Another month, another update. These past few weeks the game world of FCotW2 has become that much more lively, with the various NPCs settling into their respective locations. Gone are the days of taking a stroll without bumbing into someone interesting. I've also done some animation work and these past few days I've dealt with background polish, scaling and scripting around a complex new location called "Spire of the Gods" that is now properly integrated in the game. That calls for a little dance of joy, doesn't it?
Hola, friends! Wesray here with another status report for FCotW2. Since my last blog entry I've scripted a couple of cut scenes, including the end sequence. Which menas the last few minutes of the game are a few animations away from being done!
More importantly though, during this last month the cast of the game has grown to 50 plus characters with 15 or so still missing. I've finally imported the available character graphics, drawn tons of new ones, created several talking views and done scaling tests for characters in some of the more complex screens. I've also managed to overcome an AGS restriction that doesn't allow a character to walk and talk at the same time, which threatened to destroy my vision of a certain cutscene that I had in my head for a very long time now. Next step is drawing and importing the last few characters, all of them minor supporting roles. Once that is done, all the characters that aren't yet in there will be integrated in the game. Afterwards I might start working off some of the puzzles or go further into dialogs and cutscenes first. Or maybe I'll get some animations done? Whatever route I decide to take, rest assured that it will bring FCotW2 one step closer to its eventual release. In the meanwhile, I have some further character sprites from FCotW2 for you. Enjoy! After an extended 17-day stay at the hospital, I'm FINALLY back home and at work these last few weeks. So happy, getting back into the swing of things.
As for FCotW2, my downtime had one good sideeffect and so I have a big milestone to announce today: my detailed game script containing details on all the puzzles, characters, cutscenes and all the important dialogs is finally done. Almost that is: one tiny cutscene towards the end of the game still needs to be written, which will probably happen tomorrow. Of course I had outlined the big puzzles, situations and characters before (after all the game's backgrounds are already done), but this new document is much more detailed, fills in many, many blanks and smoothes out lots of previous problems in the puzzle design. Best of all, I really like how the story unfolds in this one, and I'm really looking forward to the players experiencing it themselves. All that remains now is implementing this huge 50+ page game script - the result should definitely be worth it! Oh, and I'm dreading all the extra animations that still need to be done, but that's a topic for another day. A very quick January update: I've made significant progress with FCotW2 since my last blog entry. However, my planned post on scripting will have to wait, as I'm currently in hospital, recovering from a nasty case of pneumonia.
While this has halted my scripting progress somewhat, these long, boring afternoons in the hospital bed at least gave me time to flesh out some dialogs for the early parts of FCotW2. There's a positive side to everything. :) See ya next month, with yours truly in better shape hopefully... Once again the holiday season is upon us, which means I am on a two-week vacation and have much more time than usually to work on FCotW2 - yay! As promised, I give you an update on the status of the game:
Victoria Blair, in short Vic, is a sweet-natured girl in her mid twenties, and a close friend of Jeff’s sister Suzie. The two of them met at a London museum where they used to work for Professor Hendrickson – until they both suddenly vanished that is. When Jeff finally meets Vic, she has a riveting tale to tell about what exactly happened on that fateful day. Both she and her boyfriend prove to be invaluable allys in healing Suzie from the mysterious ailment she’s suffering from. And even beyond that, Vic has an important role to play in things to come. That's all for today, folks! Have a nice Christmas, a good New Year, and I'll see you in January, Cheers! :-)
Wow, looks like it's time for the November update already. As promised, today I want to give you a small glimpse into my process of creating background graphics for my adventure games, namely the FCotW series. Some might say - and I can't really argue with that sentiment - that the graphics are among the weakest aspects of my games. But that doesn't mean that I don't put any effort into them, nope! What you see in FCotW1 and the previews of FcotW2 is the result of many hours of hard work. What I lack in artistic talent I need to compensate by meticulous revisions of each pixel until the graphics are at least passable. No masterpiece, sure, but infinitely better than my original mess that would make your eyes bleed and brain hurt trying to make sense of it. Exhibit A: I give you an already familiar scene from FCotW2. On the right you see my first draft of the scene, created on November 25th 2009. Yes, that's three years ago, and almost two years before FCotW1 was even released. As you can see, the series HAS been in development for quite some time. Anyways, that's an accurate representation of my natural drawing style, and I'm NOT talking about mere concept graphics here. On the right you see the same scene in it's current form, finalized on September 9th, 2011. Obviously I put some work into refining the scene and while the art is still quite basic (what's this thing called "shading" everyone seems to be babbling about?), I think it works well in the game. The background might get some further touch-ups before release, but by and large that's it. Since we are at it, I will now give you a step by step tutorial of how Wesray does his backgrounds in MS Paint. And yeah I