A Good Way In
Jun/090
If, as I suspect, you haven’t been privy to my everyday comings-and-goings, you might be forgiven for thinking I’ve been slacking off a little. I’m glad to say that, if anything, it’s been quite the opposite.
I’m going to be piecing together the room plans for the last section of Marvin Cooper over the next two days, and then it’s full speed ahead once again – a light at the end of the tunnel, if you will – after spending so long doing backgrounds.
I have also decided very firmly that once the final background is drafted, I will put the game into feature lock as far as storyline and gameplay is concerned. I’ve noticed more and more that I’m adding in puzzles and extra bits and bobs where I feel the game feels ‘thin’, and it’s only making more work for me.
As far as Dr. Oddwobble is going, Mr. Blake has been hard at work animating that pepper pot, and I’m pleased to say it looks very good indeed.
Colours yet to be added
It’s been tweaked here and there since the above image was exported, but you get the idea.
David said he enjoyed doing that animation; which is handy, since there’s plenty more where that came from.
Check out his new blog over at http://david-blake.co.uk/blog/.
Finally, A Name!
Jun/090
I had a discussion with David at last about naming the heroically creamy dessert of Dr. Oddwobble’s Snack Shack. After a rally of options (including the hilarious-yet-unusable ‘Jon Long Dong’), we settled on Peter Pudden. At the very least it means I no longer have to refer to it as ‘the protagonist’, which is nice.
I drew up a draft of the friendly pepperpot who will be assisting Peter in the quest, and gave some suggestions to Mr. Blake about how to animate it – I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out.
No, it doesn't have a name.
All this talk of Dr. Oddwobble might lead you to think I’m letting Marvin Cooper sit out for the moment – but don’t be fooled. I still spend a good amount of time each day scribbling room plans in, and I’ve now worked my way through a comfortable half or so.
Inside a mysterious temple
The scribbles underneath all my plans usually denote a general colour scheme to use and/or ideas for the music to accompany the room – but more on that later in development.
All this drawing of backgrounds for Dr. Oddwobble has got me thinking, though. Originally I planned to have Marvin Cooper as a retro-looking game, with aliased lines and a level of detail reminiscent of the old LucasArts classics, but now I look at the smooth, cartoon style of the rooms I have done and wonder if I should do that instead. On one hand, old-skool graphics are getting a bit clichéd, but on the other hand animating characters and objects in that style is so much easier.
I suppose the only thing to do is carry out some animation tests in both styles and see which I can more feasibly do.
I’ll keep you updated.
Halfway There
Jun/090
Well, according to a handy list I created, I’ve now completed a good half of all the backgrounds for Dr. Oddwobble’s Snack Shack. What this means, functionally, is that we can head towards getting the first half of the game into the engine now, and the backdrops can take a backseat for a little while.
It’s not a conventional development method, and I certainly won’t be using it for Marvin Cooper, but it helps vary the workload for both myself and Mr. Blake. Happy developers are productive developers!
I’m sure you’re all dying to see some more of my fabulous background art </sarcasm>, so here is a door with a hole in it.
It's a catflap, really.
The idea being that I then create the flap to go in the hole seperately, so it is much easier to animate. The objects are pretty much the last bit of art that I’ll have to do for a section of the game (except for the GUI, which I think can wait for now).
In terms of the character stuff, I need to get Dave to animate a friendly pepper-pot and the height-impaired chef. To satiate you in the meantime, here’s the current rolling animation for our hero. Who remains nameless.
It's rolling. A bit.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think the couple of pints of coffee I drank earlier have started to wear off.
Keeping On
Jun/090
Not a great deal to report today – I’ve mostly just been carrying on with sketching out the rooms for Marvin Cooper.
Mr. Blake has sent me the preliminary animations for the hero of Dr. Oddwobble’s Snack Shack, although it is dawning on me that it should probably have a name. I will have to discuss this with David tomorrow who, in related news, it seems is finally getting round to setting up his own site. I’ll be sure to link to it when it’s all working, but in the meantime be sure to visit Sketch Perception, a new blog about art and things, run by my good buddy Brendan Clarke (who also runs the spectacular Draglide community, linked to in the sidebar).
I replaced my trusty, yet expired, PaperMate FlexGrip with an equally trusty, yet less comfortable, PaperMate Stick 2000 I found lying about the house. At some point I will buy a new FlexGrip but, as crushingly boring as it may sound, I found it much easier to write with the Stick 2000 than any other ballpoint in the building. PaperMate must be doing something right.
I also just this second realised it’s the weekend. And half of it has just gone. Bugger.
Slicing the Cake
Jun/090
I’ve done a quick 4-angle sketch of the protagonist to be played in Dr. Oddwobble’s Snack Shack and sent it off to Mr. Blake for animation.
The scribblings to the right denote the basic colour scheme
It should be a fairly simple job to animate, then the wheels have to be taken off for a few rooms. After that it’s on to animating the other bits and pieces – I’m looking forward to seeing Dr. Oddwobble himself in motion, although it will be a monstrous task as he has a lot of one-off animations to do.
Work on Marvin Cooper is also pootling along, and I’m really getting into the spirit of doing all these room sketches.
