Made a little video about Zoltan and the city were he is kidnapping the most evil cats( and some good one)! If you don't want any spoiler,and prefer to pick up cats by the scruff yourself... skip it and
https://youtu.be/VUaicgZISSc
They main challenge I faced for this Ludum Dare was animating Zoltan's cats. You see cats doing all the things cat do and I wanted them to look as real as possible. I've never done anything like this before and I'm so happy I did!
I'm a programmer, but the two Ludum Dare I've done so far I decided to challenge me with graphics: I wasn't even sure this could be done properly in such a short time. So here is are a little series on my process, for those of you that would like to start making their own graphics.
This is not the right way or the only way to do it, but it worked! I was able to draw quickly with a good tradeoff between speed and quality.
You can find any kind of stock animation around, but making your own graphics is so satisfying and makes your game unique. So here is how you can do. Of course basic drawing skills are needed but not so crucial in my opinion, because even the strangest wobbly traced character will work well if it's animated right.
First of all if you are serious about animation, grab this book.
It is the bible, you won't probably need anything else. There are also great videos of it you can find on YouTube. The first and most important move you want to animate is walk. Turns out that walk cycles will be also the most difficult animation you will make, so start with it and everything will be easier after :) Bipeds walks are different from 4 leg walks, but they all have the so called "contact positions" that is when each foot touches the ground. A good way to start is to draw the contact position for each foot and then draw the position between the two, called "passing position". The more frames you add the smoother your animation will be. An easy way to do this is getting an already made sprite sheet and studying it.
Trace on it! There's nothing wrong. This way you'll get familiar with the movement you are drawing.
For Zoltan I picked an old picture of animation studies that shows a rotoscope of cats and dogs jumping. In the early days of animation they would film everything to study the movements this way. And this is what you can do, even with a YouTube video.
Here we are. In my last post I briefly introduced some quick ways to get familiar with animation. But if you are new to it, in the time of a jam you can't stop and study everything. So...
I had to be quick! So the first thing I did was gathering any kind of visual reference I could find on cats. I have a cat, but it's just impossible to make her pose for a picture, let alone for a videogame sprite!
What you can do is looking for animated gifs,videos you can stop to copy poses or just photos of poses you'd like to reproduce.
What many people miss about art in general (and I missed this too!) is that artist don't have everything perfectly clear in their minds since the beginning. If they have to draw a cat and never stopped to watch a cat closely, they (and me) probably only can tell you that a cat has 2 triangular ears and a tail, but they need to look at real cats photos, draw, make mistakes and redraw in order to get to know their subject and what makes it what it is. So just try.
I was sure I would have made a mess, and my first cat was terrible, you can see it here.
But then drawing and erasing I got the hang of it (kinda).
Give yourself a chance a draw something you never drew and if you are not sure about some part of it, copy and paste it from a reference in a layer under the one you are painting on. You can create a Frankenstein creature made up of pieces, it is shorter than you think :) and you should not consider it cheating: tracing over an outline will build muscle memory and it could be that next time you won't even need a guide.
The clock was ticking. The first morning of jam had passed and I had nothing done, only wobbly sketches of cats. Then I discovered the beauty of guide layers :) I sketched over my first sketches trying to make them better and they did get better! I do this in blue pencil because the next step is to trace the final outline. Don't try to get the final drawing immediately!
This was my error during the last jam. I thought it would have been quicker to draw directly my character outline, but then I spent ages erasing and redrawing making a mess and loosing precious time.
This time instead I started by sketching the basic position on legs and tails (again, keep your reference at end, even in a layer behind with 50% opacity if it make you feel more confident). After these quick blue cats I created a new layer over each one and started to draw the real thing. It was a lot easier!
I recommend to use a pen obviously, but you don't need a very expensive tablet. This is a common misconception. People think that they can't draw well with a tablet because theirs isn't good enough. The thing is: drawing like this has nothing to do with drawing on paper. you HAVE to practice a little and get the hang of it. And once you excercised you can get good results even with a cheap tablet.
Same for brushes: there is no special brush of smoothing option that can work magic (well you could use a little smoothing to get slickers lines).
