#indiegamedev
Top o’ the blog post to you. My name is Cassie Murphy. I’m an illustrator based in Seattle, and the lead artist for Trundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wifi-lactery. I draw every glowing, drippy, spindly, nubby, blocky, undulating, craggy, Non-Newtonian Thing in this game.
Though this is my first game studio experience, this isn’t my first video game. That distinction goes to a one-button game called Dinglefling, wherein you must release a family of dingleberries from a cat’s sit-upon to land on items in a room. It was a vague realization that I wanted to do 2D game art. When I moved to Seattle, I met some folks that dug my art style, and the amorphous dream that spurred me to move here began to take shape at Spite House.
SWITCHING GEARS
During life in Virginia, my art developed a one-note style and subject matter: Cute. Fat. Cats. My cat paintings got me featured on Animal Planet’s “CATS 101”,Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, HBO’s Game of Thrones Compendium, the Critics’ Choice Awards, E! Online, BuzzFeed, Nerdist, Tor.com, Threadless, TeeFury, Geek and Sundry and Cat Fancy, to name a lot. I painted hundreds of client cat commissions and slung prints at conventions across the Eastern seaboard.
After 8 years of pun-based feline success it began to feel like work (in a bad way) and I gave up the ghost. Er, the cats. To draw ghosts instead.
TRUNDSETTER
(The puns die with me.)
Working on a team like this is a creative’s fever dream. Our SoDo warehouse workspace buzzes with the urgent energy of invention and/or the trillest (only) trap in the building.
It is also the most challenged I’ve ever felt in my professional life. I’ve never needed to work on a team to create cartoons before, let alone whilst meticulously ensuring the art fits not only the lore we’re weaving, but also within the technical bounds of Spine and Unity. The re-work process is a hard reality of team-based art-making; something I’m mitigating through simpler sketches and real-time concepting. Learning, when done right, is never comfortable.
Being the lead artist affords me a surprising measure of creative control over the project as a whole. It feels like pressure, but also gives the satisfying illusion of power in this monster of a process. My favorite thing to do is slip things into my art that inspire a change in the story or gameplay: faces in the canyon walls, ghost expressions conveying their motivations, lava lamp-like innards of massive Wi-Fi towers. Sometimes a design goes over like a lead balloon (R.I.P. wispy skeleton-robot concept). Other times I design a character or environment that elicits rare, sweet guffaws from the lovable gruffians I work with.
THE CANYON
We’re in the final stretch of developing the canyon, which sets the template for future biomes, so I’m hoping we worked out all the kinks. The main kink = my making the dimensions and format of each asset work correctly in-game (see Ray’s post). It’s a continual learning process between the dev and myself to make the pieces of our cartoon world fit together. For example, the canyon walls shouldn’t follow one-point perspective as I would like to draw it, but rather need a flat bottom so as not to float off the ground. Unity takes care of the perspective. Or breaks it. Unity takes care of and breaks a lot (visually), I’m learning.
I love a challenge. Needless to say – and saying it anyway – I’m pouring my heart into this game, and I can’t wait to show you more. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Cassie
Hey there! I’m Soren Laulainen, composer and sound designer for TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery. After spending a little over a decade scoring films and webisodes, this is my first foray into interactive music – which, to me, continues to be a relatively nascent and unexplored territory.
TRUNDL.buddy is a deliberately small project with high ambitions, designed small so that the inevitable scope creep doesn’t capsize us. An exercise in creative opportunities borne from constraints. A game which certainly won’t fully realize every creative goal I would love to accomplish – immersion! synesthesia! synchronicity! – but might break new ground all the same.
Finding the “musical soul” of the game is an exciting process. Our character begins life as mindless, expressionless robot, but those eyes are brimming with idiotic bliss: the impulse to just drive imbues him with a sort of dogged enthusiasm in spite of his empty mind. And what better way to capture both a lack and extreme intensity of emotion than with Vocaloids?
Vocaloids are synthetic pop singers who have become very popular in Japan. You write lyrics and melodies and the Vocaloid software synthesizes vocals automatically. I’ll be using them for the main theme in TRUNDL.buddy, which we return to a few times throughout the game. My goal is to have them convey parts of the narrative and adapt to various choices the player makes throughout the game. Here’s one of my first music sketches with them.
