CWG: Things I've never had to think about

When I started working on games I had all these crazy projects lined up.

A chapterized FPS made in UDK.

A sidescrolling cowboy based castlevania like game.

A bird poopin on people...

Basically I had a lot of intent and zero skill in the making of these projects, so I learned.  I learned how to plan out a game, and to organize all my thoughts in physical form and especially to try and think within your limits.  So I continued to downsize until I came around with CWG.  I currently have cards taped all over my living room wall for visualization purposes.  Does it help?  No... not really...  But at least it did something I didn't really expect.

I can see the scope, and the damned HUGE amount of work it takes to make a game.  I had organized all the things I needed to get done into three major categories; Art, Sound, Code.  I broke those down further: Art = animation/static, Code = movement/attack/defend etc etc.

Hell if the thing that took me completely by surprise is all the smaller things like effects, or the pure number of sounds that need to be made, and all kinds of other small things.

In actuality its the effects that are kicking my butt.  I spent the day working out how I wanted the muzzle flash to look like.  The MUZZLE FLASH!

Look how small they are!

Things are freakin tiny and they took a few HOURS (5ish) to make look the way I wanted them too.  WHAT THE HELL!?

Enough yelling though.  

Seriously when planning out your game you really need to put a lot of thought into your work flow and priorities.  I currently have only a couple effects left to do (air and ground explosions), and to finish animating the Rambo sheep I talked about in the last post.

Than its on to all the menu screens and such, I still have to make a custom font for this game...  I think at least.

Due to lack of pictures I will instead pimp out a new chiptune CD I have been listening to while I work.  Give it a listen, and if you really like it, support the guy, its really good stuff!

Kubbi-Sleet: http://kubbi.bandcamp.com/album/sleet

Peace for now.

#DontMessWithTheHeff

*NEWS*

We have a domain!  www.NoDiceGames.com  

So far its just a splash as we get an initial Wordpress installed onto the site but it should be up shortly!

Secondly, my new bro-grammer(finally found one!) is currently re-building all of CWG in Unity.  Such sweetness!  That means when the site is up you should be able to play CWG in browser off of our site!  So excite.

CWG: How to throw out an asset

Its been a bit since my last post, no excuses I just have been working.

While keeping my mind on the Cows With Guns project I worked and toiled away finishing up the last enemy in the spawn sequence.  The Sumo sheep!

He was pretty cool, did what the other sheep didn't and ran across the field to attack you, and he ate up all your shots!  Coming only once every hundred spawn waves was good too, so I treated him like a mini-boss of sorts.

 Damn if he didn't make my cut about a month ago...  I sketched this mofo at least a dozen times, animated him once even and when I really started to think about it, the Sumo just didn't match the purpose, or even the ridiculous theme I was going for.  Something needed to be done immediately...

I tried to redesign him a couple times each got worse and worse.












At this point I just threw him out and built up a guideline of what purpose I wanted him to serve.  It was pretty infuriating but the new result came out much better than I anticipated.

When I realized I was aiming to make a mini-boss I decided he needed to guide the player into the boss fight in at least one way.  Thus he is now the enemy who teaches you about telegraphed attacks (A small animation before a strike to help identify patterns.  ex. You pulling your arm back to punch someone is a telegraph).  So I needed him to have a ranged attack he could telegraph, how about another big machine gun!  Only one isn't good enough anyways!  So I started to draw up some ideas and the Rambo sheep was born!

This is only a WIP at the moment but I am excited to finish him up and get him animated.  Being way more readable and goofy (Muscle sheep with a grudge and a big fucking knife!) he ties in with everything I want him to do for the player.

Till next time.
#DontMessWithTheHeff

CWG: Run Heff Run!

So I finished up with Heff today.  She's fully animooted and slapped into CWG.  Its a small post tonight but I am tired and want to do a more extensive post on motivation and keeping myself on track.  Peace ya'll.

PS - Stupid Flash doesent know how to export a GIF nicely....

PSS - And my test runs for the lulz
PSSS - Wow did these ever break...  If your having issues viewing them, open in their own element.  Works        for me!

CWG: Heff 3000 & SHINY NEW GUN!

So I got mad at trying to make pixelate backgrounds for CWG and after a one sided yelling match I started playing with Flash. BOOM Heff 3000, final design/color, not final iteration. Have to re-draw her at least once more to re-orient her arms to the gun being infront of her now.

In-Game:

Blown-up:

Animation skeleton holding complete gun & crazy face to make me laugh....:

Bye for now! And I will have animations/backgrounds done pretty soon I think.

CWG: Heff got a makeover

So here it is after getting some help from another pixel pusher over on www.TIGsource.com

He said that I was creating too big of a palette, that when dealing with pixels, less is more.

So here is the original.

She has a LOT of colors, approx 13.

And here is the redux:

Actual size

The new Heff only uses 6 colours, and much more design focused than the previous.

I like it more, do you? Soundoff!

CWG: Color palette battle....

So here I was just sitting around staring at my project when I get bitch slapped by the realization that my game does NOT have any color co-ordination what-so-ever.

So today, as I stood around at work, I tried to figure out color theory on my own; didn't make it very far... but my upstairs neighbour, who is a phenomenal artist (I'll likely post his work sometime in the future :P), took some time out of his evening to talk with me about color theory; that got me much further.

Here's what my game looks like now...

Yeah it breaks the boundaries of my blog, wanna fight about it? The important parts are in focus anyway.

And I will be using this color palette to go back over all the assets, even re-creating some here and there, to unify the entire look of Cows With Guns!

What do you guys think of the new palette? I still feel like I am missing something...

Anyways, special thanks to Simon! I'll likely be getting your help much more in the future.

Simon Says: Goon and friends

Been drawing up the enemies that you kill as you play Simon Says :P

Its not much of a post due to the lack of the game progress(there is none thanks to not being able to figure out both how to get "Simon" to work, NOR the wave spawner! GROAR!) but its some sketching.


Peace for now!