GGC Aftermath – Thoughts about the Project

The GGC is over and now is the time to write the project report. The report will be turned in Monday on May 30, and seminars will take place on  June 3 and 10. I will be writing about my animation work for our previous game project, Synapse.
Several months before the Big Game Project course began, I was very nervous about my performance on it, since I haven’t read much graphics courses during my second year. Luckily, I found a […]

Building a Platformer in 11 days

For 11 days, starting from Tuesday on May 10th to saturday night on May 21st, we built a whole new game called Spark. A combat platformer where you would would play as the last spark of hope (symbolized as a female knight armed with a sword and a torch) who must defeat shadowy monsters who symbolize deppresion, anxiety and paranoia in a nightmarish world.

For this new project, I was tasked with three types of assignments: making prototype assets, create/collect/edit/implement sound effects […]

The End of Synapse – Birth of Spark

So… A lot of things have happened during these last two weeks.

Besides my in-between animation work for the past five weeks, I’ve been tasked to search for sound effects for the game, both from YouTube and from the “sound library” extended hard drive from school. I found a total of 12 sounds, as well as potential background music from composer Kevin Macleod.

We had a huge playtesting on May 6th. But during the six weeks we’ve developed Synapse, it seems that […]

In-between Animations for Two Weeks

For the past two weeks in the project, I’ve been working on animations for the female character in Synapse. These animations, which are tradional 2D frame animation, will be played out when the player cleared a task. For now, we plan on having eleven different tasks. We will also be doing fail- and idle-animations.
Two members in our team work on the concepts and the creation of the animations, by doing key-frames and breakdown-frames, while I’m responsible on making in-between frames […]

Second Post – Fever and Animation Training

The week before, I was having a fever and a cold, so I haven’t had much time on doing much else. On the remaining two days of that week, I spent the time on doing some animation training.
Here is a anticipation animation, with a guy throwing a huge punch.

Here is a squash and stretch animation of a head.

Synapse – A Big Game Project – First Post

Well then, I’m back to my old blog again. I will be doing posts every week from this day forward, to the end of May. 

I’m now reading the last course of the second year of Game Design in Campus Gotland, the Big Game Project. This is the examination course of this year, where teams of between 5-9 members will be working on a two-month game project, similar to the previous year’s course during the same period, Theme Park. 

At the end […]

Beta Aftermath – Refinement work before Final Release

Well, my hopes came true. The Beta-presentation went terrific. The teachers and the crowd liked the music that I chose, as it fitted the mood for the game. They came up with ideas and drafts on how to change some of the graphics, particularly the backgrounds, but nothing for my mole sprite (and the animations for it), which I think is a good sign. It seems like everyone likes my mole design; they think he’s a cutiepie who you easily […]

Preparation for Beta-presentation

In this week, I made some miscellaneous stuff before the beta-presentation tomorrow morning. We also had a artwork presentation for our game in wednesday, during the 2D-course where the class and the 2D-teachers watched every teams’ works of arts. The teachers asked if any team needed art-support and extra tutoring.
The teachers liked our work, especially the mole, which they found very cute. They also appreciated the mole animations, though we did not show all of them, just the death- and […]

The Animation Week – Bringing the mole to life… and death

For this week, I spent the time with doing various animations for the mole, using key frame animation.
So let’s go with the digging animation. In friday last week, I got some useful drafts from one of the members on how to make it. The animation would be superfast and consist of at least four frames. When I asked how to approach with the Dig up-animation, I got the response that it would not be needed for now, but maybe later. […]

New Artsyle = New Mole = New Animations

We are now six weeks in the development of Mole Munch, and we have encountered an absolutely (!) terrible (!!) problem.
During the first of development, me and the team had a vote between two distinctive artstyles/viewpoints for the game: Isometric or Top-Down. I voted for top-down because it’s much easier to draw characters and props from a single viewpoint: from above. In a isometric viewpoint, at least in our interpretation of the Mole Munch draft, you need to draw […]

Mole-directions and digging-animation

In the fifth week of development, me and the team prepare ourselves for the alpha presentation on friday.
During friday last week, I was finaly done with the mole sprite ones and for all. Here’s his final look.

I finished fixing his left arm and some minor parts of his body. Now he looks like a fully fletched character.

After friday, during the weekend, I spent the time in my home on the mainland and this was really lucky […]

Designing the Mole, the hero of Mole Munch

Greetings!
We are now four weeks in the development stage, and we spent the time working with our respective assignments and brainstorming our ideas. Me with the mole sketching and the others with their stuff.  For this week we need to prepare ourselves for the pre-alpha prenentation tomorrow at 10.20, and our Game Designer needs to send the Game Design Document before 13:00. For three weeks, I have painted four different designs for the mole. I have shown my […]