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TRIWAY

Started by pictsy, 08 June, 2015, 03:22:06 PM

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pictsy

I would like to share a showcase of work for a game project I am working on called TRIWAY.  I have been working on the art and animation for the last couple of months or so.  I am proud of this little video.  It has made me excited about showing off the other stuff I have done in the future, and of course the game itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzwhJLGR97U&feature=youtu.be

Before starting this project I had limited experience with pixel art.  Nevertheless, our head programmer/game designer wanted a pixel style for the game.  It was initially a challenge to translate my skills as a digital painter to this very minimalistic style.  I was surprised how quickly it became a natural way to work.  In some ways, pixel art can be extremely forgiving.  At least that was my experience with it.  Being so simple also makes it considerably easier to adjust if things don't look right.

I also had limited experience in animation.  I had made a small number of animations in the past and I have learnt a lot of theory but it is still something I have been largely unfamiliar with.  The pixel art presents a lot of challenges with movement.  Movement of one pixel is a lot of movement so I have to consider it very carefully.  Getting from point A to B to C and back to A again has been interesting and I am really glad I already know some tricks to help with it.  The spell-casters were the easiest to conceptualise for.  They have nice gestures that utilise their different magic techniques, and the variety comes with the spell effects themselves (which I left out as I wanted to save those for gameplay footage).  The spell effects are somewhat abstract and a great deal of fun to do.

I have been learning a lot and utilising knowledge I already had, but the surprise has been the subtleties of animation.  I was least confident in that area and wasn't intending to try hard with it, but they ended up happening naturally just because they made sense.  The first character has a number of subtleties.  My favourite being his headdress bouncing a little at the end of the sword attack.

The video itself is all animation, too.  I didn't use video editing software to compile it.  All the fades were done with layer opacity settings.  After showing it to the game designer, she suggested a little title sequence, and I ended up adding a few other extras: the fades, the closing 'credit' and the obligatory social media stuff.  I had only ever done time lapses of digital paintings before this, so I'm very pleased with the end results.

Zarjazzer

It looked great especially the lizard man.  :thumbsup:
The Justice department has a good re-education programme-it's called five to ten in the cubes.

Darren Stephens

Very nice work, Pictsy. Something I've always wanted to have a go at.  ;)
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pictsy

Thank you both :)

I'm glad you liked what you saw.  I'm hoping to get a selection of enemies completed before the end of the week so I might have another showcase video on the weekend.  Fingers crossed.

Ghastly McNasty

Cool characters, Picsty. Looking foward to seeing more.

pictsy

Thanks Ghastly.  Looks like we are getting closer to being able to demonstrate some gameplay as well.

Third Estate Ned

It's cool that you do this for a living. Those pixellated characters brought back memories of Another World, Monkey Island and Prince of Persia on the Amiga 500 - all good. The music suits the mysterious characters as well.

pictsy

It would be nice to say I was making money off doing this, but currently I'm not.  Hopefully that will be an outcome, but we are going to be trying crowd funding to help keep this project going.  I have even had to sacrifice my 2000AD re-subscription to continue working on this game.  :'(

The Amiga 500 was the gaming platform I grew up with (until we were lucky enough to get a PC in my early teens).  Flashback is one of the games I reviewed before starting work on the pixel art, alongside Another World and a lot of recent games like Hyperlight Drifter (which I haven't been fortunate to play - thanks goodness for youtube).

I'm glad you like the music.  I was a little worried about it as I only spent about an hour and a half composing it.  I will certainly be returning to it and building on the foundation, but I think it needs more work before a final composition can be reached.  I'll probably whip up a different tune for the next showcase.

I am glad we are receiving a positive response for what we have so far (which I know isn't much at this point).  I'd like to thank you all again for this. :D

pictsy

It took a little longer to complete than I would have liked, but today I got the next showcase video finished and uploaded.

http://youtu.be/3x2E1oJb2Hs

These are the first set of enemies for the game.  They might not be the first enemies encountered in the final product but they serve as a good visual placement to flesh out the different enemy types and combinations this game will have.  A lot of hard lessons learnt with this.  I put in a little more detail than might have been necessarily, but they are odd Goblin fiends so it kind of works to their advantage (I think).

Goblins were chosen as they are good fantasy staple and it meant I could get something done for an upcoming demo that will demonstrate the basics of the gameplay.  I now have been tasked with doing some promotional artwork.  I am unsure whether to try and do some time lapse videos for the promotional artwork like I have done in the past with some of my personal artwork.  I'll need to find some decent freeware screen capture software if I do end up doing that.

Alongside the new video I have also uploaded a 720p version of the old video.  I hope this slight improvement in quality demonstrates more of what I am trying to achieve artisticly.

https://youtu.be/zU19mUEKYsI

I am hoping that our next video will have gameplay footage.  I'll start hassling the programmers about it ;)

pictsy



I finally had the time to work on some concept artwork for the game.  This is the outside concept of an environment currently being referred to as 'Icy Pass'.  There is going to be an interior environment as well and I'll probably be working on that next.

We became somewhat delayed as a better polish to our first demo was decided upon.  I also had to change one of the effect animations as the original didn't work very well visually.  In addition we also decided to change our groups name from Candy Havoc to Silicon Pill so as to avoid any potential hassle we'd have over using 'Candy' or 'Havoc'.

pictsy

NEW VIDEO!

Took ages but it finally happened.  I made a video with some gameplay.  Rather sickeningly I realised that I could have done this a while ago as I had a build of the game that was suitable sitting on my computer.  I think I was bedazzled by the code entries I was delegated to complete.


Darren Stephens

Looks good, Pictsy. AmI correct in saying it's a turn based figting game....?
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pictsy

Sort of, Darren.  We've been describing it as a turn based strategy game focusing on party combat.  It's an idea based on the combat in Japanese RPGs, but with more depth.  We've kept some tropes of that genre and ditched others to present an interesting challenge and get the player to engage more with forming a strategy.  The enemy types will compliment this as well, providing different situations for the player to overcome.  We have made the lanes an important aspect as well as some characters are more robust and some characters play in a support role with status effect abilities.

Darren Stephens

Sounds very interesting. Look forward to seeing the finished game! ;)
https://www.dscomiccolours.com
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pictsy



This is the second piece of concept art for the environment currently being referred to as Icy Pass.  This environment will have an interior which at some points opens out to an exterior (with lovely parallaxing) to give the impression of travelling through these large mountains made of Ice.

It is going to be interesting translating these ideas I've explored in both pieces to the rather flat 2D environment we've created, but in doing this I have found some interesting aspects that I know will be fun to explore with the pixel art.  Certainly the background for the exterior is something I'm looking forward to as I'll be given more room to play with the medium.

Now I get to start working on a new environment design, Jungle Temple Ruins.  I think I can put interior and exterior ideas into one piece for that concept.