Tim makes art

The ramblings of an illustrator and game developer

Tag: Black Feather Forest

  • Week 93/94 – Unwinding and maintenance

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.

    Week 93 had a late start due to Kingsday, a dutch national holiday. On wednesday I had a call with Hubbub to plan out all the features we want to put in the next Home Rule beta (including a better name for the project), and on thursday I had a call with a potential new client, an illustration rushjob.

    I spent the rest of the week doing administration and updating my portfolio. Google’s new policy is to give priority in their search results to sites that are mobile-friendly, so I dove into the world of responsive design and media queries to make my portfolio site adapt to all kinds of resolutions. It was a nightmare of weird glitches and quirks but it works now!

    Last week also started out mellow because of the national war remembrance days. I made a little character animation for the folks at mindbreaker games who are working hard on their demo. It was nice to open After Effects after a long time and animate a little something using the latest version of the DUIK plugin, which is UHH-MAZING. Highly recommended if you do a lot of character animation.

    Later in the week I finally sat down and upgraded Black Feather Forest to the latest version of the game engine. Miraculously nothing broke! There were a few weird thinhgs in transitioning from Unity 4 to 5 while simultaneously updating two plugins, but I managed to solve 90% of them in an afternoon.

    I’m itching to continue developing Black Feather Forest. I realized a few weeks ago that it’s been a year since I started working on it. And I think almost half a year since I stopped development to rethink a few aspects. That stung, so I’m determined to carry on with it in the next few months. A Kickstarter may be inevitable.

    But first Reconquista! I started that project up at the end of the week to add a few features and get it ready to launch. I expect that will happen in the next few weeks. The game is practically done, I just need to figure out one thing and then I can push it out the door. It makes no sense to leave it lying around for much longer.

    Next week: new dailies and the kickoff of the third phase of Home Rule.

  • Week 74

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Week 73 wasn’t that notheworthy. I mostly worked at my parttime job and caught up on games and tv shows.

    Last week I drew a new Off-Stage page of course, and I spent some time re-wwriting the plot for Black Feather Forest. I believe I’ve told you that I came up with s handful of new angles, and I’ve been trying to write those out into full summaries. Coincidentally the podcast Stuff You Should Know did an episode on the phenomenon one of the new storylines is based on, so that added some motivation to the process.

    Other than that I’ve been emailing some more, trying to score new leads. And I engaged in a game of Subterfuge with the guys at Game Oven. It’s a really nice take on Neptune’s Pride.

    Next week: Christmas.

  • Week 72

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week started off well with getting hired for a part-time job. It’s enough to cover the rent each month and it only takes three mornings a week, so by noon I can be back behind Photoshop. I’d like to do more but for now this is okay, it’s not a well-off market out there it seems.

    The rest of the day and into tuesday I worked on a new Off-Stage page as usual.

    In the meantime I emailed another potential Black Feather Forest publisher on the recommendation of a friend, and this at least was the first one that wasn’t full/unavailable yet. I’ve been brainstorming story ideas for them and I managed to come up with five or six alternate angles to the second half of the game that are exciting me more than the original story draft, so I’m looking forward to writing those out.

    On wednesday I went by the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch and caught up with some industry friend. I should really hang out with them more.

    Thursday was filled up with Sinterklaas crafts, making cardboard constructions, a nice change of pace from the digital world.

    On friday I booted up the Trusted Soil adventure game project again and implemented and linked up all the rooms that we had in the previous version, so you can walk around all the locations again. It’s a bit of a mechanical task, porting old code and going through the same motions again and again, but the result is fun to click around in.

    On saturday I returned to an old favorite of mine, audio production. I was overdue to do a voiceover for a friend’s game trailer, and while I was at it I recorded the first episode of a new podcast I’m thinking of starting. Due to the traffic noise outside my window (even when it is closed), I had to set up my recording studio in the bathroom (and leave the light off otherwise the air purification fan would kick in…)

    On sunday we celebrated the Sinterklaas holiday with my family. It was very gezellig. (check out my construction below)

    Next week: getting up at dawn to do a job!

