Game Jam Collab- Evaluation

Well. This has been dramatic.

Other than the graphic design collaboration, which I adored, taking on more of a leadership role, leveraging peoples skills and talents and keeping the project on track. Despite preferring 2D, I applied my 3D skills to the project and learned much more about modelling, which meshed very well with the work of the graphic designers, it was a highly positive experience in comparison to the longer collaboration in Games Art.

I was overjoyed to be working with two very close friends for this project, myself and miffy weren’t going to work together as we didn’t want to maim each other, but for repulsion of any other team, we decided we respected each other enough to do this and do it well, and we have. Ian however. We have personal history with Ian, myself more than the others, and it took much persuasion on Miff’s part for me to grow up. I decided that it would be a great experience, something I could grow from. And I’d say I have, as to not put too much of a schoolyard-spin on it, working with my “worst enemy” was far more doable than I thought. I have nerves of steel. After this project, I have absolutely no fear of working with anyone else, because the things I had to get over and eal with have been immense, and for this, I’m proud.

 Far too much time was spent on concept art when we could have been working on production, but with many key roles that Ian himself wanted to do, like animation keyframes and assets that quite simply, he didn’t do. We spent an age designing our character and the mask as we all had very contrasting ideas, and settling on something with difficult, but we didn’t need to spend the time we did on stuff that was so miniscule, it should have been stuff directly going into the game such as assets and animations. Voice clips shouldn’t have really been explored until the mechanic was implemented, despite how innovative it was of us to decide to utilised 3DS capabilities with the lack of a sound room.

Only myself and Miffy had any real nodding experience, but theres nothing I can do that Miffy can’t do quicker or more efficiently, but I still wish she had time to do the work she truly wanted to do: the promotional art. Many corners have had to be cut and our game is very different from what we originally had planned, if we had Ian using his actually very impressive talents throughout, with a large work ethic that matched the rest of the team, we would have been a force to be reckoned with. Sadly this was a fantasy. As much as I dislike him, his work would have been a massive asset to us, if he bothered to join in. Quite frankly, our game would be much better if we refused him and turned him away as everyone else had. But truly, I’m glad we didn’t.

Not only have a learned more about painting from working with my talented friends, but on a massive personal level, working with Ian was cathartic despite everything. There really are worse things. I’m proud of us , I know my painting skills still have a long way to come yet, but I feel this was all most beneficial, and playing with animation was a lot of fun and something I’d like to continue in my own time. 
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Game Jam Collab- Week 8- Final

 This week, being the last, was predictably the most stressful. Many corners had to be cut, the game had to be changed, mechanics wont make the cut, but we're trying to salvage the best of what we can. This is due, as previously mentioned, to too much time on concepting and not enough time producing assets and animations for the game, as well as the dramas that having Ian on the team brought, but this was sadly to be expected. Following on from the asset list, Sasha made the land pieces as I made the set dressings.


As well as a breakable log.

 And Appleman.


Who blinks as I painted over the spritesheets.


Each team member was given a "wildcard" asset, it could be anything we wanted- so appleman became a thing. Having painted over the spritesheet here, I decided to do the same for the mechanised mushroom in the game.

So now they can run, with gas billowing erratically.

I was also asked to produce some modular 2D assets, that could be built with different branches as platforms, even if parts were very slapdash.

Due to Ian not complying with the work that had been set for him, I painted some assets to make up for this.

 A large ground tile.
 A background of barren trees.
Some distant mountain.

Environments are really not my strong suit, but the practice has been welcome and great experience, I feel many of my assets are hit and miss, but in my personal practice, this is motivation to keep practicing.

I also recorded many more voice clips for the narrator and mocked up a text box widget idea.


To make the narrator more distinctive, I looked into Polari slang and recorded clips that seemed seedy and strange, to fit with the strange world we've created, how we implement the narrator beyond just the opening is currently anyone's guess.