I like to use a pencil effect brush for sketches (something with a bit of transparency), but then for the final sketch I use the simpler harder brush you can find, without any dynamics or transparency. This is because when you animate, you want your lines to stay the same thickness all the time or else the result will be wobbly.
This has always been an interesting category, one I'm very curious about, so...
comment below and I will do my best to rate you :)
What's the quickest way to draw something so that it looks good enough? Using the tecnique you are more familiar with. Period.
I'm a programmer as you know if you have read my past posts, and the pen tool has been a mistery to me for years XD. I started to use it last year and even if I'm more confident now, I'm deadly slow compared to freehand drawing. Plus the results are actually pretty close.
If you have time of course vector tracing is the best choice, the result is flawless, but if you, like me, are not so expert in moving, adding and deleting points quickly, just go for a freehand tool, like a basic brush.
Choosing a thicker brush also helps a lot to get slicker looking lines.
For Zoltan's cats *I used a 5 pixel hard round brush with no dynamic al 100% opacity *.
(forgive me for this one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOMxQ67XfYk
Cut scenes for Zoltan took me an entire day of the jam. I wanted to include them to give more context and because I love stories.
This year I didn't have tools like Animate to use, so I went for a simple video that I put together in After Effects (I could have used anything else, the only effect I used was a motion blur in the very first scene, beside that ans some camera movement, I basically added text and music). At the end there's not much animation going on here, but it is still effective.
I basically drew the hell environment, the Devil and Zoltan in different poses and then I "shot" the frames I needed following a storyboard I sketched around 6 a.m. waking up with the idea :D.
I found out that the main difficulty in making this short video was conveying the right emotion and finding the right facial expression. I redrew them many times before getting what I wanted.
For storytelling lovers who want to enrich their games and create compelling stories, integrated tutorials and great game experiences I recommend this good old book. It will help you a lot in designing your game, creating worlds and characters, convincing enemies, effective dialogs and cut scenes. It also gives you advices on how to produce design documents for a team. A good read!
how we got to the final outline, read the previous post here
In Zoltan we have cats of different colours, all using the same animations. That's why I filled my outlines with grey. The final colour is set inside Unity.
I generally select the outline and fill the shape on a different layer I leave underneath. To put all together In the final spritesheet, first I tried out the animation in Photoshop (I hate the Photoshop timeline, but it's all I have), then I created the spritesheet with GlueIt and imported in into Unity.
Many animations are made of two spritesheets one on top of the other (for instance the crazy typing cat, that changes colour while the laptop stays silver or the evil and good cats that need to have overlayed features)
This was a bit of extra work for us, but we liked the idea that if you picked an orange cat you will play all the games with an orange cat! :)
Would you like an infernal hatch to drag everything you want to hell? Here you are!
### In Zoltan's city cats can be fall into one of these at any time.
First thing I did was defining the hatch shape and making the flashing effect.
If you are familiar with old style games, you can see a lot of this effect in explosions. Basically an explosion always starts with a flash of light, and the simplest flash of light is obtained by alternating black and white. In this case I added red because I wanted a more colored and fire-like effect.
Then I decided to add some infernal red smoke. I used a cloud shaped brush in Photoshop and I started with red. I made a burst in the center of my hatch incrementing the red with any frame. Next I added orange and finally some yellow. Note that the brush became smaller with every colour.
Then I added some infernal light coming out of the hatch. I did this on the stitched spritesheet. I used a soft brush to trace rays and the adjusted the opacity to make the light stronger as the hatch opens.
Also I made sure to cut my light so that it stayed inside the frame of the hatch.
But I wasn't happy with it, so I added some random sparks. The position of these doesn't really care since they move random.
I created the hatch separately from the cat falling down, because in Zoltan, we can have cats of any colour. So the final animation is made of two sprites one over the other. I had to make sure to cut the cat so that it looked like it was inside the hatch in the very last frame.