  • Week 66

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week was a bit disappointing. I did get the BlaFF storyline plotted out fully in Twine, which was great because it gave me an instant visual overview of which parts were too linear and which had too much going on at once. I added one location and everything feels better balanced now. The added bonus is that I now have an accurate count of all the clues you can collect during the game and where they are referenced. I was afraid I had planned for too many, but the total number came up short of the space I had reserved for it, so that’s good, I can pad some things out and add more info to find.

    twine

    But then, bad news. Indie Fund reviewed my submission and decided that it didn’t quite fit with what they were looking for in their portfolio. I hadn’t expected much but it was still disappointing. The next day I heard back from Double Fine too – they really liked the game, but with two guys manning their publishing department part-time and three projects on their hands already they didn’t have space on their docket, but it was still nice to hear. I’ve got a few more emails out, so we’ll see how that goes in the coming weeks.

    Mostly it shook me awake to the fact that the core game needs work. I’ve been caught up in polishing what I essentially made in one month, but it needs new features. I’ve just been afraid to break the whole thing open again. But it has to be done. I got some good tips from people that played the demo, some of which I had already thought of myself, so it’s time to put stuff like that in and make the game match up with the promise.

    The only problem is I don’t have much leeway to spend time on it right now. I’d love to, but life costs money, and making games is not exactly a quick return-of-investment. So I decided to pivot back to illustration for a while. I could do a Kickstarter for BlaFF, but setting that up would take me another month, and there’s no guarantee that it will work out, especially in the current sour climate in the games industry. I needed to step away from all that anxiety and get back to what I know I can do well: drawing. (I have more thoughts on this that I’ll put in a seperate blogpost.)

    But for now I’m good doing illustration. I got two emails recently for interesting and substantial projects. They’re both international, so it’s also a new challenge in figuring out how to process that in my administration. And if you’re reading this and have a nice assignment for me: I’m available for hire!

    next week: drawing drawing drawing.

  • Week 65

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Another week of battling the flu, though by the end of the week I conquered it and got back to work.

    On wednesday I dragged myself out the door to have lunch with Richard Ram about him possibly doing the audio for Black Feather Forest. Richard is a cool guy and I think we were on the same page regarding what the soundtrack should be, and we were even wearing the same shirt, so clearly he is a man of taste. So I think we could work together well when the time comes to get started on the audio, somewhere around the end of the year. Richard is currently still working on the audio for Penarium, made by my friends over at Self Made Miracle.

    Safely back in my quarantine zone I got to work on the proposal for the possible investor. Luckily I had a design document ready that I only needed to strip some irrelevant parts out of, and I had a solid demo, so all I needed was one bugfix and a rough estimation of the budget. I think I kept it pretty reasonable, so we’ll see how it goes once they get back to me.

    Once I felt good enough to do some real work again I drew a few cartoons for dutch news site Fresh. They had an open call for illustrators and they liked my work so from now on I’ll be drawing some news-related spot illustration for them every week. You can check that out here (if you’re dutch).

    I also tinkered with different materials for my sprites in BlaFF following a suggestion on the Adventure Creator forum. It allows me to tint my characters, which will be useful in later scenes where it’s dark or where there are hard shadows that the characters travel through. The effect is subtle but I like it. I might hit up SpriteLamp at a later stage to really make the lighting dynamic.

    spriteshading

    I’ve taken to the abbreviation BlaFF now, as BFF reminded me too much of, well, the term BFF, and having the ‘la’ in there makes it sound more like the full title – but maybe like you were slurring it ha. What do you think?

    Inbetween I also made good progress in Alien Isolation, and I checked out A Golden Wake by Grundislav Games, a cool retro adventure game that pushes my 1920’s-loving button pretty hard.

    Next week: plotting out the plot, one scene at a time, in Twine.