Soren Laulainen
Music Composer and Sound Designer
sorenlaulainen.com
So we’re close enough to the end of needing art assets for the canyon biome that I get to really flesh out my concept for the swamp biome. I want this level to be a complete departure from the visuals of the canyon (warm oranges, rocky terrain, dry dust). I intend for everything to look cool in temperature, jewel-toned, ethereal, and even drippier than usual. As in the canyon, I’m drawing each swamp tree to stand parallel to the viewer as they whip past. Some will be in shadow and others more detailed as they stick out into the light. I hope you love it (rough as it is), and I can’t wait to share more as the team puts it into motion!
Cheers,
Cassie
I’ve been on contract with SPITE HOUSE to develop Trundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery for a little over a month now, and one of the biggest issues is 2d art in 3d space. The whole team has wrestled it enough to share some initial observations. If you’re a dev, you might find them useful. Preface: we’re using Unity as our engine, but you might find these concepts helpful in others.
SHADERS AND MATERIALS ARE A PAIN IN 2D ART
Do your research if you plan to pull any fancy lighting, material or shader tricks with your 2d art! Anything that doesn’t use the standard sprite shader has given us trouble with z-fighting and lighting, and we’ve had to do a bit of custom shader work to overcome this. Be wary!
USE QUADS
This is mostly if you want to be able to do lighting or repeat textures, but quads (at least in Unity) are built to be 1x1 units, allowing you to resize and position things with certain accuracy. For example, our grid needs to be defined by how many spaces it contains, as well as the size of the spaces themselves. Quads let us make quick and easy calculations.
LAYER YOUR OBJECTS
Achieving the illusion of depth and height is very difficult with 2d art, but we can fake it by layering our objects on the distance axis. This lets us create rough canyon walls with varying details and depth without having to worry about stretching art across a side-lining quad.
USE CAUTION WHEN DRAWING PERSPECTIVE
As long as most of your art is drawn assuming the camera will point directly at it, you can pull off perspective and depth pretty easily. But in some cases you’ll want to draw perspective into your art, as seen in our canyon walls. Plastering them to a quad lining the edge of our road made things look very flat and lose detail, especially at a shear perspective. We ended up drawing our perspective into the art itself, then facing them directly to camera. This allowed us to retain detail while varying quad placement along the horizontal axis to craft interesting “geometry.”
I’m sure there are many solutions to problems like these when using 2d art in 3d space, so don’t take my word as law; you might find your own solutions! I hope this will make at least some of you aware of the challenges and considerations you’ll have to make with this approach.
Ray Grice
Designer and Developer
raymondjohngrice.com
Happy #WishlistWednesday!
Take a look at one of the mechanics our JRPG has where you can power up your abilities by repeating a sequence. Show me your move!
Wishlist and try the demo here!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/786510/Oracle_of_Forgotten_Testament/
#indiegame #gamedev #JRPG #touhouproject
Happy weekend and happy #ScreenshotSaturday, everyone!
I’ve decided to put the beta version of Three Mazeketeers into the public! Join the adventure of three heroines in another world on our Itchio, GameJolt, or Steam!
Itch.io:https://dragonemperors.itch.io/the-three-mazeketeers
GameJolt:https://gamejolt.com/games/3Mazeketeers/655127
Wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1889370/Three_Mazeketeers/
Stuff I’d like to talk about Lastone: Behind the Choice
About the dilemma ‘easy mode and skip button’.
… It is one of my concerns as a developer to see someone not enjoying the game we’ve developed. But, the satisfaction it brought for the players when they finally solved the puzzle and read the story of their character, reminded me of the purpose of this game. We deliver the story and the puzzle as a whole package. Without the puzzle, it will just be a linear visual novel reminding you how changes might happen instantly. And, without the stories, it will be no different than the first version of this game, which maybe some of you remember as Cengkeh Batu. Together, they create a new experience which is this game, where you rack your brains on the puzzle section and be rewarded with stories to read and to feel. …
See more: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1844990/view/3139576859094806999
Check the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1844990/Lastone_Behind_the_Choice/
A girl fell down through a portal into an unknown apocalyptic world. Bewildered still, something approached her and said to her, “you are here amongst the chosen ones. I will give you the power to do what you need. Use it well.”
Stay tuned