Flash for Brains :/

So... I've been tinkering away the past few days in Flash. Trying to get the right look to the images etc and make it interesting but been struggling a lot. I realised after plenty of trial and error that best results came from the vectors instead of the bitmap files I've been using previously.

Thus, I've storyboarded the intro to the story (not the actual intro video that Chris is playing with 3D) and been getting it transferred to vectors in flash (which takes way too long... but that's how it goes).

I figured even though I've been slaving for ages with little to show, I'd upload a screenshot at least for you guys. Lemme know what you think in general please.

The Phatt Man

Hi guys,

Just finished inking/colouring/shading the other two perspectives on our antagonist. Thought I better share it with you guys. If any of you need the .psd files to play with just lemme know.

I was thinking of breaking these apart and using them for the Flash cinematics like the beginning of the story or transitions between virtual museum and minigames (for example you might see a cinematic when you action an NPC). I dunno how you were thinking of doing it Ben?

EDIT: A little like this http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/465005 only in our own style obviously.

 

 

Monday Musings (and action plan)

Sup guys, just some notes from today's class:

Absentees - Simon, Anthony and Ben

Chris and I discussed some things for our project with Annie. We talked about our ideas for the comic book style transitions (or I think we referred to them as 'cinematics' at some point), such as the scenes we had in mind for the beginning of the story where the youth breaks Tommy the Turtle etc. We also talked about the intro video and Annie recommended we go for the 3D with this, as she feels everything else we've done is to a high standard and we should aim to up the ante as opposed to coasting or letting things slide. So we have a nice 3ds Max (or Maya) challenge there.

Therefore the action plan is as follows amigos:

Transition videos / Cinematics - John and Ben (Flash stuff, comic book / anime style etc)

3ds Max intro video - Chris is eager to do this, he started experimenting with it today so that's his baby for now.

Simon, I wasn't too sure on what you'd be best for but I thought for now if you could get into some of the Game Maker things that Chris has been doing already. Maybe get the files off him and see what else you can push out of it. You're also welcome to join in with 3ds Max if you feel that's your forte. I think Ben and I also have experience with it so I imagine we can all chip in there somewhere =)

Anthony, if you could carry on with minigames a little but please get in touch with Simon and get the info on the original minigames designs we have as well.

So if we aim to have at least one blog post (of actual content) each before Monday, and then have some results to show Monday morning as well, I think that's a reasonable setup for now.

stuck in snow.

cant make it in tomorrow went home for weekend.. you know to get free washing :) and err basically train stations snowed in.... so im getting the first shuttle bus back tomorrow so ill try to make it in for lesson but cant make any promises.

anthony

Good Job

Hi guys,

Just wanted to say good job on the presentation today everyone. You all came across clear, concise, coherent and confident. I think we left a good impression considering how few questions there were.

A small side note to Anthony, you had the ideas to talk about but having agreed to talk about minigames it would have helped for you to know what the rest of the images on the Powerpoint presentation were about as they were a large part of the minigames design and we felt they got unjustly skipped in the end and left questions. It's a small thing, I just wanted to mention it for future reference really as I feel it was something the rest of the group agreed on. Still good job though.

As for the concerns voiced by Chris (? might have got the name wrong), the 8bit fonts were never really something we decided on so thats easily resolved. Also they mentioned the Millenium Galleries logo and representation of the company etc. which in my opinion is also easily remedied as that will all be implemented in the introduction animation/video sequence. We just hadn't integrated them yet. I think the only other issue was the "old skool" style and he complained that kids nowadays are playing PS3 etc. though if we take into consideration the continuation of 2D games on the Nintendo DS I think as long as we show some research we're safe on that aspect. We can always decorate things up further down the pipeline. Oh and the "threat" instead of "ask" thing was simply me making jokes and it being taken a little too seriously, so my bad on that one =/.

Anywho, I think we've all earned a break really. Feel free to continue with designs and Game Maker/Flash etc before Monday, but otherwise I'm happy for us to chill and focus on our other classes till Monday's session.

Peace out.

DOOMSDAY!

good look all :)

lets knock it out of the park!

A steaming bowl of Powerpoint...

Hey guys, I've finished the Powerpoint presentation, just might need some final tweaking tomorrow. It's looking alright to be honest, and runs smoothly. If anyone can think of anything they want putting in, email me and I'll see what I can do about incorporating it, failing that, I'll come in early tomorrow and we can all sort it there.

Bring on the presentation!

Tuesday's Meeting

Just a few notes from our meeting today.

Powerpoint is almost finished, I'm doing a couple more drawings to go in the presentation but otherwise everyone else has supplied Ben with what he needs for Powerpoint.

We ran into a little obstacle when we realised that Game Maker isn't Mac compatible (it uses .exe filetype), as that's part of our presentation and we were just going to plug the Mac directly into the projector. I think Ben has managed to get the Powerpoint working similarly on pc though.

