Final Poster

We are proud to show the finalized poster for Shove Aside! Underneath, you can see the overall process of the poster.

State of the Environment 6

Here is a quick update of the art and how it's coming along. My life has been unwrapping as of late, here are our unwrapped modular assets, and some interior objects for each puzzle area.

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!

Rough Dani Push

Rough animation of Dani beginning to push something.

Poster Creation

The next task for conception is the poster design. It will be a challenge to capture the essence of the game in one picture. The first part of the design process is figuring out what will be highlighted. As a narrative-driven game, we felt that the characters and and iconic location in the town should be prominently featured. The next step is looking for inspiring movie posters that provoke the same idea as the game. A few examples:

With the reference images and our own ideas of what the design should be, we created many thumbnails to see where the composition could go. Once a thumbnail was agreed upon to have the strongest impression, work on the final design has begun! We'll keep you posted as things come together.

Rough Gabe Push

Rough animation of Gabe beginning to push something.

Rough Gabe Walk Cycle

Playblast of Gabe's current walk cycle.

Dani Idle Animation

Playblast of Dani's idle animation.

Dani Walk Cycle

Playblast of Dani's walk cycle.

Building a Battery

Environment work has started. The first area we're creating is based off of one of the many abandoned military gun batteries that scatter the pacific coast. We've got a full proxy of the level built and navigable and now we're putting forth the hard work of turning those boring grey boxes into something beautiful.

We started by doing a few paint overs of our grey boxed level.

And from there we've begun creating assets.

More art to come so keep your eyes posted.

Head of the Class

Progress update for Dani and Gabe.  With the final designs nailed down, we begin working on the creation of assets to bring the game together!  These are the current head models for Dani and Gabe respectively.  Their featureless, hairless craniums are rendered in porcelain of added creepy effect.  The bodies will soon be completed and connected to make our full characters, and the next task will be clothing them.