  • A former drug addict, a priest and an investor walk into a games expo…

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

    INDIGO, the games expo put on by the Dutch Game Garden, was pretty intense this year. 32 local devs gathered on the spaceous ninth floor of music palace TivoliVredenburg for two days to showcase their games in development. I was there too with Black Feather Forest.

    I saw some familiar faces, some fresh new ones, and talked to a ton of people. Seeing visitors take the time to play through the entire demo and most of them raving about it afterwards was a really great experience, and a much needed refreshment after the past few weeks. Thank you to everyone who came out and stopped by! My parents, uncle and some good friends included. Also dinner with my Game Oven friends was a good time, and my booth neighbours from Wolfdog Interactive kept me going through the long hours. And a special shout-out to Benjamin who came to help me out on friday evening after work when my legs had turned to jelly. You rock dude!

    It’s hard to describe all the moments and conversations from those two days, but I wanted to highlight a few that really stood out.

    As a kid I used to read Power Unlimited, the biggest games magazine in the Netherlands. Of course like any publication it’s run by normal people, but having looked up at these guys in my teens it felt pretty special to have them stand in front of my booth checking out my game and following me on twitter now. Check that off my bucket list.

    Speaking of nostalgia, the memories left behind by the game Broken Sword are what compelled me to start making my own games, and then all of a sudden I run into a programmer from Revolution Software, and a dutch one at that, on the show floor. It was really cool to meet Joost and exchange adventure gaming stories.

    Near the end of the VIP night on thursday an older man came up to me. He started on the demo as I explained what the game was about, then he turned to me and asked me why I cared so much about this particular true story. From there we got caught up in a passionate exchange of ideas, where he revealed that he was a recovered stock-broker-turned-drug-addict who just started learning about computers three days ago. After getting clean he had set out on a quest to learn about himself, and had become a very joie-de-vivre carpe-diem kind of guy. He wasn’t even on the guest list that night, he had just wandered in and was having a blast talking to people. We spoke for about half an hour and at the end shook each other’s hand with a well-meaning I haven’t experienced in a long time. Like we were both genuinely excited to see the other enjoying life, and wishing eachother well.

    The second day of the expo was also punctuated by an unexpected meeting. 5 minutes before the end of the show a man dressed in a priest’s garb came up to me. I recognized him as Roderick Vonhögen, also known as the podcast priest. He hadn’t played the demo yet but had read all about the project on my website before coming here and went on to tell me how incredibly cool he thought it was. He was even familiar with The Walking Dead games, which was perhaps even more of a surprise. It was super cool to have had a chance to talk with him before packing up and heading off, and I took his encouragement to do a Kickstarter and get on Steam to heart.

    I’d been on the fence about Kickstarter for a while, but after I left the hubbub of INDIGO behind that night and checked my email on the bus home I saw that perhaps a Kickstarter was not even going to be necessary…knock on wood. More info on that very exciting email soon.

    All in all INDIGO was a great succes and I want to thank the Dutch Game Garden for letting me be a part of it.

  • NOPE

    Doing concept art and color thumbnails for new Black Feather Forest locations this week. Looking forward to building this scene.

  • Week 59

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    Last week started off right: I got a job offer the friday before (for a freelance project), and we went to have lunch and talk it over. It went well I think, we’ll see what comes of it when everything is sorted out.

    On wednesday I showed Black Feather Forest at the Dutch Game Garden networking lunch, to positive reactions. The people that played loved how it looked and played the demo to the end, so that’s good. I also met the good people from Wispfire who are working on a cool narrative adventure game too.

    2014-09-03 11.58.49

    Following the lunch I fixed a few bugs I noticed (a restart button isn’t very useful if it doesn’t reset your progress on the map), and refined the cursor system based on an interesting observation made by Game Oven‘s Adriaan. Now I just need to hack Adventure Creator a bit so it actually works too.

    On thursday I pulled out my ol’ Yeti mic to do a voiceacting test for the game a friend of mine on the AC forums is making. It was fun to do, especially because it’s a kind of Monkey Island comedy game so the voices can be very expressive.