JAM GAME by EgonBegon (@egonbegon) , and AwesomeAlliterationAlliance (@awesomealliterationalliance)
JAM GAME by Xellaya (@xellaya) , and DDRKirbyISQ (@ddrkirbyisq)
JAM GAME by ruddiculous (@ruddiculous) , ruddgasm (@ruddgasm) , AlphaBetaSoup (@alphabetasoup) , and ColeSlaughter (@coleslaughter)
JAM GAME by FailedStarfish (@failedstarfish) , AdamD (@adamd) , and SecondDimension (@seconddimension)
JAM GAME by graebor (@graebor)
JAM GAME by Sangemdoko (@sangemdoko)
COMPO GAME by jjjjason (@jjjjason)
JAM GAME by notke (@notke) , and fonserbc (@fonserbc)
COMPO GAME by grllle (@grllle)
Yes, we brainstormed about this during the jam, we wanted to choose the best evil minigames for Zoltan. We managed to finish only 4 games for the jam, but...
Your cat: 1. scratches you.
scratches sofa.
hangs to the curtains.
throws cat litter miles away from its box.
pukes around (in the worst cases pukes from a high shelf of inside your backpack).
sits on your laptop (with or without you).
covers everything with fur.
knocks small objects down the edges.
meows to get you open the door and then he doesn't go out.
wakes you up at 6 am putting his butt into your face.
desappears for hours until you find that he managed to slip under the covers of the bed you had just made.
shreds the toilet paper.
eats your plants to the roots.
establishes a reign of terror over your other cats.
Sits in front of the tv especially if there are subtitles you want to read.
robs food from your table.
chews your clothes.
sleeps in the sink.
Isn't it great what you have done? Alone or joining forces, you made a videogame in a very short time!
Many of us are here because this is our dream job. For some this is their job already, others just wish they could start their own studio, join an established one, or just have a publisher distribute their game.
In any case *what everybody is telling you to do is: MAKE, have finished games in your portfolio. *
Probably every game developer I met had a couple of secret long time unfinished projects: one that was to long to finish alone, the other he or she could never find the time to polish as they wanted.
You contemplate your broken code, your sketches, your half done scenes and you procrastinate.
But then, here it comes the Ludum Dare, thankfully! And * you become an all-accomplishing hell of a game developer for 3 magical days!* How cool is that? You made it! You can do it!
So you think: why can't I do this, every week? (The main reason is because you need to sleep, eat properly, shower and so on XD).
No, seriously, jams show us, every single time, that our limits are far beyond what we thought. Try to remember it when this one will end.
* Bring with you a little of those superpowers* and use it in you daily game development.
Think the same way for you next projects, think small, think original, think feasible, get organized and FINISH them.
That accomplishment feeling will fill you with new energy and will make you start and finish a game after the other, that is exactly what you need in order to get better at it.
So don't abandon your creature now, let it grow, polish it and publish it somewhere, please. :)
I remember that during LD38 at some point people started to post their comments word clouds.
I felt nostalgic and curious about what would come out for Zoltan's Idea. So here it is.
Looks like we can make people laugh, and we are proud of this result :).
We made better than our last time in almost every category and this makes us very happy.
Of course there is a lot we can improve for the next jam.
Every time the results are out I'm surprised to discover great games I didn't get to rate. So if your game got a low rating to let this put you off. Maybe they just didn't get enough attention. I bookmarked as my favourites many games that I don't see in the first pages.Congratulations to everyone, I'm excited to see in the first pages the games I loved and also games that were rescued at the very last minute. I'm curious to play and learn from you all.
*An enormous thank to all those who were so kind to share their sources as well. *
"Power shared is power gained" they say, and your code could help someone else to get started and learn (or to pull their hair out because they can't understand it :D )
Hope to see many of these game further developed polished and published.
Wish you all the best of luck for your present and future projects!
I realize that the vote I give in mood is usually more related to a mix of graphics and sound, a measure of how engaging and convincing I found the environment, but this is just me.
We were discussing with the team and, after seeing the statistic distribution of votes someone posted, looks like mood category could be generally misinterpreted (or better, freely interpreted).
I feel that the evaluation of story and concept tend go more on the "Overall" vote. Just a guess based on how WE voted.
What are yout thoughts?
This has been already brought up during the last years probably, but...
Here we are again! A couple of days ago we were just worried about the themes and now another creature took shape!
And here is the intro of Not My Hoarder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNaxC-Qr5PY
