Posts Tagged ‘ survival-horror ’
Greatly enjoying my new Wacom Bamboo. It’s white and feels like writing on paper. You’ll gave to forgive my inexperience with it, though: but anyway, here are a couple of sketches for Amnesia Stories (working title for prequel series.) You can click to enlarge them…
New location...
Floorman (early sketch)
This is my ongoing project I first came up with the story for about six years ago. I’ve tried and failed to make it many different ways before, most of the reasons came down to having an immense amount of assets to produce.
Version 1: BlitzMax Pure Point’n'Click Adenture
I wrote the full engine for this including a windows GUI for the editor and a script language you could enter with code highlighting etc. The problem was animation… I could do a walk cycle fairly well, and render characters out of poser and use Max for the backgrounds, but the animation was beyond me in Max. Left it to simmer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEZ3oLn78Nk
Version 2: XNA Survival Horror
After Soundless Mountain II I hoped I could use some of the apparent popularity of it to launch an indie career with a similarly designed game. I felt I could adapt Amnesia really well to this style. I had a great like-minded artist to work with, Phil Duncan on monsters and environments, and the mighty Dock (Tumbledrop / Sweatdrop Studios) to help out with portraits. But I didn’t really know where I was going with it at the time, partly because I still hadn’t fully figured out how it could survive as a survival horror but keep the story in-tact. But again, it wasn’t so much that but the fact that I felt the need at the time still to make it commercial, and that to me meant writing off a lo-res look we initially mocked up like the one above.
I learnt XNA and then we decided to use 3D models all because I wanted shadows. This was at the edge of our skills though (Phil & I certainly as Dock was busy with Tumbledrop - and rightly so!) Phil’s a great 3D modeler, but not yet that experienced with animation. In the end the prospect seemed too daunting, especially combined with other life pressures. Put on hold again.
Version 3: Lo-Stress, Lo-Fi BlitzMax Hybrid
I’ve begun again. I can’t help it. I keep coming back to it even though right now I have a really cool game coming on the iPhone that I really have to finish.
Above is a shot of the new tech I’m using for it - a way of applying a sort of 2D dynamic pixel-lighting. It comes out really organic and it feels more ‘magical’ than doing it by bump/normal-mapping, even if it is quite time consuming. I keep getting effects I don’t quite expect.
Anyway Phil is excited and has already started putting our main baddie into the new format. I’m excited too!
The idea this time is to keep it simple, hence going back to the BlitzMax language. So I’ll be working on it on and off, and I’m just trying not to consider money or anything like that.
Anyway just thought I’d share the story with you guys, I’ll keep you posted on it… For now, please enjoy this short video of the new lighting in action (it’s a really poor quality video, I’m afraid):
Amnesia is a game I’ve wanted to make for ages… It’s in a pre-production phase and has changed from being a classic point’n'click to more of a Survival Horror title, partly due to the fun we had making Soundless Mountain II, and the fact that I now have a great artist to work with, ‘Lord’ P. Duncan. The story is essential the same as the point’n'click I imagined, though - it’s about a Japanese man called Aruku re-discovering his identity through dreams and nightmares, in a recurring Groundhog day. Solving puzzles ‘positively’ will give you a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that is white, solving them ‘negatively’ will give you a red puzzle piece. When the puzzle is assembled you will regain your memory, although the ending depends on the makeup of your physical jigsaw puzzle.
It deals with the theme of isolation from society so present in modern Japan (I lived in Tokyo until recently.) In fact we hope to really tackle some issues about modem life with this game, the distance and loneliness people can feel even when surrounded by others.
Visually we’re using what we call a ‘Moving Mosaic’. This is our tech term for chunky, grainy, dirty hand-drawn pixels with lots of noise and filtering. As well as this we have dynamic 3D shadows, so the torchlight will be spectacular! It still is very self-consciously low-res pixel art, but with a modern twist, scaled up 4 times as in SMII - although it is in a higher resolution than SMII and with no colour restrictions. We’re using 3D cel-shaded characters, with a slightly Prince of Persia feel to the moment. There will be a lot of ‘being chased’ in the game, and you’ll have to escape this unkillable antagonist time and again by any means necessary, pulling obstacles in his path, cutting rope bridges etc. Dreams will range from flying to escaping a filthy prison, and that’s all I can give away at the moment!
superflat.