    I am planning to make a trailer for Black Feather Forest soon so this was a nice reminder that I could probably do the voiceover for that myself. Besides that I also did some illustrations for a calendar that’s coming out in a few months.

    Then the week closed out with some good news: Black Feather Forest was selected to be part of the INDIGO showcase put on by the Dutch Game Garden during the Dutch Film Festival. It sounds like a complicated construction, but what it boils down to is that I’ll be showing the demo at the top floor of the new TivoliVredenburg music venue in the center of Utrecht at the end of this month. Exciting times! Another things I can cross off my bucket list. I’ve exhibited at game shows before but never with my own game.

    Next week: how to cut a trailer for a game that’s only about 15% done.

  • Week 56

    This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.

    A strange week in indie land.

    At the start of last week I was moved by Dom2D’s post about the state of his life. I admire Dominique‘s artistry and optimism, so it’s not great to see he struggles with things. I can identify with a good number of his sentiments from various periods in my life, about making ends meet and feeling like an imposter sometimes, which I wrote about before. But it was heartwarming to see all the nice responses he got. I hope he’ll feel better at the new studio he’s working at now.

    Further good vibes were obtained at the Idle Forums, were responses to Black Feather Forest were positive, and some great constructive feedback was given in terms of writing and character development. I was stuck in a rut a little bit, because once you have a project that shows promise it’s sometimes hard to decide in which way to proceed with it. Especially in games there are so many variables, and everyone has a preference for a different thing. But discussing the narrative got me going again.

    During the week I edited some dialogue, converted each existing scene to a new workflow method that solved a few strange bugs, and I reworked the interaction icons. I’m ashamed to admit it but I completely overlooked those when polishing up the demo, I was so focused on other things I forgot they were still using the low-res default icons supplied by Adventure Creator.

    gui

    I was quite pleased, then over the weekend a shitstorm broke out. It was like everyone had to get their bad vibes out at the same time. Zoe Quinn, Phil Fish, Rami Ismail, they all got mangled on the social media. A delegation also decided to hate on me for even trying to tell a story a subject more grounded in reality than your average videogame, which shook me up pretty bad on Sunday. I wish people wouldn’t make assumptions based on a headline and a cursory glance at my blog, I’ve done my research.

    Anyway, new week, fresh vibes.

    Next week: fresh vibes.

  • Week 55

    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 creator.

    Last week I took some time to decompress after the deadline. I pulled up my Steam backlog and finished The Wolf Among Us (so good), caught up with Team Fortress 2 and played the shit out of State of Decay Breakdown. I loved State of Decay but the story in the main campaign had me beat at some point. My main dude kept dying and critical missions failed. Breakdown lets go of all that and just lets you build a home base somewhere and then survive infinitely. Unlike for instance DayZ, they’re very good at creating narrative around these random characters, by generating missions where they get lost or spot a special zombie. It’s really fun to play, even though the AI is sometimes absurd.

    I also binged on The Killing’s final season. That show has also been an inspiration in how Black Feather Forest came to be, and I’m glad to have more of it, even if it is just 6 more episodes.

    Somewhere along the week I took a look at the intro of my game, where you are introduced to the main characters, and went to rewrite it. I realized it was the only conversation free of player choices, so I made it a bit more engaging and flavorful.

    On twitter I saw Fork Parker tweet an image of someone who had reimagined a scene from True Detective as a Lucasarts adventure game. It looked awesome, and I hope the people who crave that to be real can find some satisfaction in my game when it comes out. The creator, Lazerhorse aka Arthur Doyle, was even Canadian himself, a nice coincidence.

    Next week: some actual work???

  • Week 54

    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 creator.

    Last week was the final week of the second development period for Black Feather Forest, its goal being to polish up the demo to submit to an event here in Holland. I’m glad to report it was succesful, which means you can play the new version right here!

