After Tsugumo's awesome Mage Knights post, I thought I'd put up our last game as well. Sort of a counterpoint if you will - game production from the newb's standpoint, as opposed to the successful veteran! This, for all intents and purposes, the first "real" or "serious" game I have ever worked on. It's a horizontal shmup for the Sidekick/Hiptop phone (I can't say the title or developer name yet). We were contracted to do the game's design, art, and music. The developers are doing all the programming for it.
Ok, so job #1 was designing the hero ship, the player's avatar in-game. I went through a variety of more...traditional ships (e.g. ripping off R-Type, or Gradius, or whoever) - you know, slender, spiky, gray, etc. However, for a horizontal shooter, this is NOT EASY. Vertical shooters give you symmetry and generally speaking a cooler silhouette; after all, airplanes don't look like anything interesting from the side. The final design I ended up with was based more on animation concerns than anything else; my biggest regret is that it doesn't look more heroic. The animations for it are kind of fun though, and give it some good character (I hope).
The animations include banking, changing throttle, attack, shield, and bomb launch. Next up was a variety of enemies - the earlier enemies are space pirates, who use converted hauling and scavenging gear to salvage wrecks and stuff (i apologize ahead of time, some of these are still at 2x):
I also worked on most of the ship's attack's at the beginning:
I can't remember exactly what order i did some of these other things, but I think this was near the middle of the development process. We added a second enemy type to the game (nefarious outer space squid monsters) and continued to pump out UI and character stuff:
At some point I had to come to terms with the fact that we were probably going to need some bosses in our game. The second boss I designed, the Super Squid, took close to a week to design and pixel. After this boss I took a break and went back to finish the other enemy, obstacle and background art. By the time I returned to the boss designs I was down to about 10 hours per boss, including all the animations. Practice does crazy things! Here is the Stack Ship and Super Squid:
Those animations will all be layered in game for his different attacks. The background tentacles are composed of tiny segments so they can do some nice sine wave action to help make him look a little more interesting. Super Squid fights you with a wide variety of methods - he can try and inhale you and chew you up, he can launch clouds of squid babies from his carapace, or he can squeeze the captured ships, spilling floating corpses in your direction.
Let's see, I think it was back to bad guys and backgrounds after that:
Ok I'm realizing now that some of this stuff is a little out of order. The Wrecked Hulk, that last image, was done pretty early. The "squid momma" - the burster thing - was my very first work in Pro Motion for this game. I went on to do the missile and space mine after that, and finished the remainder of the game's resource in PM exclusively. The nebula and galaxy are *gasp* downsampled, and yes, it shows.
Ok - so then it was time to learn about tiling! First I did a simple repeating background for the asteroid surface level, the only game level that does not take place in deep space:
It's a few different tiles, not too many, i think they're 16s mainly. It was supposed to be rocky, but ended up looking like caramel pudding...before I go on to the final push, which was all the rest of the big bosses (I did 4 in a week) here some particles and crap:
I think most of those were made in Pro Motion, except maybe the large space junk and the explosion...OK time for bosses! The more or less final (outside of some UI stuff) stage of the art development was coming up with some hopefully sweet bosses. Boss designs are a real challenge when you're given a blank slate because you are not just designing something that looks (hopefully) good, but it has to PLAY good too. Art and motion and interaction are all intertwined very closely...I spent a day hammering out all the concepts for these, and approx. 1 day each doing the actual artwork and animation for them. I don't think this was the exact order I did these in, but its pretty close. First up, the Gravity Grinder:
The gravity grinder goes through the asteroid belt, smashing up rocks and the player has to dodge the debris. Frequently, the Grinder will use its Gravity Drive to reconstitute the debris into a larger asteroid; when it does this, it leaves the interior of the gravity drive momentarily vulnerable. Ok, moving on to the Salvage Rig:
This is like one of those old school "evil room" bosses. It's the front end of a very large ship that strips derelict space colonies. Fighting this boss is more about strategy than reflexes. First you have to shoot the light on the side, that will stop the booth on the bottom from moving around. Then, position yourself above the booth, near the claw. When the claw launches itself at you, dodge, and blast the cable to send the claw crashing into the booth. Right! Then I made the mecha squid, here is his concept and his final sprites:
I don't know if it shows, but I was playing a lot of Metal Slug Anthologies during the week I designed these bosses
The mecha squid's concept is probably the most fully realized concept drawing I did for the entire game. Pretty sad, huh? Most designs were based on postage stamp-sized thumbnails to try out ideas before actually getting my pixel on. Anyways, here are the various parts of the final design:
So the idea with this boss is he has a couple of attacks. Mainly he just tries to whack you with his tentacles. However, he will periodically attempt to blast you with a massive laser from...i dunno, from off-screen anyways. The trick is, when his eye twinkles/glows, to fly under him so the attack smashes into the, em, submarine tower on his back. He defends the tower from frontal attack using his tentacles and stuff. So...yeah. That leaves the main boss:
Alright! So this is the space pirate's mothership, which is being taken over by space squids while you fight it. It has four turrets, and througout the battle the space squids are poking holes in the hull from the inside out. If you shoot the tentacles while they are briefly visible, you can blast the tips off, leaving just the stump to plug the hole. However, if you don't get the tentacle in time, or you shoot the stump, corpses will spill out of the holes for a little while, and you have to shoot/dodge them on top of the boss's actual attacks. Periodically the boss will move to the top of bottom of the screen, attacking you with its massive jets or front-mounted laser cannon respectively.
Ok I think that's about it. There's other stuff in the game too, but this is a good cross-section and review I think. I learned a lot of stuff on this project, and there are parts of it that I'm very happy with and parts of it where I wish I could have spent a lot more time, but I guess that's how these things go! The style and level of detail varies wildly from week to week, as I learned new things or tried different approaches. There's a lot less of that happening on the current project, but it seems we are destined to always make the worst stuff first
You are welcome to crit/rape/edit/whatever any of these, however because of work schedules I can't really make any changes. However they could still make me a better artist so if you feel compelled, go crazy!
Thanks!