Marvin's Room and Desk
I’ve still been shuffling things around in the game plan to what seems right, and I’ve added a couple of extra puzzle-bits (I hesitate to call them real puzzles). On one hand it feels a bit like I’m artificially increasing the length of the game, but on the other hand I hope that what I’m adding is fun so it won’t feel like it was just tacked on. I feel that since the game is still in pre-production, I’m entitled to chop and change as I see fit, but once I get into the thick of drawing the art assets and scripting bits and pieces I will have to lock everything down to stop myself from making big edits.
Sadly, exhausted by all this creativity, my trusty black ballpoint has run out of ink. I will miss its comfortable rubber grip.
So Much to Do..
Jun/090
..so little time.
Here is another background that will be going into Dr. Oddwobble’s Snack Shack.
Do you sense a kitchen theme?
I do.
Back to Work
Jun/090
Well I had a lovely restful weekend, and I’m back and eager to get on with my project(s), so it’s time to put my nose back to the grindstone.
I had a good time today sitting in the sun sketching out some room drafts, which join the few I managed to get done on Friday night, although it is sometimes a challenge to get what I put to paper looking the way I want it to in my head. Nowhere is this more true than in the earlier rooms in the game, where I put – I admit – a little less detail into everything. As a result of my own haste to get the idea onto paper initially I’m left with very vague descriptions of these early locations, which is a problem.
Where the player should start the game and be greeted with a memorable location, I’m now a little worried that these first areas are going to lack that special something that makes the difference between a good adventure game and a great one. With this in mind, I’m definitely going to spend a little more time on these rooms than the later ones; certainly at the beginning of the process to convert the drafts to ‘real’ computer graphics.
In terms of workload for this coming week, I’ve spoken to my partner for my other project (Dr. Oddwobble’s Snack Shack), David Blake, and decided that we need to get things really moving for that. As a result, I’m going to be spending hopefully a couple of hours a day on that, and then whatever is left over on Marvin Cooper.
The top of a kitchen worktop
David and I already agreed that I would do the room backgrounds while he did the character art, meaning I’m going to be pushing to finish the major locations this week so that I can hand that over and the character designs can be made to fit them (by ‘major locations’ I mean the screens where the characters are going to need entire animation sets done, so different angles etc).
Very Long Lists and Highlighter Pens
Jun/090
Thanks to my stellar ability to simply skip out boring bits and repetition, it seems the blog is rapidly catching up to where I actually am in production of Marvin Cooper.
I have spent a day or so writing a large flowchart of what essentially amounts to the whole game. I skipped out the odd room or two where it was just backtracking, but overall you can pretty much see (assuming you know what all the various rooms are actually for) what the flow of the game is like. It ended up taking up one and a half A4 pages and, crucially, showed me that the third ‘act’ of the game was far too short.
I was never particularly happy with how I had written the last portion of the game, in that it felt too much like a particularly long cutscene where you occasionally had to use something. I was actually quite pleased to have a concrete reason to go back and add in some more ‘meat’ in the shape of a little bit of find-the-key gameplay, and I am at last satisfied with the way the game pans out towards the end.
Overall, the game will have 39 unique rooms.
Once all that was done, I went through it with a highlighter pen and marked the individual rooms as and when they appeared, so I could see at a glance every room that I would need to design. Unfortunately, this seems a little i
ncompatible with the previously mentioned method of skipping out backtracking in the flowchart. I am now left with one and a half pages of A4 scrawl, of which a good three-quarters is in livid green.
Nevertheless, tomorrow I will begin the arduous task of trying to put what the rooms look like in my head onto paper.
Getting Things Down
Jun/090
“Must get flame-retardant undies from assistant. Next area has even more elaborate flame traps.”
I think a key aspect of writing this blog is going to be my overcoming of an innate fear of revealing things.
I am generally a private person, and revealing what’s going to happen in my game is quite a difficult thing for me to do, but hopefully I will find a way of showing you what’s happening without also spoiling the game too much.
“Fall into deep pit. Land on head, but get up anyway.”
The whole game concept began on a nice sunny day; I sat outside with a pad of A4 paper and a pen, watching the ducks on the lake, and was experimenting with ideas for various space exploration themed games. Out of that came a character, nearly fully formed, who was a very British explorer. I have since described the game as the illegitimate love child of Indiana Jones and Red Dwarf.
I suppose I was heavily influenced by having fond memories of playing Space Quest as a child, and greatly enjoying the mixture of whacky humour and the kind of epic feeling that can only be conveyed by space exploration.
“Use hammer on button.”
I managed to write out a good 6 pages of plot, gradually getting a little more detailed as I went on. This, unfortunately, left the first page or two a little sparse on details, but I have since gone back and added them in with footnotes (scrawlings fitted in wherever I could around the page; often with a mess of arrows denoting where it should fit).
In one case, the 'note' was actually a small sketch.
So now I have this story all set out in front of me, I can start getting on with the real work.
First post!!
Jun/090
Welcome to the wonderful world of my development blog!
I hope to keep you all updated as I take a game from pre-production through to completion and release.
Unfortunately, the idea for this has come a little late into the game’s life-cycle to demonstrate the huge rush of creativity associated with those first few days. So far I have already written several A4 pages detailing the overall plot and charting player progression, so I will try my darndest to get bits and bobs from them up here as soon as possible.
Regrettably, I have also come up with a title for the game. I was always taught at school that the title was one of the last things you should do, but it just popped into my head and seems to have stuck.
So here we are, in the very first post on my brand new blog, as I announce my new game:
Marvin Cooper and the Cube Conspiracy
Now in development.
Ahh, that feels better.