    Content-wise not a lot has changed; I’ve mostly fixed bugs, edited dialogue here and there and added a few of the planned features to the GUI. Notably the Dossier is nicer to look at, and the dialogue UI should play nicely on all resolutions now. Initally I wanted to also add some new locations, but with the time I had I decided it was better to make the existing content solid before moving on to new challenges. And the past week left me no other option when a handful of game-breaking bugs came to light!

    being a game developer is sometimes a bit like being an explorer, because you often see really weird things that nobody has ever seen before. Especially when there are several plugins working together in ways you have no idea about.

    Things like a conversation with an NPC only triggering if it was the first location you visited in the game. Or menus that you explicitely disabled popping up again if you press the skip button at the wrong time. Colliders rotating on the X-axis when a character turned on the Y-axis. Cutscenes that only run half of their actions. Z-buffers that sort differently between engine and build. Every day is a new adventure.

    Luckily both of these plugins are made by devs that really understand how to run good and swift tech support. So thanks Chris and Tony.

    So now that the demo is ‘done’ I can comfortably start adding new content. Basically starting the production towards the final product.

    And finally, there is also a matching url now: www.blackfeatherforest.com

    Next week: the tale of how I’m probably going to break all of the things by upgrading the software.

    If you have other topics you’d like to hear about in a future blogpost, let me know in the comments.

  • Week 53

    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 creator.

    Last week I got some great feedback on the Black Feather Forest demo. Articles ended up on warpdoor,  indiegames.com, rockpapershotgun, badogames, indiegamemag, and I even got a call from Canadian radio! I’ll be on their morning show later today.

    When you’re working on a thing in isolation for a while you start to lose sight of whether it’s any good or not. I hadn’t expected people to get so excited about it yet, so this definitely cements that I’m going to finish this game. Working on it is so satisfying that sometimes I forget I’m not earning any money this way. That will have to be stage two of this campaign.

    Sadly there was a problem with my new internet connection at the new house so I’ve had to subsist off of the wifi of parents, friends, cafe’s the past week. Not having reliable internet is such a burden, and when emails pour in and you have to participate in heated discussions in comment threads that’s a bad position to be in.

    There was a bit of discussion about the influences in the game that led me to de-emphasize some mentions in the script. The people I spoke with were very accomodating and I think we came to a good solution.

    In terms of progress, I’ve been working on a new iteration of the ingame GUI. I’m still having problems hooking a few menus together the way I want to, but at least they look good now. A big issue I had before was that the dialogue GUI didn’t scale well on lower resolutions. I finally sat down and adjusted everything, so now the look is unified and works at any size.

    menu

    Aside from that I’ve been mostly doing polish on existing content, and adding new animations for all the characters to make the whole thing feel more alive.

    Next week: the premiere of the new demo build.

  • Week 52, or Year One

    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 creator.

    It’s hard to fathom that it’s been a year since I started working for myself.

    Said goodbye to my desk job designing games for someone else (honestly it was a sweet job, what was I thinking) and started my own thing.

    I got some assignments pretty quickly, thanks mainly to friends/colleagues putting in a good word, and thus I started incing my way up. I’ve been able to carve out a pretty okay living so far, struggling some months when the work dries up for a bit, but enough to move up to a nice studio apartment with my girlfriend and pay the bills (and jump into a Steam Sale every now and again).

    And now, 52 weeks later, I announced my first solo commercial title! Holy cow I hadn’t even thought of that. When people asked me around week 45 what I was going to do for my ‘anniversary’ I shrugged. Turns out week 52 was pretty special after all, thanks to the fellas at Warpdoor. More on that in next week’s update.

    But for now I want to thank the fine folks that offered their support, good conversations, and/or advice this past year. Some names that come to mind: Jens, Michiel, Adriaan, Bojan, Benjamin, Ilona, Lowen, Anke, Alwin, Niels, Esther, mom and dad, Ralph, Anne, Matt, Chris, and ofcourse you, dear reader.

