to add - stuff like fish jumping out of water, birds flying around in the forest and so on - just little decorative animations here and there to make it look finished and more lively. And of course the end-game clip - which is what I'm currently working on. It's really a lot of work... After this I'm gonna get a studio designed to make games and learn it and maybe even take a class or two on animation graphics.

The other exciting thing is that we're going to make the game work not only on xbox but also on iphone, droid, and obviously windows.

After this is done, we will take a little break to give me time to learn the animation studio and we will make a much smaller and simpler game graphic-wise - something like "lines".

Anyway. Here's the facebook album with game graphics http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=59095&id=1073925241&l=ee1db8c5f9
I really don't feel like reposting the photos here :)

I'll probably be making another post pretty soon as I have some things to say well to rant about :)) but it will be too long and a bit out of place for this post. But really what I should do now is close this tab and get on working :))

P.S. I have nothing to do with the game name or even the idea lol