All in all, a lot has gone wrong. Our game is not going to be what we wanted it to be and so many features and aspects will have to be cut out, but that's just the nature of development. Its all currently rather last minute, but its all coming together. Our game is a glitched circus of strange animations and weird locales, but we love it for what it is. The mechanics work and visually its strange and beautiful. I'm grateful we have a game at all the way things have worked out. I've gained so much from this experience; I've learned new painting techniques and approaches thanks to working with Sasha, with Miff's art direction I'm learning to be less attached to concepts and through working with Ian, I've learned that despite your differences, you can still come together and create something great using your talents. Even if he was an utter disappointment to work with despite our best efforts. But that's also what I've learned from Collaboration, you just keep going until you have a finished product, its the journey not the end product.

It is all a bit last minute, we could have done so much better. We could have chosen not to have had Ian. But I can confidently say, despite everything, I actually really enjoyed working with them all and bouncing ideas around and working together, even if it was every flaming flavour of hell at times. Our game as it stands makes zero sense, but it will be remembered, I'm proud of us all.
Bar one.
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Game Jam Collab- Week 7

This week, in short, has been dramatic. For reasons I’ll cover at the end of this post. For now, here’s what’s been worked on.

To begin with, after some critique with a tutor about how we've interpreted the theme of "one-button game" and problems getting mechanics to work, we've scrapped the idea of a continuous runner and are rebuilding, a week before hand-in. However this is not as radical as it sounds, its just a change in nodes and replacement of assets, so we're not really taking any steps back, it just makes more sense for our game, the paralaxing has been implemented and its looking wonderful. However in retrospect, I feel we should have started assets and actual production much earlier instead of getting wrapped up in concepts and selecting the perfect mask, when the character is quite small and its mask even smaller. We've also decided to scrap extra monsters like the crabflower just so we can perfect and polish what we already have, to make our prototype as great as it can be. Myself and Sasha have been working on assets, written from a sign up sheet we three have shared from the programmer, Ian was on backgrounds, but more on that later. 

We were given a diagram, or "tile" where the assets are displayed together in where they should be and in placement, from this we use it as reference to create the content. We finished between the 4 of us the assets for tile 01.

Credit: Myfanwy Bundock


I also worked on the sprite follower animations, I played with colour burning them to make them pop, but we decided that a lack of harsh contrast made them seem more like spirits. I did originally want idle and jump animations for them, but due to time constraints and bluepriniting complications, their idle will be a static frame and their movements and jump will be the same animation.

This lil guy shall stay the same.



A small alterations to the legs here.

I struggled with the next one greatly as I tried to give it knees, and got way too involved with it despite knowing so very little about animation so I couldn't get the right nuances in motion, I resolved it by just simply not giving it knees.

 I got a great bounce in the leg originally, then he had a limp, and now his leg is far too kinky for words but hey, we learn! I've got to learn to not get so wrapped up in insignificant details and just get on and make progress.
We wanted the orbs to orbit as it hobbled around.

The gas fly was also animated. Opting quickly fo orange on the symbols to make them more visible.


At this speed it looks like its galloping, but slower it looks better, I wanted it to wander around, and I even editied an attack mode face:


But its simpler to have it stationary floating up and down shooting this projectile:

A sort of pink gunk shot with a limited animation.

Our team mate, Ian, has been difficult to work with throughout this project. In part because myself and Myfanwy have some personal history with him that led us to absolutely refuse to work with him initially, for me personally it was unimaginable. But we got over it, settled our differences and have tried throughout to include him, but throughout he's been lackadaisical, throwing us every kind of excuse and has produce very little. We've confronted him many times and tried to resolve it, but no amount of coffee or face to face talking seemed to motivate him at a constant rate, so we use google hangouts to chat and give him direction. Myfanwy was pushed to her limit and lost it as she's under a lot of personal strain as it is, having to deal with Ian is also hard, but we're managing. She refused to work any longer on the project, but I've won her round since. We had a conversation with him and a tutor to clear it all up and it very much felt, if I'm honest, that whilst for the hundredth time he said he was ready to work   and did for a short burst, his utter apathy for all our hard work and the project was not recognized.