know, Photoshop, GIMP or whatever would be much better suited for a project on the scale of FCotW. But let's just say Paint is my comfort zone and all attempts to use more advanced drawing programs have ended in disaster. So MS Paint it is, and don't even think about trying to convince me otherwise! The example I'll use in the following is FCotW2's "Shop of Wonders" background that I have already shown in a previous post. 1) Wesray has an idea In the beginning is the idea. I decide which locations are needed because either the story necessitates them or simply because I think it would be a cool location to have - and yes that's my actual process of reasoning! At that stage, puzzles for the screen tend not to be determined yet, so they will later be fitted to the background or maybe the background is adapted to allow a specific puzzle. More on that in a later post that will deal with puzzle design. In this case, I wanted to have an indoor shop with a counter and many shelfs which are full of all kinds of bizarre stuff that you can buy - an ideal setting for an adventure game, with lots of possibilities for nice puzzles. And I can't show you a picture of that since, well, at that point it's still in my head. :) 2) Wesray decides on a room layout and draws it Next step is to determine a layout for the room. That's probably the most critical step for each room I draw, as there are lots of things to consider: Will story relevant scenes take place there and if yes, what are their requirements? Are other characters located in this room? Should the room be scrollable? What size should the player character be in this screen - should he scale and get smaller in the background? Where can you enter and exit the screen? What about perspective issues? What layout would work best in respect of the puzzles that could take place there? Is the layout too similar to other rooms in the game and what could be done to make it more unique? Once I've decided all this stuff I make a simple black and white drawing of the room to give me a first idea how the layout might work and how the characters could fit in sizewise. For the Shop of Wonders I decided on a simple non-scrollable room with the entrance/exit on the right side of the screen and the counter on the left side. The player character doesn't scale and can be full size. We have at least one other character in this room, the shopkeeper behind the counter. Puzzlewise, we need at least be able to talk to the shopkeeper and look at / buy things. Below you find my first draft of the room. 3) Wesray chooses the room's coloring Once I have decided on the basic layout of the room, my next decision is how to color it. Often I have a preconceived idea what the room should look like, but other times it's just trial and error until I find a color palette that seems to be working for the scene. Again I try to give the room an individual look and feel that distinguishes it from other rooms in the game. After this point, the specific shades of the colors used might still change, but now I have a pretty good idea what the finished room could look like. Below you find my first attempt of coloring the Shop of Wonders. 4) Wesray cleans up the room As you have surely noticed, my hand drawn room is full of wobbly lines, so my next step is to go through the whole room and straigthen them (or curve them correctly, you know what I mean!), while simulateneously removing the black outlines, since I decided to work without outlines in part 1 of the series. In the graphic below I have already worked on the door, the windows, the counter, the shelf and the floor, but not yet on the mirror on the backside of the screen. 5) Wesray adds more details Once the background has been colored and cleaned up, I often notice that the room is quite empty, even at the resolution of 320x200 I use. In indoor rooms I typically add stuff on the walls and maybe on the floor, while in outdoor scenes rocks, additional plant growth and maybe some small animals are the way to go. Sometimes it's also good to have some stuff in the foreground both for indoor and outdoor scenes. In many cases I do research in the internet to get some ideas for fitting details I could add to a scene, and for some items that I can't get quite right by hand, I even paint over reference pictures. The Shop of Wonders is a typical example where many details are needed. It should be full of things like statues, trinkets, tools, fabrics, sacks and baskets full off food etc. You can see that I added many details at that point. The water pipe is a reference photo from the internet that still needs to be overpainted in the picture below. 6) Wesray adds the finishing touches Once the details are done, I usually add some additional improvements like some shadows, additional patterns or grain on big solid surfaces, or some very basic shading to hint at light sources or to accentuate the form of some objects. I also import the screen into the game and test how it works in action, whether some stuff needs to be rearranged and so on. And of course there are animations and characters yet to add to the background plus further changes made for puzzle implementation and finetuning, i.e. some background item might actually become a takeable object. Below you find the final version of the Shop of Wonders, how it currently looks in the game. I worked on the "Shop of Wonders"-background from April 8th 2012 to April 14th 2012, almost a week. So with 70+ screens in the game you can imagine how it might take me a while to get all the backgrounds done. ;) Well, that's that. I guess what I wanted to demonstrate with this example is, everyone can draw. I put off creating an adventure game for the longest time because I was afraid of the art hurdle, but in the end I just started doing it anyway. It was learning by doing, and I don't regret it one bit. Sure, the result isn't high art (harhar) and still scares off some potential players, but all things considered I think it works well enough and even has a certain charm.
