B'looning Away, background art

Despite taking a break from it for several months now, I'm slowly returning to it. Background art is completely finished but right now I need/want to start some prototyping before moving on to more art.

In the meantime, some cuts of the background art.

 

 

 

B'looning Away, back to work

One month of vacation over and it's back to work. Here's what I slowly managed to finish within the last week (working a bit slowly at the moment, adjusting to not being on holiday anymore). However despite working a bit slowly at the moment, I can see this project finishing for january.

We're moving into space with a space hotel. (Very Jetsons inspired)

In development: B'looning Away (mini-update)

My development frenzy for B'looning Away has kind of died down now after the initial 2-3 weeks of total excitement and now it's down to work. Although in that time I did manage to squeeze out backgrounds for 3 out of 5 levels, so it's been a very productive frenzy.

Here is a shoehouse for the game.

In development: B'looning Away

No rest for the wicked, I've started working on a game again almost right after finishing up all the mandatory semester projects.

The basic concept is the same as Neno from my first semester, however it will be completely redone and all the extra narrative and gameplay stuff that was piled onto the Neno will be stripped off, so it will end up being the concept initially pitched. The reason why it's important for me to remake and work with this concept again is that I feel it has potential to be an interesting experience (although not necessarily a game). There's something very innocent and nostalgic about blowing around a balloon.

The game will now be about a boy who has lost his balloon (so there is no longer a boy from space). The player will then be left to explore the universe and fly higher up or collect things to fly down and reunite the balloon with the boy. The balloon will always be moving upwards in a certain speed unless the player collect things which will weigh it down for a while, and then it starts moving up again. A very simple premise for what is a very simple game.

Although I initially thought I was going to reuse the art assets from Neno, I ended up redoing everything again and it looks much nicer now when there's no time constraint and absolute creative freedom. In fact I am enjoying creating assets for this game so much, that I ended up having made the background for the first level within one week, but there's still a long way to go.

Neno, a bit animation

Aww... Though Neno is long gone I still can't let the little guy walk away completely. Here's an animation I did for him but didn't make it into our build. Obviously he's not supposed to constantly swing like this but just when the player blows wind on his balloon.

Reflections on: Neno

Neno is the first game project I have worked on at Mediatechnology and Games (apparently just recently redubbed to Games). The game was made by team consisting of four people with a development phase of around two months, starting from mid-october 2010 and ending in mid-december 2010. My role in this team was designer, writer and artist.

Our vision was to create a browser game that was relaxing and explorative. The game is about a boy from space who has been accidently been left behind on earth by his parents and now he must, with the help of a balloon, make his way back to space. On his journey upwards, he must upgrade his balloon to a better one in order to be able to move all the way. Meeting all kinds of weird people with balloons, he helps them do whatever they needed to have done and they in return give him a new balloon.

The player is in charge of the wind and blows the boy around by mouse clicks. The main mechanic of the game is to collect objects, where objects that fly by their own power contribute towards updrift and objects that fall from the sky contribute to the opposite.

Positives:

• Consistent artstyle. I pretty much had my way with the art, as I was the artist, which caused a lot of work, but at the same time I made sure I was happy with it. The artstyle is obviously consistent throughout due to the fact that only I had a hand in it. However I do realise at the same time that especially the later levels lacked a polish that was there at the first couple of levels. This was due to the fact that a) time was an issue and so the later levels were slightly rushed. b) the time issue also manifested itself in the programming department which made me lose motivation as I could tell my graphics weren't implemented the way I wanted it to. But despite this, I'm still satisfied with the graphics and I think they tell the story well enough.
• Massive learning experience. I have learned a lot of do's and don't's during the development of this game. As this is the first game I've actually made with a team, I have obviously learned alot about team dynamics and how to communicate to a team consisting of people with very different backgrounds and tastes. Apart communication, one of the main things I have taken from this project is also an estimate of scale and project managing, which I feel is one of the main reasons why this game fell through (but more about that in the negatives section).
• A very different game. Neno is a game that is fairly difficult to pin into a genre, which was what we were going for. One of the things we discussed in the group at the beginnning of the process was, that we did not want to make a platformer or a similar very tested genre, as it was perhaps the easy way out. So we instead went out to do something that wasn't seen very often, and although the game completely fell through, I am still happy about our choice. Rather do something new and fail, than doing something old and do it ok (not great, as I believe it is not in our capabilities to do an outstanding platformer, or at least not in my capabilities as a designer(I generally have a problem with sidescrolling platformers, playing them and designing them)).