The next day however he started working on UI as informed, we've decided to have the one button as a call mechanic that he'll design the button for and a spirit counter. He was drawn to wooden filigree and the idea of framing the game, but this would obscure much of the view within the game, masking our hard word, yet the idea of "framing our art" is definitely a novel one.

Title wise for our game, so we can illustrate a title, we played with names but soon returned to Mongolian shamanism and Turkic culture for influence. We came across Tagh-Baianai, a female creature that in many many ways reflect our main character in physical description, tey this name doesn't quite roll off the tongue. After many duds, I proposed "Taghsprit" as sprit could allude to sprint or spirit, and at this point, its a name!  We also discussed the narrators role and interaction, I thought of this strange creature emerging from behind a shrub with crude animation would be quite a memorable moment. Yet we feel we should introduce him as a cutscene, talking directly to the player in the beginning, the animation for him is amazing, sasha working frame-by-frame. We've been writing and recording script for him. The gallery option in the game is also shaping up well, we're sending in our best peices to implement in game, collectible gems will unlock our concept art for the player. We've still got to work on illustrating menu UI and titles, but Ian's apparently working on that. Myfanwy as an artist is creating the gallery as all she's been working on is nodes as she's the most capable and she really wanted to work on Promotional Art, but due to difficulties in the group, she no longer has the time.

All the game really needs now is to be put together as animations and mechanics are pretty much done, just nodes and the many remaining assets are this final weeks goals.

What must be said however, is on the topic of Ian further. To not put too finer point on it, it has been hell to work with him. However, I've learned so much from the experience as I expected I would, which is why I agreed to it in the first place. Whilst its been ugly and dramatic. we're still working together, I've learned no matter how much you dislike a person, you get on with the job at hand and still work together to achieve a common goal. I truly believe I can work with anyone after this, its been horrific. There have been some rather ugly messages sent to Myfanwy as well due to her outburst at Ian, and with Ian still demanding his hand held through every little direction of twig and particle of dirt, which is draining to handle, he then also trying to implement a very complicated idea of his at such a late stage, caused me to send him this message,

Now, I've annotated this and am including this message here because even on this personal level, truly despite everything, we need to get this project done despite the circumstances, even if that means we work apart for this last week, his work is already laid out for him. This had to be said just to get this moving, I knew this project would be difficult, but I feel completely in my right to have done this and I've tried my utmost to keep this professional for the sake of the project.



With that, we're to truly knuckle down for this last week to get these last assets done, these sounds in, the UI perfected and menus designed. I also produced whats been coined as "the worst bush ever not really attempted" which is making a special cameo in our game in the gallery its so adored.



This project has been so, so difficult, but we've all, all four, come so far with this game and I can't wait to see it finished. Our problems may have come from miscommunication and an over-attachment to the project, which I'll bare in mind for future work and despite diabolical history, we're all determined to get it done. Here's to our final week.
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Game Jam Collab- Week 6

This week was far more fruitful, I worked on monster concepts, finalised the sprites and started their animations.


We started to move away from the mimic idea, and it finally hit home that I need to stop just attacking things in colour, I should go for value first.

We also liked the Crab flower from last week, playing with the idea of having a mimic monster, pretending to be a flower, but when close, will come up and kill the player.



As the sprite followers go, the more rounded ones were taken forward but we liked that they had contrasting shapes, my team mates also iterated them. I played with colours, a flame like texture and darker tones.



Credit: Myfanwy Bundock

Miff took my designs and explored colours and choose the five design we'd use. we decided to drop the fifth one as we could'nt figure out a way to animate it well. With some direction from miff the team leader, I animated the second one along in idle, walking and jump to go straight in the game as a place holder for now. It looks to be shaping up well!





I also worked on other sprites






I tried two animations for the one above as I didn't know how to animate a sprite with only two parts and make it dynamic, but some quick direction from Miff led to the second.
Talking of monsters, my team mate started frame by frame animation on a plant monster of her own design. Talking of the gasser from weeks ago, we talked about having it a s a fly, so after playing with body shapes and getting critique from the group...