We went over a few more details of what we're all going to talk about and everyone is happy with the setup.

A few of us may be early tomorrow for the presentation, just to double check our slides etc.

Aaaaaand that's about it, roll on Wednesday's pitch...

so tired....

ok ive done 2 maps now..... very pretty n detailed... took me a while but they look really good will show you 2mos as cant screen print..... cos american keyboard haha


there both 1600 x 240 so there LONG pieces


and also jotted down some other game ideas with abit of bio on which


may try and make a 3rd map..... tomorrow really getting into it :) quite interesting on game maker....

oh yeh i gave up with photoshop style stuff......

so jumped into game maker and produced the art in there so half the battle is done :)

Anthony

Little Fatty

Yaaaay, say hello to little fatty :)
Still need to do the side and back views in Photoshop but they're inked ready which is half the battle anyway.

Presentation - intro

I've neatened up the storyboard images for putting into the powerpoint, i'll bring them in tommorow.

Storyboards and Mini game ideas

Just went over the storyboard and mini game drawings I did in pen, they came out much better this time. I'll see about making a full colour game idea tommorow when we meet up and decide what ideas we want presented.

Security Guard

Security Guard done for now, at least till the redraw/re-ink/re-colour further down the line...

Security Guard WIP

In the middle of shading the security guard/cop at the moment. If i can I'll bomb out the little fatty before the night is done, or i could do it tomorrow evening if needs be.

I will redo the inking of this guy cuz it's kinda lame, the way i inked the hero worked better. But for now we can show this in the presentation at least. I wasn't sure on colours.

 

I also screwed his feet up for the rear view... oh well =/

Layout again... with added niknaks

Here's the almost final version of the layout. Draft obviously, I'm going to check out the gallery again tomorrow for proper whereabouts of things, make it look a little better. Plus there's a cabinet missing but I'll sort that later on. Just thought it was about time I updated the blog...

Also I added some mock-up NPC's, (partly to show the layer order of some of the display cabinets) it makes the metalwork exhibit EVEN MORE exciting than it already was!

Re: Powerpoint; I don't have all the images I need to put in but we can sort that tomorrow when we meet right? Also we can discuss the order of the slides and things some more, I have a few ideas.

Metalwork Curator... give us the go a head...

Hi,
The Millennium Gallery front of house staff said you wished to do some filming in Metalwork and then a podcast as part of your project. If you could let me know more details about what you would like to do specifically - im sure it will be fine for you to go ahead.
When you do the filming please let the front desk staff know first as they will have to ensure there are no large groups in at the same time.

Best Wishes
Clare

CLARE STARKIE
Senior Curator of Humanities & Curator of Decorative Art

Museums Sheffield
Weston Park, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 2TP
Tel: 0114 278 2642
Fax: 0114 278 2727
Email: clare.starkie@museums-sheffield.org.uk
Web: www.museums-sheffield.org.uk

Anthony again...... so i've got us the go ahead to get some filming for the pieces where we was gonna do a video.

:)

Turtle copyright infringement Bonanza

In the interest of fairness to the good folks at Nintendo and Game Freak, Ive taken the original Tommy turtle design, which looked fairly similar to a Squirtle, (cough), and changed him ever so slightly to make him our own.

Anybody happy with this design?

More Background madness...

As promised, I've continued to update the background, and felt it appropriate to post my progress so far.

Working on filling the display cases with tiny pixelated metal trinkets, it's coming a long quite nicely.

One thing, where as it looks quite good (and true to the actual layout of the museum), I can change the slanted cabinets in the middle (that would be covered by the canopy... thing) so they are just straight and parallel to everything else, if this would help with character movement in gamemaker.

Illustration progress

Attemped to design levels with photoshop got no where so downloaded some tiles off the internet... and went into game maker and set a 1000 x 240 layout landscape and went to town on that bad boy.... will bring in tomorrow for meeting with.... harddrive and ideas for other games..

Monday Meeting Notes

Just minutes of the meeting we had today from 10am:

All members present including Anthony (huzzah =) )

Everyone gave a little update on progress with their given tasks and we're all pretty happy with what we've got. We worked out how we're going to do our pitch/presentation and organized who would talk about which sections.

Presentation order:
Storyboard - Simon
Level/Virtual Museum Designs - Ben
Characters - Me
Working Game Maker Example - Chris
Mini-Games - Anthony & Simon

Action Plan:

Ben - Powerpoint mock-up for presentation based on the above notes
Me - Moar character designs, colouring/inking to include in the Game Maker examples etc.
Anthony - Mini-game illustrations
Simon - Storyboard inking and mini-game illustrations
Chris - Moar Game Maker stuff, polishing the already working example etc.

