Whoops
Jul/090
I have accidentally been dossing about for a week, and have got almost no work done. I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but I blame board games.
To rectify the issue, I spent a great deal of time today on background art (as I should have been doing). At last count there are a wrist-aching 35 or so left to draw.
Here is my take on one of those ‘before/after’ doo-hickeys.
Landing in an Earthquake Zone
I certainly seem to have got the hang of the art style, at least.
Elsewhere, my internet has decided to become glacially slow (for broadband) of late; to the point where most sites take a good minute or more to load, and even then they don’t always load completely, leaving me to mash F5 until I see what I want. It’s a real pain in the neck.
At Last!!
Jul/090
The background drafts are finally all done! It feels nice to put that behind me for now and get on with something new – not that I don’t enjoy designing background art, but things get very dry when you do them on their own for a long time.
Step two of my ‘master plan’ is in three parts – character design, item design and GUI design.
I’ve made a great start on the character design already today, doing seven of what I worked out to be thirty-one in total. It isn’t easy, given that my inability to draw people is in serious need of attention, but hopefully the more I do the better I will get, and I can go back and redraw the earlier characters later.
I never seem to have a problem with drawing cartoon heads and faces, so that is where I’ve been starting each character; the issues arise with drawing the bodies in a way that I’m happy with. I have to find a way to show a good amount of personality in each character but also make them simple enough that I can animate them with ease, so I’m going to be relying heavily on instantly recognisable body types and exaggerated features.
I’m glad I decided the game would have a cartoon style to it; having to draw one realistic character, let alone thirty-one, would leave me very flustered indeed.
On a final note, I haven’t yet named Marvin’s assistants. I’ll be posting a topic to Draglide nearer to production-time to see if anyone would like their name in the game, but if you’re reading this and I haven’t made an announcement about it, feel free to drop me a line.
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.
