Hedgeblog

The ramblings of illustrator and game developer Hedgefield

Month: May 2014

  • Week 44

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    A tumultuous week! On monday I got to view an apartment in Utrecht with my girlfriend, and we decided to pull the trigger on it right that morning. So that means moving soon! A lot to think about, but aside from the inherent boon of being together I’ll also be closer to the dutch games industry hotspot.

    On tuesday Bounden was released to much fanfare. It’s incredible that the game came together with no delays or major problems and became something really special. I’m glad to have been a part of it.

    The rest of the week I worked on some freelance drawing assignments, posted about Black Feather Forest in a number of places, and dug up some unused Bounden concept art for fans to gawk at.

    I also updated my portfolio, not so much in terms of new projects but mostly the infrastructure. I had “NEW!” ribbons on each fresh project, but those were still scattered across the various pages so it wasn’t real easy to see that stuff at a glimpse. So I added a rotating banners at the top, much like the iTunes Store. And in doing so I broke the lightbox for the images, so I replaced that with something much more lightweight, slick and fast. And you can link directly to certain projects now! I had put in those anchors long ago but they never worked until now. I figured it out!

    And the week closed out with some bad news: Black Feather Forest was not selected for the competition I entered it into. With 60 entries I can totally understand the high-quality and cool games they selected to showcase Dutch gamedev (Bounden is in there! And hooray for Westerado), but it’s still disappointing that the outcome of those weeks of hard work amounts to “Sorry, good luck hey.” But I’ll keep working on it and responses for other places are positive, so that’s motivating.

  • Unseen Bounden

    While I worked on the concept art for Bounden we tried a lot of things. Mainly related to the world- and theme-building. We worked hard to distill all the level ideas down to the best possible ones, the ones that you can see in the game now. But for every ‘world’ that you see in the game, there were like fifteen more designs. Here are some that didn’t make the cut. (click on them for a slideshow with descriptions) :

  • Black Feather Forest

    Time to pull the lid off a project I have been working on for the past month:

    logo

    HoT v0 2014-05-14 19-11-30-64

    BFF is a 2D adventure game inspired by true events and Haida mythology, aswell as things like True Detective, Fargo, Detective Grimoire, Kentucky Route Zero. It brings together many threads of ideas for games I’ve had over the years and ties it together with real-world influences.

    You play as Sofia, a documentary maker, and together with your cameraman Caleb you travel to the town of Augier’s Peak, up in the wilderness of rural Canada, where three people have gone missing recently. You are free to travel around town, where you will meet a handful of inhabitants that all have their own reasons to help you discover what happened – or not. You gather clues by talking to people and combining pieces of evidence and statements to slowly try to figure out who or what is behind all this.

    For now I’ve completed a demo that shows the first few locations of the game and sets up the story and gameplay. With that I hope to generate some interest that could lead into the further development of this title. I’ll keep you guys updated on the progress and share some more insights about the development as I go along. Let me know what you think in the comments.

    dialog concept chardesign moodboard

  • Week 43

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    At the start of this week I had a dream that I ran into an older woman working for a newspaper that had just lost their cartoonist, and I managed to entice her into paying me good money for two cartoons a month. That was a harsh dream to wake up from, ha.

    On monday I worked on the pitch document to accompany the demo of my game. Writing everything down properly and readable for others made things a lot clearer for me too. And it spawned a few new ideas at the same time. I also received some great feedback from Niels ‘t Hooft that made the story stronger with a few small tweaks.

    The rest of the week was basically polish, adding in some low priority things and fixing bugs. It’s funny how no matter if it’s a 3-year projects or a four-week sprint, the ‘last 20% drag’ always occurs, where you slow down on doing the last few minor things.

    When I sat across from Niels in a cafe four weeks ago and said “I want to have a demo ready by the 15th”, I had no idea if I was going to make that deadline. That thursday at noon, I proudly submitted my application. Time to sit back and twiddle my thumbs.

    So I can finally say that for the past month, I have been working on a game called Black Feather Forest. I’ll talk more about that in a following blog post.

    On friday I did some more painting in Mischief, and otherwise mostly decompressed from my gamedev sprint. On saturday I celebrated my birthday by petting some monkeys with my girlfriend.

  • Week 42

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Development on my upcoming game continued this past week. When the demo is done by the end of this week I’ll be able to tell you more about just what the hell I’ve been making.

    On monday and tuesday I worked on the first two scenes of the game, writing the dialogue and setting everything up just right. Apart from a few minor things I was very happy with the outcome. The workflow I had established worked well and allowed for a pretty quick setup of a scene. I also iterated on the story and made it readable to people who knew nothing about the project in preparation for the pitch document I’ll be writing this week.

    On wednesday I set up the next big scene in the game, which went very smoothly. Because I had finished well on time I set aside work that night to play Kentucky Route Zero Act III. Apart from being impressed as always by the visuals and the tone of the narrative, it reminded me that it is okay to write a little more than bare minimum if it is interesting to read through.

    On thursday I applied this newfound insight to finishing the last of the in-game conversations, and it was a doozy.

    I’m very thankful for Dialogue System For Unity, a plugin that made the management of these long branching conversations a lot easier. And most importantly, it integrated with Adventure Creator, which made it top choice over things like Dialoguer or Playmaker.

    I spent the rest of the day customizing the UI and wiring up things like the fast-travel map and the clue system.

    On friday I took a break from development to work on a freelance assignment. I was faced with the challenge of drawing a character in vector, but I’m not good enough with vector tools that I could pull that off in two hours and have it look good too. So I decided to give Mischief another try. I sang its praises before but man it really came through for me this time. I could draw exactly like I would in Photoshop (without all the fancy tricks like clipping masks and blending modes though, so back to basics, time to be a real artist again ha!), but it took the form of infinitely scaleable vectors, ending up with the best of both worlds. I went to buy it right after.

    Saturday night I tinkered with the game’s code a bit and fixed a bunch of bugs. As it usually goes, I was ready to make a new build and then suddenly all kinds of things came to light. But I managed to fix a good few eyesores. On sunday I mostly worked on missing art and more bugfixes.

  • Week 41

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creative.

    Week 41 was a beacon of productivity. My body tried to slow me down on tuesday when I started feeling like I was getting sick, muscle pain and nausea. But I refused to give in and by the next morning after a nice fever dream I was fine again and ready to keep going.

    I worked through most of the graphics I need for the May 15th demo of my game; at least the essential gameplay stuff like characters and backgrounds. I plan to spend the final days of next week filling it up with extra stuff like menu graphics and animations. I got a little ambitious with the size of my textures which resulted in the display drive crashing when the game was running! I think it couldn’t handle all this HEAT. It’s fine now.

    This week will be all about the gameplay programming. I have the parts to make the whole, I just need to plug in a load of dialogue. I already did some inital work on that during last week to set up cameras and triggers and all that, so it helps to have the grunt work out of the way.

    Near the end of the week I also snagged a new freelance job, so at least once I’m done with the demo a little money will be coming in again, that’s a consoling thought.

    Maybe the most thankful job I did this week was planting a forest made up of prefab trees. I wanted the rees in the background to animate, so going with single trees was the best solution, which also reduces strain on the processor since it only needs to load in one tree and duplicate it. Then I wrote a script that offsets each animation so they don’t all sway at once, and voila, a beautiful forest ready to go!