NEXT MEETING: Tuesday 16th Feb from 1pm outside Harmer 2303 lab

(spooooons)

Updated Background

Hey guys, here's an updated background, (as the title suggests), made some new cabinets and fixtures, I'll continue to work on this, but thought I'd post my progress so far...

(Going to start working on objects too when I get some more reference photos from the gallery)

Floor Layout

Took down some rough sketches of the floor plan in the Metalworks gallery, as follows;

This is just a plan, and can be modified at any time for putting in gamemaker.

Done

Wow !! After 2 hours of solid work i have finally managed to get our hero to walk around. lol

Game Maker

Hi John, Just seen the Drawings that you have done they are looking really good i am about to start work on turning him into a moveable character on game maker. So hopefully everything on my end should be done for mondays meeting, then we have got some time to make minor tweaks for wednesday.

Sprites/Character

Spent most of last night drawing/inking/colouring these. We can easily recolour them as i kept everything on seperate layers. Can maybe clean up some of the lines later too. Opinions?

Chris if you need the inbetween phases for the walking animations just let me know and i'll get on it.

Emailing With John

Been in contact abit with john, via email.

A few tasks im gonna look into maybe some more in depth art into storyboards and game ideas.

Also going to run on the storyboard on the M trench idea, could use after effects for that and export is as a .avi file and then bring it into flash or export it as a quicktime file and use it as the intro.

Also i have abit of skills in 3d programmes like hammer and abit of maya and 3ds (maya and 3dsmax not so solid on)

Going to jump into the museum again on monday morning before meet up with you guys and get some movie based and picture based research... so i have more visual components to work from, and ill try and give as much imput as i can.

Anthony

Presentation Potential

During the meeting Friday afternoon we jotted down a few notes on how the presentation might be ordered. I know you've already been working on that Simon, so feel free to use the below notes however you like or we can discuss on Monday.

• Show intro storyboard then talk about exactly what we're going to make, i.e. an interactive virtual museum in which the user can interact with the environment and play mini-games whilst having a higher goal (the pieces of the turtle).
• Show slides of the characters and discuss some of the design aspects.
• Show the level (museum) design and talk more about the cartoony yet retro theme we were aiming for (for our demographic of 8-12yr olds mainly).
• Show the example Chris is putting together of Gamemaker game with Ben and My drawings. Gives them example of character in motion etc.
• Show some screenshots/designs of the interactive elements and mini-games that will be included in the virtual musem game.
• Talk about how the game/story ends with collecting the Tommy Turtle pieces
• Maybe talk about why we feel the overall ideas are good for this project etc?
• Questions!

Aaaaand that's about it. Feel free to comment anyone.

Friday Meetup Notes

Good meeting today, Simon was absent but he informed us he's got some things done which is awesome.

Ben showed us some more Flash work he did for the intro to the game we're going to make which should work nicely for the presentation.

We agreed we'd do some research on educational themed games, as this is an area we haven't looked at in as much detail yet, and would be very helpful when putting together our presentation.

Chris had been busy with Gamemaker and it looked really nice. Ben, Chris and I agreed that we will definitely use Gamemaker for the final production as it's good for implementing Flash type elements afterwards and our knowledge of games using would be too limited.

Anthony, if you could get in touch with us via emails or text/phone (as i left my number on the original email i sent in the first week) that'd be good. We're a little concerned that we've yet to actually meet you and we're 3 weeks into the project. Classes have been Monday morning from 9am, regardless of which course you're on. Hopefully we can sort it all out soon though.

I showed the guys the character designs i've been working on, and team response was encouraging so we're going ahead as planned. See below for sketches:

We decided these would be good characters for our purpose, the one on the left of image 2 being our hero, the other two being involved in the beginning of the game plot. We also contemplated the idea of having characters stood by each interactive element of the game, as guides and to add more character to the game since we've decided the hero will stay as a "silent type".

Our other idea is to have a sidekick of sorts accompany the main hero around, adding personality and character without need for the main hero to be altered into something that may not appeal to all players/viewers. Potentially this could be a pet, or the spirit of "Tommy the Turtle" who is involved in the game plot already.

When drawing, i decided we should stick to a retro feel in terms of gameplay, though we can add some more modern features to the designs such as more detailed characters and hand drawn levels etc. instead of the pixelated "Super Nintendo"esque retro style. I think we were mostly agreed on that, though it's still up for discussion as that's more my own opinion :).

Action Plan

Ben - Creating a plan of the virtual musem for Chris to use in Gamemaker, and doing some design drawings (or screenshots) of things for the interactive elements/mini-games.

Me - Continuing with character design, inking up some final drawings for Chris to use in Gamemaker, and also doing some designs for the interactive elements/mini-games.

Chris - Is going to use the images Ben and I will provide (asap) to make a recreation of what the finished game may look like, and we'll be able to show the character moving around the level/virtual museum during the presentation we have to do on Wednesday 17th.