    Then, presskit! I am perhaps disproportionately excited to have this bit of php code, but if you as a journalist or what have you ever needed any info on my company or my games, the presskit’s the place to be.

    So now, back to the daily grind.

    Before HoT started getting picked up by the media I found myself mostly doing small tasks – a subconcious way to avoid having to deal with the large and nebulous tasks still in the backlog. However it wasn’t without its merits, the demo segments are a lot more polished now. “But,” I thought on tuesday, “what actual new content was added to the game? None!” So I got to it and started doing animations, and made a start on a new scene. Then over the weekend I went on a small vacation with friends, during which the social media coverage really fired up.

    Next week: tales of exciting new improvements to the interface, and great feedback on the demo from cool people.

  • Black Feather Forest update

    Well, cat’s out of the bag – Black Feather Forest appeared on Warpdoor, a curated site for interesting indie games run by smart guys from indiegames.com and killscreen. So if you want to check out what I’ve been (mainly) doing for the past month or two, grab the demo and let me know what you think.

    The demo is a rough early version with some features missing or partly implemented, but any feedback or suggestions are appreciated; bug reports too, either here or in my email.

    And now seems like a good a time as any to tell you about the website for Black Feather Forest. There’s not a lot there yet but it’s a nice place to go, a sign that it exists for real at least.

    It’s weird when something ends up in the ether outside of your own involvement (I only posted to a forum for feedback), but at the same time it’s somehow reassuring when it gets picked up, that you’re on the right track with what you’re doing. I wasn’t going to drop the demo publically until I polished it up to my satisfaction, coinciding with an upcoming showcase at a festival, but I realize that when you are making things you always want to hold onto it until it is ‘just right’. There’s always something more to polish, to improve, to add, to tweak. So heck, let this be the way that I get over that and let you guys in on what I’m making here. I hope you dig it.

  • Week 51

    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.

    Last week the heat had me beat a little bit, but I came back and did some animation for the opening of my game.

    menu

    This is the title card shot after the intro cinematic. I painted it on tuesday and animated it with all kinds of parallax effects on wednesday. A classic case of ‘make a plan before you do something’, because after I had finished making it in After Effects, it turns out Unity Free cannot play video files (without excessive hacking or plugins). But it was fun to do so I guess time wasn’t completely wasted. I’ll redo it in-engine this week, which should only take a fraction of the time.

    Inbetween on wednesday I jumped through the final hoops to hand off my old apartment, so now that chapter is closed. And thank heavens, all the stuff I had to arrange around that ‘project’ ended up tripling my phone bill this month. Let’s hope the next person enjoys it as much as I did.

    In the meantime I also continued my research into the background of the BFF narrative. Even though the story is completely fictional I still want to accurately represent the cultural and societal factors are that could lead to such events taking place. So I’ve read what is known as ‘the Forsaken Report’, in which the Commission of Inquiry describes real cases in great detail, which has been a fascinating read. I’ve also reached out to some community members and CBC reporters in Prince George, Prince Rupert, and Vancouver, and a cultural expert studying the Northwest to learn more about the heritage of the Haida people.

    At the end of the week I stayed at my parent’s house for two days (came to see them, stayed for the wifi ha), and got to spend some time sitting next to my dad at the kitchen table while we both drew. Check out his facebook page with space age art over here.

    father and son

  • Week 50

    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.

    I know I said I would work on the Fawlty Towers game, but shortly after that I saw a call for submissions from INDIGO, a dutch games convention put on by the Dutch Game Garden, and it is in association with the Dutch Film Festival. So that put a revision on Black Feather Forest at number one on the todo list. Niels once described the script of BFF as being very filmic, so that makes this a good crossover venue to show the game.

    Besides that I set up the new version of Trusted Soil, my graduation project with Anne Bras, in Adventure Game Studio. Having worked with Unity exclusively for a while now had made me forget how easy it is to get something basic up and running in AGS. With a bit of luck I can copy a lot of code from the original demo over to this version.