Negatives

• Disjointed design. The design of Neno is completely disjointed and renders the game slightly unplayable actually. Our first thoughts with the game was to make something that relied heavily on mechanic, but as we redesigned the game somehow we felt the need to insert a bit of narrative to explain goals and assert motivations. Another reason why narrative suddenly grew so big in our game was because the original plan was to not have a "level"-based progression but rather a fluid experience throughout the game without any "clear" goals, like a sandbox. However there were disagreements in the group whether this approach would be a good game or not and we ended up putting in levelling points and so on. This in turn sparked a lot of narrative and we suddenly had to explain why and what the player had to do in the game, which turned it into a fairly adventure-esque kind of game. But still the game had a very strange controlscheme where the player has limited control which works against the adventure-feel the game ended up having. All in all, a very disjointed game in many ways.
• Out of scope and nowhere near polished. This game started within scope, but suddenly exploded in all kind of directions very quickly. The narrative grew gigantic which caused the scripting to grow which in turn made our programmer very busy. The levels also grew from being one screensize wide and only scrolling vertically to several screen sizes wide and with wrapping, this is something that was felt in the programming department, and the wrapping didn't properly until the last week, which is not good enough. I'm probably most unhappy about this, as I feel we probably still could be in scope and provided a tighter experience if the level sizes were kept smaller, but our keyword of exploration and a narrow level structure didn't sit well with the other members. I think it also grew out of scale due to the fact that we weren't sure who we were designing this game for, which leads to the next point.
• In-team communication wasn't clear enough. This is quite possibly the culprit for our shortcomings in the game. We had not formulated our goals clear enough from the beginning which caused us to design for ourselves. Big mistake, as we had very different tastes as regards to what makes a good game. I like a sandbox experience and have a more toylike approach towards games compared to some of the other members who preferred a very competitive and challenge based experience. This caused the game to go from casual browser (which was very me) to a game that grew too big and heavy for a browser, although with time and redesign the concept would probably still have worked in some way. What we should have done was to formulate very clear goals, such as audience, technology, platform and our personal intentions. This would have focalized our game and contributed towards tighter design as we would be working towards the same goal.

Massive post, but the game itself is pretty massive compared to other stuff I have made.
The game is close to unplayable due to many factors. However I will treat this mainly as a learning experience and I am happy that we chose to do something difficult and try to think of completely new mechanics rather than relying on a set of used and tested one and modifying those. (Although I have absolutely no problem with people who do this as long as they do it well)

In development: The balloon game (working title)

So this is the game I'm currently working on at MTG. We're reaching the final stages of development with only about two weeks to go before deadline. The team consists of Jens Højlund Lauridsen, Troels Frostholm Mogensen, Emil Norsk-Nielsen and myself.

Basically it's a browser game about a boy from space who has been left behind on earth, with the help of a balloon and people he meets on the way, he will now try to make his way back to his home planet.

I am completely in charge of art in this game which reflects in a rather childlike and innocent artstyle, taking a bit inspiration from Paper Mario (with the white borders of objects) as well as Yoshi's Story with a fairly flat and significantly different background.

In the earlier concept art, the boy as well as the general look of items had a thick black outline whereas background objects (such as the island beneath) had a watercolor painted style. However the black outline caused problems as the blue background got darker further up making it impossible to see the outline. This is why we/I ended up going for the white paper cut-outs. 

The background also changed from the impressionistic painted to a more stylistic shaded look (compare between the island in picture 2 and the background, picture 4). The reason for this was partly because the new look afforded more detail, I was inspired by drawings from another member of the team and also because I couldn't find the brush I had used earlier for the impressionistic look.

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