Simon - I know you missed the meeting, but we were hoping you could get in on some designs for the mini-games/interactive elements like Ben and I. Also we figured it makes sense for you and Chris to work together on the Gamemaker side, as i get the impression this is your forte (but feel free to correct me :)). Lastly if you're ok for it, an inked or more detailed version of that storyboard intro you did would be great for the presentation.


Next meeting: Monday 15th, 10am outside Harmer 2303. Objective is to put together the aforementioned work into a presentation ready for Wednesday.

Meeting Plans

I completey forgot to mention in my last post,

We all agreed to meet at 12:00 Friday 12th to discuss the pitch and go over the new material we hopefully have.

Anthony Here

Hey guys, erm sorry ive not been around recently been having some minor difficulties with my timetable, via switch from games design to film and visual effects ive read from bottom to top.

I hope thats the order i was ment to read, erm im open to do anything, so just throw ideas at me and im happy to meet up when ever with who ever to talk about what ive missed or via email.... dikwod@hotmail.com

just wanted to say sorry again for not being around till now.

Intro Storyboard

These are the initial storyboard sketches that I drew up for the intro to our game. We are fairly solid on the general idea but it may need some tweaking before we go into making it. Sorry about the image quality, damn scanner.

Session 4: Continuing in class

So we continued with the planning of our project during class.

Ben had made a mock-up of a "point and click" version of our game in Flash which was really good to see. Chris had also created a mock-up using Gamemaker so it was helpful to have some visual comparisons at our disposal. Hopefully they'll both upload them to the blog soon =)

Also Simon made a storyboard for our intro video which looked very nice so that should be uploaded soon too.

Meanwhile we tried mapping out exactly what we want to include in our final product and how they'd work. See the diagram below for what we roughly sketched in class. Also there are notes from the session on there.

We decided we need a character with more personality to set our little game apart from others of similar style. We aren't 100% on whether we should leave the main character as a silent type and create more interesting side-characters, or if we're going to add the personality to the main character yet.

For now we've agreed on tasks assigned to each of us, and we're going to meet Friday 12th at noon to discuss what we're putting in our pitch that we'll have to do soon.

Tasks assigned:

Ben - See if he can find out how to use Flash for making a game where the user can use the arrow keys etc instead of point and click. Said he'd do a mock-up of the intro sequence too, and maybe some screenshots of what the game might look like.

Me - I've got the job of doing some character designing, and possibly storyboarding another section of animation we're having at the beginning of the game.

Chris - Said he'd try some more things using Gamemaker, using some of the images Ben provided.

Simon - Screenshots/stills of what all the interactive elements of our game will look like, such as mini-games etc. Also may do a mock-up powerpoint slideshow to give us a base when we plan how we're going to pitch our ideas to the curator.

Session 3: Personality Test

The final part of Monday's session was a 'personality test' the entire class carried out.

Mine came up as ESFP (efeminite emo or something) which is apparently the 'Energiser' personality type. I kind of agree with a lot of what the results say to be honest.

Extraverted - moderate
Sensing - corridor (mild)
Feeling - Clear (almost Very Clear)
Perceiving - Moderate (almost Clear)

Session 3: Monday's Class

Hokay, Monday's Class based on this project involved a few things.

First was a group chat with Annie Watson about our ideas so far, and what we may pitch in the coming weeks. She was very helpful to us in that she pushed us to think about some of the more specific details concerning our ideas, and touched upon the question we'd already raised among ourselves of what our target audience should be for the project. She also helped us think about how to really appeal to the target audience we may have which was very beneficial.

Afterwards we had a tour of the Metalworks Gallery and Claire (the curator) told us a little more about the gallery and was happy to answer any questions we had. Here are the notes we gathered from today's session:

Ideas

Check out other virtual museums online to see if there are any big issues and how they've been created.

Age group will vary, but can be mostly aimed at primary and secondary school ages with a range of around 8-12yr olds being a good aim.

Finding hidden objects within the virtual museum may be a nice main goal to the audience when exploring the virtual museum. This could be pieces of the Turtle in one of the displays of the gallery (who happens to be called Thomas, or as i like to think of him, Tommy Turtle...)

Adding a stronger element of fun and a hint of 'naughty' themes will help attract the age group we're aiming our advertisement towards.

Nonsensical idea of the spoons flying... Flying spoons may be more interesting??

Arranging the spoons in chronological order could be another mini-game of the virtual museum.

Plans

Ben - Will do a mock-up of the 'point and click' Flash for the virtual museum, to see how well it works in comparison to Gamemaker.

Chris - Will do some experimenting with Gamemaker to see if it's going to be adequate for our ideas etc.

Simon - Will draw up some storyboarding for the intro video/animation ideas we've had so far.

John/me - Will continue blogging, and get involved with the storyboarding of the intro for the time being.