    Anne and I decided a while ago to make the full version of Trusted Soil (read more about it here) and try to sell it on Steam. We’re doing it in Lucasarts pixel-art style now, and I’m concerning myself full with the programming side. For that reason we attracted Misja van Laatum (artist on Indiana Jones and The Fountain Of Youth) for the backgrounds, and Molly Carroll (recent HKU graduate) to do the animations.

  • 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.

  • Black Feather Forest

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

    logo

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    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!

  • Week 40

    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.

    Things really started coming together on my game this week. I’d been living mostly in a test environment last week where every game element was thrown together in one space, so when I created a proper scene with some nice background art it felt like things were going somewhere.

    Early in the week I did some resolution tests, and uprezzed and tweaked the characters. I was pretty satisfied with the designs I had made but those were still considered placeholder so not nearly high enough resolution to use in the game, so I had to repaint the edges to tighten things up.

    On thursday I sketched out the rest of the locations, and finally got some dialogue in the game so it actually started to feel like a game. It was time to make build 0.2. I also wrote a post explaining deltaTime for some guys on the Idle Forums, an elusive and abstract concept in programming.

    On friday I had lunch with Niels ‘t Hooft to catch up and share our current projects. It’s great to chat with someone who shares your passion for a certain thing. After that I squashed some bugs and tightened up some UI elements then left everything be for the Kingsday holiday weekend.

  • Week 39

    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.

    It’s strange how much you can disappear into a hole when you’re deep in gamedev. I’ve been working on it all week, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’m having fun.

    Even butting up against a problem that grinds things to a halt was fun because such a situation promises a mental exercise, pushing my problem-solving skills to the max. Each problem is a puzzle, and in an almost detective-like way, again, you have to put the pieces together.

    So that was thursday, when I spent about an hour lying on the carpet here trying to unite the design that I had with the tools that I had. The days before that I worked a lot on setting up the basic infrastructure of the gameplay mechanics. Talking to people is an important aspect of this game, and so that system needs a lot of thought and effort. It’s not all the way there yet but it’s taking shape.

    The final thing I did this week was work on some idle animations. It’s cool how a few blinks and a head-turn already do a lot to make a character seem alive. I’m looking a lot at Puzzle Agent, or Grickle’s style in general. I’m pretty good at animation but at some point it just becomes such a timesink that I’d rather do things as efficiently as possible. And this is not a case where I have time for tweaking the bounce in a walkcycle – in three weeks I need to have a solid demo to submit for an event. Let’s see if I can make it!

    I realize this post does little to clarify what the actual game is, and I’m keeping it that way for a little while, so in the meantime have a moodboard.

  • Week 38

    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.

    Woops, almost forgot to write a blogpost about last week, that’s how absorbed I’ve been in my work. That must be a good sign, right?

    Since I’ve gone indie I’ve been looking for a project that could get me genuinely excited to work on it every day, and I think I finally found it. Not that I disliked what I did inbetween but I had to pass through a Valley Of The Shadows type deal I think where everything felt derivative or lacking zest. Sometimes I still feel a pang of worry about that but then I remind myself I don’t have time for that nonsense because game needs to be made, and I get back to work.

    And so far I’m running on schedule very nicely. Instead of planning out the entire project in advance and potentially overwhelming myself I’ve taken to planning out just the month up ahead, setting milestones every friday and generally living from day to day, and it’s working out well. I have a folder with a fuckton of research into style, history, context, culture, mythology and whatnot, a bunch of concept art and an almost entirely fleshed-out story. And even a fancy parallax scrolling prototype. Once I’m done typing this I’m moving on to prototypting the dialogue system.

    I’m not ready to share too much info about this project yet, that will happen soon, and I plan to blog more about the development here in the future, but if you run into me in real life feel free to ask and I’ll talk your ear off about it.

  • Twine

    Got into Twine today to write and map out the story for the next game I’m working on and it’s been a delightful experience, very easy to write branching dialogue and test it right away, plus it’s similar to Playmaker, so implementation in Unity will be a breeze.

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