AuthorTopic: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)  (Read 4577 times)

Offline AdamAtomic

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New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

on: May 01, 2007, 02:25:53 pm
We just recently wrapped up the art direction for 2 more mobile games.  The first is a side-scrolling "siege"-style game.  You start out with a dinky tiny little bunker, and you are able to upgrade it and build on it as you proceed.  The tower doubles as a menu, with each layer being labeled and containing a graphical display of what action/power/weapon you'll be activating.  So here is what your tower might look like:



The bottom layers have both been fully upgraded, while the 3rd floor is still at the lowest level.  The top floor and the turret have both been upgraded once.  Here are the upgrade animations for the turret and layers respectively (if these look desaturated they are, the frames are from before i did a Levels adjust to compensate for the phone screens):

     

So that is your tower.  You can deploy I think 6 different units to form your army that both defends your base and attacks the opposing army and their base.  You also get various special weapons and abilities, like Meteor Shower, Repair, etc.  SO here are some of the enemy bases:



And finally, a selection of the units:



I'm not 100% pleased with most of these animations, and these are the better of the bunch, but I had to design and pixel about 25 units with 8 frames each (walking, idle, attacking, dead) in about a week, so they're definitely not perfect.  HOWEVER I would love to see any crits or edits you guys have, the more animation tricks I have up my sleeve the more likely I'll be able to work them in even on quickie projects like this one. EDIT - there will be bobbing motion added to the flying units in-game, I promise!

So once that game was wrapped up we did a little darts game, which didn't actually have much pixel art it turns out, but we did have one decent pixel animation:



Any crits/advice/edits on that one would be great too!  Thanks a lot guys!
« Last Edit: May 01, 2007, 02:28:19 pm by AdamAtomic »

Offline ZoSo

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #1 on: May 01, 2007, 02:43:14 pm
Wow i love it.

Heck i love all your art :).

Offline Helm

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #2 on: May 01, 2007, 02:45:30 pm
I am unsure about one-liners in the context of a 'dump' thread as I know it's a bit difficult to start critiquing lots of art. But please keep one-liners to a minimum or I'll start deleting them again.

Offline Rosse

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #3 on: May 01, 2007, 03:03:06 pm
AdamAtomic> Hey, these pieces looks brilliant to me. But there is just one thing which distract me a bit. For me, its unclear which units belongs to which base. Maybe the designs were given? I mean, the Arachnids like (Starship Troopers inspiration? ;) ) are clear, style and color-wise. But the others are, at least for me, a bit unclear. The dinos belongs to the dino-looking head i think, but color-wise i thing they belong to the troopers. And the mountain belongs to the, uhm, "mammals". Color-wise, the tree matches, but style-wise? Do you see my confusion? Ingame everything may matches perfect. But detached I have problems, please enlight me :).

And i'd like to hear some technical details. What tools did you use? Maybe workflow - like the other post from your space shooter.

Keep up the good work!

Offline AdamAtomic

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #4 on: May 01, 2007, 03:48:21 pm
OK a little more detail!

As far as armies, the spec was something like this: we need 4 enemy armies, that are color-coded in some way.  The selection in my first post only includes the player's army, and three of the enemy armies.  There is a blue crystal army that lives inside the meteorite.  However, you'll only ever be engaging a single army on-screen at a time, so there should not be any confusion on the player's end.  As far as confusion from a general design standpoint, that's probably my fault!

