Today it's wall of text and no pixels.

This week I had two presentation practices scheduled. They went fine, even though I was really not up for it the second time. I sat in my house feeling miserable and didn’t want to go at all. 

It was probably a very useful experience to feel that way and still go, do the thing, and deliver.

The rest of my available time this week I have play tested and really tried my best to mimic different types of players and see what happens, and I found numerous small things that will improve the player experience.  

(It’s an amazing feeling honestly when play testing a game day after day for months and it’s still FUN! That’s really something!)

I’ve also found some time to go over all the fonts once again, to iterate a bunch of things that didn’t feel right and to create a nice looking web page as background for the game.

It’s starting to look very nice and polished in its own quirky style.

I keep making myself misunderstood when discussing the look of my game and I’ve been thinking about this.  

What I am doing now is spending so much time on the game design, the aesthetics, and the player experience that I don’t have time enough to make the art delicious. I’ve seen many other projects that have the feeling of “let’s make a game to display our art” to them, and initially that was how my mind worked too. 

I have completely changed since then and my main interest now is in what actually happens and how the player experiences the game. So when I’m saying “it looks crappy”, what I actually mean is it doesn’t looks nearly as good as I could make it if I spent all my time doing art. 

However it’s absolutely good enough. It has a charm and delivers the message and the game itself is so much more important than the pixels. 

I think the problem is that my heart and mind has now become the one of a designer but my ego isn’t really there yet.

Just peachy!

Remember when I posted about how we were torn if we should cut content or not but decided to not, and that we on top of that discovered that we had to make an entire playable tutorial. To add even more to this workload, presentation practice has started and takes its share of the time. 

I was very worried about how I would be able to solve all of this and still get a good result and it has been hard but I can say with a lot of pride (ant even more relief) that my hard work has paid off and I’m back on track. 

This week I have done the practice and worked on the slides, created portraits and a lot of the effects and things needed based on our playing test results. I iterated things as usual and worked on the text for chapters and popups and tutorials and made a priority list for the things we still need to fix.

So, in the end, I ended up with less time than I anticipated, I managed to solve this without cutting content and even added some instead. 

Man am I good or what?

Another week in the trenches

This week we started to prepare for the jury presentation and this has taken a lot of my time, but still I managed to do art for almost all combat sprites and effects. We want to have every card working ingame by the end of next week and it looks like we’re going to make it.

We also did a big outside game test with great results. Unfortunately these results while once again letting us know just how fun our combat is they also made us certain that we need to change the initial decision to just have a “how to play-image” and make a playable tutorial instead to be sure that everyone that tries the game understands how to play it properly.

This of course means that the work load is piling up again, and I just keep praying I won’t get any sicker than I am. At the moment I feel like I’m being held together by duct tape. 

(Also, I need to stop forgetting about updating the blogs until the very last second...)

This week I have been doing a lot of iterations and tweaking of our previous art. It seems that when we are creating so much content so rapidly, many times things don't really feel coherent and so I have to go over them again and make sure everything works well together.

We also have a situation where I will have less time to spend on the game than expected and so we had a discussion on how to best solve this. The options were to either cut half of our content card wise or to simplyfy the ingame sprites of the cards to save time and really try our best to squeeze every available second into the project and be able to have all cards in game by the time of GGC.

We decided to go for the second option. After all our game is a collectible card game and one of our key feature is a multitude of cards. It's gonna be hard work but it should be doable. And with those words, I'm back to work!

Here's a pic on the current state of both deck editor and campaign map, all art made by yours truly.

Animation has started

I have spent the week doing animations for the game, or rather trying to do animations. One of the downsides with being in such a small group is that we cannot divide the work between different people and trying to make use of everyones strong sides and since I'm the only artist and I'm hardly an animator it started out looking dark.

However I read up a bit and watched some tutorials and was able to do some basic animations. Then I worked together with Jerry to create some animations for our new little friend, the sturdy skeleton:

The glamorous life of a graphic artist

This week I have been working on the GUI and Deck Editor and it has taken a lot of time and effort. Apart from making frames and borders and buttons and whatnot I also had to find suitable fonts for the game's different menus and info boxes and so on and things like that quickly pile up in terms of hours spent.

When we started the project the game was initially meant to be in 3D, and so our first iterations of the GUI and card layout had a more three dimensional and realistic style. Later on we changed the game to be in 2D with a much more cartoony style so I redesigned some of the elements to fit better with that style and with every major change that work has had to be redone.

I've lost count on what number of iteration our main GUI is at by now, the deadline to have it done and implemented is tonight and there's still some polishing to do.

I'll head straight back to work to get it done.

Here is some of the work I've done this week:

Week two - backgrounds and locations

This week I started with the different backgrounds, locations and icons needed to navigate the world of Little Warlock. When the player enters the world he will see a kingdom where he can visit his home, the shop, the scribe's den or the tower. For the early demo part we will only have the tower enabled and so I've focused on that this week. I also made a second attack location which will take place on a sandy beach.