Value Thumbs

Line work on the poster is done! The next step is defining the values before the coloring phase.

Of Progress, Rewards, and Spooky Things

Today I'm going to talk a little bit more about teams. For all that content is super important (I mean, it's literally what makes up the game), in my experience with development most of the conversation focuses on content creation, so throughout development of Project Kassa, I'll be making periodic blog posts about other aspects that are important as well but seem to get a bit less emphasis. You'll be able to find all these posts under the "Producer" tag if you'd like to read more of them.

Last time I wrote one of these, it was about the assembly of a team, today we're going to talk a little bit about a lot of things, ultimately boiling down to morale. Keeping team morale high is important for team health, sanity, and quality of work. A team with low morale won't work as hard, or as well, as a team that is happy with themselves, each other, and the project.

One of the most important things to keeping morale high is a sense of accomplishment. People who have achieved something, or feel like they have, generally feel better about themselves and whatever it is they're working on. One of the easiest ways to do this is to track progress. Now there are a ton of ways to do this, and what is going to work for one team won't necessarily work for another, and sometimes what works for one team might only work for a specific project, so I'm going to stick with talking about what we're doing for this project rather than going too into the many options available.

We initially tried using VersionOne, which is a lovely site that I highly recommend trying if you are a fan of scrum and are looking for a reasonably priced option for it, the staff was communicative and the I found the interface very easy to learn and use. Unfortunately, it went under utilized, it didn't mesh well with the team. What we wound up with, and has been working so far for us, is a simple whiteboard.

Current Whiteboard

Different team members have different colored post-its, and we have three columns "To-Do," "In Progress," and "Completed." Only tasks from the current milestone (which - for us - is monthly), or outstanding from past milestones, are on the whiteboard. Each team member is responsible for moving their tasks to the appropriate column as they progress, and at the end of the milestone we take all the "Completed" post-its and stick them here:

Our progress spindle!

We bought a receipt spindle from an office supply store. There's something satisfying about impaling completed tasks on a pointy object. You may notice that our particular progress spindle has several marks on it, when we got it we decided to break it up into inches and whenever we complete enough tasks to reach an inch, we go on a morale adventure.

Morale adventures are fun, we've already done one in the form of visiting Fort Stevens in Oregon and Cape Disappointment in Washington, which gave us the additional benefit of a TON of photo/video/sound reference for our game as well as an opportunity to get out as a team and do something.

For our first inch, which we are rapidly approaching, we're discussing going to the ghost town Monte Cristo in Washington, where Danny and Branden will get us killed by following horror movie tropes instead of being sensible about the whole thing. The other options include the haunted soda machine in Seattle, or doing the Pike Street ghost tours. Obviously we lean towards spooky rewards, given the focus of our game and our apparent disinterest in not getting murdered by ghosts.

And once again, this post is turning out long, so I'm going to end it here, and talk a little bit more about smaller-scale morale boosting events in a later post.

Line Quality

Today's post will be on line quality. One of the key pieces to the art style for Shove Aside is the thick, graphic lines. As we are going for a gritty comic style, it helps breathe life into the world. In the poster, we wanted as much variety as we could get to differentiate the different materials in the world. The texture of dry patchy grass is different from a thick leather jacket or tree bark. Each part is simulated with different splotches and strokes to best evoke the feeling of that material as well as provide some artistic flair. In the examples above, you can see the different types of line quality used for the base of a tree, Dani's hair, patches of grass, tree bark, Dani's jacket, bushes, and Gabe's pants. Stay tuned for more updates!

Horror Game Jam

This time around, we supplemented our Game Jam with horror films, in the spirit of our game. We watched:
Descent
Ghost Ship
The Craft
Silent Hill
The Last Exorcism

Other than that, we pretty much just worked on our respective parts of the game, no whiteboards this time around, but here are some pictures of working through the day:

 Clockwise from top: Paul, Frank, Ryan, Tyler, and Danny.

 Branden and Danny.

 Frank and Ryan ignoring Ghost Ship (if I recall correctly).

 Paul in the kitchen.