Anyhow, if you want to learn drawing REALLY GOOD backgrounds for an adventure game, I'm the wrong guy to listen to, there are tons of experts out there who do a much better job then I do, both at drawing and in explaining their process. There you'll also get more formal tutorials including topics like the correct use of perspective and the importance of shading, techniques that I frankly suck at and therefore either ignore or just try to use intuitively in my backgrounds. Which would look a hundred times better if I followed the appropriate methods, but then again I've decided on a style in FCotW1 and plan to stick with it for the rest of the series. So, that's it for my November arts tutorial. In my December post I will give you a major update about the status quo of FcotW2, rave a bit about how happy I am with some of the decisions I made recently and introduce one of the new characters in FCotW2. Until then, have a happy November, and stay tuned! You know, I really should post here more regularly, if only to motivate myself to get some more work done. But the thing is, I don't find myself with a lot to say lately. Not to imply there wasn't any progress on FCotW2 (there was!) or that I don't have anything new to show (I have!). It's just that I've been super lazy recently, so progress is on the slow side and I don't want to go too deep into spoiler territory either. There's still a long way to go until the release of FCotW2, so I better pace myself.
Anyways, my plan is to have a monthly update from now on, and to have a very specific topic to talk about each time. For instance, next time I plan to give you a comparison of concept art vs. the final version for my background art, and I will write about my process of getting there, probably using an example from FCotW1 as a demonstration. In the mean time, I give you another screenshot for FCotW2. Don't worry, there are dozens you haven't seen yet, but I better keep releasing them sparingly to not spoil the surprises. See ya next month! Wohoo, it's one year to the day since "Far Corners of the World: Chapter 1" has been relased. It's been an interesting ride and I want to give many thanks to the players for all the kind words you've sent me since then.
This anniversay also means that FCotW2 has been in development for a whole year now. It has come a long way since its initial conception and it is taking shape slowly but surely. Unfortunately I didn't manage to complete all the backgrounds during my vacation, but I made important progress nevertheless: I designed most of the new charatcers in the game and in some long and painful brainstorming sessions I managed to come up with and write down all the puzzles (only some big cornerstone puzzles had been designed until then). I might still need to fine-tune one puzzle or the other, but these things will become more obvious in the implemenation and beta-testing phases. For now the I'm very statisfied with the pacing, the variety and difficulty of the challenges and with how the backgrounds and characters are utilized. However I've sworn myself to change my design process in FCotW3 and complete all the detailed design BEFORE I go into creating the backgrounds and characters. Sure, these things are often dictated by the story, but adding 80% of the puzzle design retrospectively is a hard and tedious task that bestowed more than one headache on me. Well, we'll see how long my resolutions hold once I've started working on the next game. ;-) For now, I give you a special preview of some of the new characters in FCotW2. There are some slight spoilers I guess, but nothing too bad. As always this is work in progress, so some of these graphics might change 'till the release. So I played and loved Ben Jordan Case 8 - did you too? You can read my detailled opinion about the game in the review section of this site. Now tomorrow I'm off to a short vacation, but next week I'll give you some new infos about the status FCotW2. See you then!
So tomorrow's the big day when Ben Jordan Case 8 is finally released. Wow, I can't believe that the wait is almost over. :) I'm very excited to play through the game and finally discover the answers to all the open questions, but I can't help but feel I'll be a bit sad when it is all over. It really is the end of an era. Anyways, I will put online a detailed report about my experience playing the game, probably some time next week, but in the meantime you can already read my retrospective of the series so far. You'll find it in the new Reviews section of this site. So happy playing all you other Ben Jordan fans out there - see you on the other side!
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