Writing a character… And animating a start menu.

So, since our writer had alot on his plate besides writing for the characters, I took it upon myself to write a bit for one of our driver-characters, Haizea Alonso (see picture below)

Now, this is more or less a result of a big problem with how we planned our project, that being that for a game which main standout feature is the story between races, we haven’t had a proper script during the whole of the development period. We have […]

The award scene (And a poster)

When the race concludes, we wanted to make a scene where we show the placement of the characters in said race. To do this we’d have to make sprites for each and every combination of results that could be achieved. Since these characters will be set more naturally into the environment than the dialogue-scenes, I thought that they should match the simplicity of the environment. This means that they’re more or less colored silouettes. So to get across the emotions […]

Garage background and dialogues.

So aside from our press-conference, we were also gonna have someplace else where the character interacts with the other drivers. As everyone is in their racing-gear it would make sense to set these interactions in the garage before and after the race. For this I looked at some different garages and chose one picture that I built my own upon.
The more difficult thing to decide with this was how stylized I should make it, and what colors I should use. […]

Press conference scene.

So, the game will have the character-dialogues to further your relationship with each of the main characters, but there’s another important thing that you do between races: Press-conferences.
Now, this isn’t that different from your interactions with the characters, but in presentation we wanted to make it more distinct, instead of just having a dialogue-box with different portraits above it like all the other times. This would also make it easier to communicate that the player is talking to a mass […]

Characters

Our game is described as a story-oriented racing-game. They idea is that the results and events that happen during the races will change how people percieve you.
Ofcourse we have the press conferences, where the player will get to answer questions which will build up expectations on the play player during the race, but we also wanted to have more intimate character-interactions, which are mostly with you fellow drivers.
In the vertical slice of our game that we will show during GGC, […]

Pre-production

The point of this series of blogs will be to explain and archive my workprocess, which means that it’s as much for myself as it is for you, the reader.
So to first describe the project in question: Fast Gear is a racing game which is heavily inspired by formula 1 and dating simulators. The main thing that seperates it from others within its genre is its focus on story and character-interaction between races. It’ll not stop there though, what we […]

Introduction to Fast Gear.

Hello! My name is Daniel Qvarnemark and for the rest of spring I’ll be working as art lead on our Big Game Project, called fast gear, a racing game that also puts focus on the downtime between races where you’ll talk to other drivers, hold press conferences, etc…
Here I’ll write about my work-process atleast once each week, both for myself and for those interested.
Looking forward to it!
 

Blog week 6 – Story pictures

Hello! Not much happened this week when it comes to graphics. Alot of time were spent on very small arifacts, writing in our design dokument or managing our backlog. Most of the in-game graphics were done but there was one last piece that we implemented this week: The story.
So this week we’ll take a look at the story-pictures that I drew for the intro of the game, wich sets up the event that you, the player, will take part in. […]

Blog week 5 – Winning and game over-screens

Hello there, dear blog-readers! We’re getting close to the end now with only one week left after this one. We have been using this time to finish and polish everything that we need for the end-product, both gameplay and graphics-wise. Since we haven’t really touched on our narrative in the game, I set out to draw some fitting pictures for both the opening-sequence and the win/fail-states of the game. This week I’ll show you some of the pictures that I’ve […]

Blog week 4 – Branches

This week has been interesting… We’ve worked to make up for lost time and has as an result put in lots of things into the game on a short amount of time. My biggest problem starting this text was to choose wich one of the artefacts I should document, and while it’s not a big animation or anything this time, it has more to do with the process of its creation rather than how long it took to draw or […]

Blog week 3 -Thundercloud and powerline animation

This week has been a week of ELECTRICAL ANIMATION!
I have two artefacts to show this time, both sharing the theme of a high voltage-count. For now I’ll start with the thundercloud wich has been the meatiest of all of the animation I’ve worked on so far.
The thundercloud is one of our hazards in the game. It’s a sinister cloud that moves across the top of the screen and shoots down a bolt of lightning at regular intervals that the player […]

Blog week 2 – Wingflap animation

More animations? Ofcourse! This week I have, among other things, worked with giving our protagonist some life, as the poor thing so far have been without wings (and a head for a while). As the programmers had written code to figure out the players hitbox from its pixels, and the head of the owl shall be able to move around 360 degrees, we decided to split the sprite into three pieces. First of all the head needed to be it’s […]