We settled on this design, the hands were preferred, I'll animate this asap. Though it is now occuring to me that the hands are such a small feature. Using a 3DS, we also played with its sound generating capabilities, which is yielding great results at a fast pace. The overbooked sound room at uni no longer needs to be used!

We had some strong words with our team mate, who has started producing acceptable work, his backgrounds are looking much better. I'm to work now on assets, monster animations, painting up the sprites and doing more polished animations.
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Interchange- Fashion Design, Creative Writing and Screenprinting

Interchange, a two day period where we get to try new things.



My first day was spent doing Fashion, however I was an hour late as some of the emails gave the wrong time, so I missed a lot of the illustrative content, which was my main reason fo going, and sadly, I couldn't pick up in five minutes what was taught in an hour, but we watched runway shows, were told about basic fashion illustration proportions and got to design and draw our own outfits, I misunderstood what we supposed to be doing whilst watching as I was late.



We were meant to have rendered materials and sketched what we saw quickly. I did really enjoy the process, its just such a shame I couldn't perform as well as I wanted to having missed a lot of content. However, this is something I have an interest in and nothing is stopping me exploring, sketching and designing clothes and doing this activity myself.

We were then told to choose an element of fire, water, earth or wing and do an illustrative fashion portrait, I picked water/wind, this might be something I explore digitally over summer soon.



We then got given a lot of calico, and had to craft outfits out of via pinning, cutting, folding and painting.


The idea was to co operate with other members from other courses and all smother the calico in inks and paint. However, I was the only one in my group happy to work, so as I used ink, my team mates sat and chat, so ours really didn't looked finished, I should have really stepped my game up here.

Whilst the overall experience really didn't go too well and I'm not happy with any of the work produced, I have been given some insight into another world, way of working and topic that I'd like to explore and practice further. Im really interested in fashion and costume design and loved all the work that we were shown from these companies, I'd love to design expressive characters with elaborate costumes, so this should definetly be used as a starting point for personal practice.

The next day, I partook in a Creative Writing workshop, my background a strong literary one. We practiced through word blurts/sprints- writing as many words as possible in two minutes, our journey that day to the workshop and evoking physical sensations in our writing. It was pleasant to return to writing, and there was much information on writing and developing characters and knowing their flaws and weaknesses as well as the strong link between narrative and character, something I care deeply about.

My fnial workshop was a smidge of fine art, creating a sign with screen printed words. Writing down a load of random phrases, I picked something autobiographical before we as a group walked around with our signs as a form of performance art.




Some pictures of myself and others with our signs, I of course look like a complete derp. Muchos Apologies.





 Overall, whilst the work produced wasn't anything incredible, it was wonderful to experience something new at university, and I'd like to practice characterisation in writing, to inform my art as well as fashion design to do the same.
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Game Jam Collab- Week 5


This week was the second week of our Easter Break, and regrettably, not a lot of progress was made.
I sketched out a character movement sheet, playing with the idea of the mask floating away from our character and the size of the necklace, we decided to opt for teeth.


Thinking more about walk cycles and a running animation, we looked at a variety of walk and jump cycles to take inspiration from, each belongs to respective artists.









The sort of "Naruto-run" we liked as the long sleeves could be billowing behind to create a less static animation. Now, we've been struggling with one of our team members since the project has started and we've tried everything to get him to work by allocating jobs he seemed passionate and eager to do, key frames being one of them but he opted that of this as well. This won't wash. And we're having and have had to pick up his slack the entirety of the way through, but we'll see how this continues, not too much has been worked on this week so this isn't too bad.

Having volunteered at the NGF, having met many wonderful people and been invited to Norfolk Indie meetups, I also began to develop some monster silhouettes. The top left creature was well received and we're thinking of blending the mimic monster in with this, it hiding as a flower only to emerge as a monster.



Gotta pick up the slack from this week and really must start on production of animations and characters in game.
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