So, from a technical standpoint, this whole game was built in Cosmigo Pro Motion.  The whole thing took a little under 3 weeks to complete; that includes the title screen/catalog splashes, etc etc.  I spent maybe a day or two hashing out the basic gameplay elements and tower designs with the client, starting with this goofy mockup:



As you can see, it used to be MUCH more steampunk/miyazaki.  This didn't really suit the game's theme and setting, but when you are just trying to bang out ideas for basic game systems it doesn't make a lot of sense to obsess over presentation details.  Then I did a speedpainting of the basic turret, just to help get an idea of mood and surfaces:



And a quick pixel silhouette to test scale and some design ideas (which were later abandoned):



At this point I had sort of tiny epiphany about how to work the game interface.  So in a siege-style game, you generally have your base, and then you have some weapons to pick from, and you use them to defend your base.  That's about it.  But I kind of hate menus, especially on cell phones, where there is no room for it anyways.  So we started talking about having the tower BE the menu - i.e. each layer would have a label on it, and you would move up and down, and the exterior of the layer would fade away to reveal the interior, which would have some kind of icon or unit display to show you what your options were.  That's when the design began to shift toward the current exterior (which sync'd up with the mood painting a LOT more anyways):



As far as the individual units, the driving philosophy was just readability and color.  We knew we wanted yellow, blue, green, and red armies, but we weren't exactly sure where to go from there.  I basically just did a lot of thumbnailing in my sketchbook until I'd found some shapes that I thought would work well at very small sizes, and proceeded from there.  Nearly every unit began as a single walk animation frame, and from there I created the rest of the walk animation, and the "hit", "attack" and "dead" states.  This ended up being a very fast way to work, although the quality did suffer some (though hopefully it is less noticeable in the middle of the game action).

Offline Dusty

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #5 on: May 01, 2007, 06:30:52 pm
Only thing about the unit animations are some of the bodies look quite static in their movement, well, stiff.
Also, the hand, only after repeating the pose of it myself I released that the chunk of flesh between the fingers on the first frame is the palm. At first I thought it was the pinky finger, which made me a little confused.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #6 on: May 01, 2007, 06:46:37 pm
wow, this seems very high quality in both design and execution specially for a 3 week project, I am very impressed.

for the animations, there are always little tweaks in the extreme frames that can help you make a simple loop look like something more. The concept is to tweak the frame right before the one before you loop, since they are the turning points and the parts that attract the most attention, a little tweak there might convience the viewer that the pattern is more like an 8 instead of a |

This is a suggestion I did to Dr Derek quite a while ago in a topic of his so let me show you the example I used there

the original, a simple reversing loop

here, at both ends of the flapping motions (not exactly the extreme frames, it really depends on each particular case) I did some simple tweaks (frame 2 would be one end, and 5 and 6 the other) that add a lot more life to the animation. Open them up and paste the frames 2 5 and 6 of his over my edit, you'll see what I mean, it's fast and it adds a lot of life.

hey, did you do the tiles as well? I'm intrigued about how you'd handle the sands desert setting implied in the mood painting.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2007, 07:38:39 pm by Conceit »

Offline AdamAtomic

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #7 on: May 01, 2007, 08:13:11 pm
@Dusty: yes the bodies are quite static, on the flying ones it won't be too big a deal, i've tested those with motion and they look ok, but i'm not sure how apparent it will be on the ground units yet.  I may have to go through and tweak them some, but again, hard to make those calls balanced against the clock!  I'm hoping I get at least one day to do a polish pass, and get more  body and a LOT more secondary motion added.

@Conceit: Cool, actually the environments are all done procedurally with vectors - its a destructible environment engine, much like Scorched Earth or Liero or Worms.  I'm a little confused in your example though, I think you have the images switched?  But I agree with your point, I'm lacking a lot of secondary and with just 4 frames I still fall into that "wiggling back and forth instead of actually moving forward" trap.

Offline candiru

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #8 on: May 03, 2007, 05:01:00 pm
Hehe, sweet looking sprites, will you post a screenshot? I think the animations have enough frames, but the orange creatures swing their heads too much. The idea about the tower being the interface is pretty cool.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: New Mobile Game Finished (2 of them really...)

Reply #9 on: May 04, 2007, 02:35:10 am
its probable that the images are switched, Photobucket was being a bitch because I had Ç in one of the filenames. yeah, well I suggested that specifical fix because I thought it was really fast to implement, and made quite the diference