 Clockwise from top: Frank, Ryan, Branden, Danny, and Paul.

 Ryan and I discussing something while Danny, Paul, and Frank work.

 Ryan deep in thought.

Danny and Paul.

Design Process for Dani

Hello there!  I'm Danny Huynh, the concept artist for the team.  I take broad ideas and create concept art for characters, environments, and anything else that helps to refine and nail down the look and feel of the game.  Basically, I make pretty things.  Ryan previously talked about the inspiration and direction we want the game to go, so today I'll talk about the design process for one of the characters, Dani.

When I first joined the project, I had a rough sketch and a character background.  I read through to make sure I understood the character, and focusing on the main aspects of her personality, I needed to make a strong willed, outspoken, take charge kind of character.  Before I started fleshing out her character, I wanted to have some of the more key physical features nailed down, namely her hair and clothing.

Clothing and hair thumbnails.

One of my first sketches of Dani.

With feedback from the rest of the team, this is one of the first sketches I did of Dani.  This was before I had the design elements applied.  As you can see, her proportions and style are pretty average.  We wanted something a little more stylized.  Something with the grit of Backwater Gospel, the bold style of The Gorillaz, and the unique rendering of Ashley Wood.  Taking in mind the inspirations for the game, my next sketch came out like this.

Notice the sharper angles, the play on proportions.

For being a leader-type character, I wanted to play with having a heavier lower body to give her a more grounded look.  The other character in contrast is much slimmer.  With this as the newer reference of how I would draw her, I played with some brushes in Photoshop to get a better vision of how she would look with texture.

Dani with texture and thick ink lines.

Near final concept of Dani.

This is the closest to final concept that I've gotten.  Reassessing her design, I decided to go back a few steps to fix some problems.  Her baggy pants wasn't reading quite the way I wanted, and with the jacket, having her come off as bottom heavy was a bit difficult.  So, to remedy the situation:

More thumbnails, more silhouettes, MORE EVERYTHING.

I quickly pumped out some more silhouettes and thumbs to play more on her proportions.  In the end, I've decided to flip her design, making her more top heavy (makes sense with the jacket right?) and to have thinner legs.  Another feature that most characters will have is exaggerated hands.  Most of the stylization will take place more in the body than the face.  Even though the previous concepts won't be accurate to the final design, the work wasn't done in vain.  It helped to visualize what the quality of the final piece will look like, and it'll be interesting seeing how different the final design will look compared to the original sketches!

Creating the Style Pt.1

Hey all, and thanks for checking in on our weekly blogs. I’m Ryan Sand, a man with too many titles, but in this case we can call me our art director. I’m in charge of handling the development and cohesion of our art style as we move forward with the project, so that’s what I’ll be talking about today.

Since we've started working on Kassa, we've always wanted the game to have a dirty graphic style that would match the games setting and themes as well as stand out amongst most other games you’d find on the shelves today. Messy outlines with varied line weight, a dull color palette with spots of saturation, a good range of value, and a painterly messiness to our textures.

With that in mind we began to research a multitude of styles that fit our vision and how others have translated those styles into 3D. We latched onto many of the elements from artist Ashley Wood, and the animated short Backwater Gospel. We've been especially impressed with how well the messiness of Backwater was transferred into 3D, and can’t thank them enough for their making of video.

Ashley Wood, Backwater Gospel, The Walking Dead, and a bit of Borderlands for good measure.

From here we've taken element’s from our research and gave them to our concept artist, Danny Huynh who has worked to combine them into a style of our own. Here are some of this pieces showing the evolution of our style through character concepts.

Danny started with broad simple concepts to nail down the look of the characters. Once he had their look down he started to brought the stylistic elements we researched to the the characters.

As concept work develops we’re creating test assets to bring the style into 3D. Nearly all of our line work is going to be done in texture, similar to Backwater gospel. On this model we're taking advantage of extra strip geometry to give the asset outlines. Right now this is a box only with a diffuse texture, and from here we can quickly experiment to develop our unity shaders.

A simple crate for experimentation. 

The foundations been set and there is plenty more to come as our style develops further.