venture with me into the lost world

Snow is so fascinating, and I find is an amazing thing to look at I find it amazing that England is currently blanketed in the stuff and when I look outside it steals my attention. So instead I have been embracing the cold that seeps into my room and wrapped up warm as I can and have been working at an exponential work on all that i have to complete.
I am of course happy to tell you my hard work has not been in vain, the dissertation soldiers on and the concept document should come together nicely, I never thought I see myself type this...but I am enjoying what I am producing!


Here is some art to look at, should give you an idea of the direction that I am taking:

Still not sure about these colours yet, but basically the assistant is based on the look of a dung beetle, the character is quite small and will always be near his master Rasputin, the only times he is seen alone is when Rasputin has sent him on a mission. I wanted to give him a strong figure while also looking too innocent to be completely independent. When he appears completely in shadow I wanted him to have this great silhouette.

This is Rasputin, the concept is based very strongly on a praying mantis, I wanted his height to be a big factor. Making him so giant that he has to stoop to stand in almost any area, I wanted his look to be that of someone wise and yet tired as if he has never had his way and is always in want of more.

I wanted to save the best until last as I really enjoyed doing this concept. This is Uncle, he stands casting a perfectly sharp shadow over his nephew Blatta. I chose to look at Victorian dress for the character, this is due to my interest in how powerful it makes the character look while giving him still a sense of comedy. I like him being fat because it splits the approach in the animation he can almost appear as two characters, the stupid and loveable Uncle but also the glutinous and evil minder.


So there you have it, a little look into what is going on behind the scenes at the moment. These are just some of the concepts and I realise the lack of the background, I guess this is because it keeps your focus on everything I want you to see. But mostly because I haven't set on what I would put in the background (you got me I'm not very good at all that)

we tear it down just to build it up again

As promised in my last post here are the long awaited (and equally not exciting) game engine shots each with exciting information that points out either the bleeding obvious or the downright helpful!

Here is a great example of how to not size things correctly, one of the first and best mistakes to date. Practice makes perfect and you can thank my lack of photoshop and exporting for the web for this monstrosity, scary but cool.

Second try was a vast improvement, you can see that there is a white line around the character, I discovered this was due to it not being a transparent image, if you make the image with a transparent layer underneath it and then save it as a .png24 for web devices, voilà! No white lines and it looks like it belonged in the game all along.

This just points out adding in new frames to make a walk cycle, where it all goes how boring the engine looks and basically how it all works. You can see for yourself and think "hey I could probably make my own game, but I'd rather read his blog"

Last although certainly not least this is simply to show you the importance of cropping, if you notice the character is off to the left (yeah that is my drawing for you) if it is cropped fully meaning the character appears central it generally just helps with lining everything up in engine.


So there you have it! More kinks need to be ironed out and plenty more of this needs to be done, i am a little afraid that time will run away with me. But I aim to remain confident and to one day soon be able to show you all a working copy of this game which you can try out. For now keep checking back and I will deliver exciting new concept art and more fantastic news from Pax Insectica.


Goodbye!

a blessing in disguise

Happy Christmas!

(more work to be updated very soon, with special guest ... game engine shots!)

roads? where we're going, we don't need roads

So animating has been great fun but i have descovered a problem, when putting my stuff into ags i realised a few things, instead of saving the animations as .gifs it is better to save each individual layer/frame as a .png and make sure that the transparency is on and there is no white background. The problem being that if there is a white border shows up around the character and it looks horrible! Also the character needs to be drawn in and animated on the very bottom middle of the page in order for it to be centered in the ags editor. It is good finding out these issues now by doing a build early because i haven't tackled too many animations yet. I will have to re draw all of the animations and that way i can improve on them there and then, and i will keep this updated to say how that goes.

Have checked the background in the ags editor to make sure that the character can interact with it and the colours are okay and it doesn't look shabby and the resolution holds up just fine and dandy! Each small build is a new step to a working Pax Insectica!

In the meantime my lovely friends, enjoy yet another concept of the main character Blatta.

i shut my eyes, in order to see

I was recently lent a book on animation, which has helped me phenomenally! I have finished a walk cycle for blatta, it is a little clunky and certainly rough round the edges but in all honestly i can say i am pleased with it. Might need some cleaning up but overall you get the idea. Made him walk at a steady pace, as he is an insect and naturally they don't move too slowly. Still so much more work to be done on other characters, but this is fundamental work that should be gotten on with and it's a joy to do it and really work hard at it too.


One step at a time.

wise men and cups of tea

I have been posting here a lot lately, after getting into level design and animations i really can't help it because i want to keep this updated with what i have done. So if you saw my last small animation (Blatta scratching his head in confusion about what to do) then this animation should fit nicely. It is a simple static boil on the character which gives an overall feel for how the character should look in game. It was a very wise beardy man called Rhys Thomas that told me it would help gel all the animations together, so this is for him to critique as well as you all!


Put the kettle on!

pipe dreams, to wonder where a non-conformist, mild mannered cockroach lives

This is a concept of a screen appearing in the game, it is the front door to the main character's (Blatta) house. There is a grating underneath that is covered by leaves which will require moving to get down there. The image is compiled of different photographic elements and then played around with in photoshop. These images will probably have a faint black line around parts of the scenery to add a drawn feel to them, though as yet this is still undecided.