Week 1 –
During the first week of our project, everyone in the group planned out what tasks each one of us was assigned to each week. I, Kinami, Frank and Matt was in charge of producing various sound types for the game. There wasn’t any disagreements with the roles given and everyone was so excited to actually be a part of it.
Jamie and Kamil were in charge of one of the baddie characters in the game by animating it in Photoshop.
Myself and Shane were in charge of drawing out the concept designs for the characters and enemies in the game. Jake was the head of the production of the game by sorting out if everyone was completing their tasks set out to them and that he was also in charge of building the game together by using GameMaker on his Laptop.
Week 2 –
I came up with the idea of setting different stages that the main character starts at almost Mario-esque in a way. The start being the character only being able to attack with their body with a single jump to then progress into another form with arms and the ability to use a melee attack and the final form will be set to utilize long ranged attacks.
So with that I went on to start concepting the main character in his different forms. Kasra sat with me and gave me a few pointers and Ideas but I did all the designing and incorporated my final ideas into the design. I was pretty proud of the outcome for our little disease ridden protagonist.
Week 3 –
Once the third week came I finished the final form of the character and went over the original designs in fine-liner so I could scan them in later. Using my scanner at home was the original idea in order to save time though I used the Photo Booth application on the mac and it turned out better than I expected. Afterward I started to design one of the three enemies we agreed the character would be able to kill using a set of skills depending on one of its three forms.
Week 4 –
I started the design of the Second Bad Guy during this week. I was told this character was meant to be stocky and killed with a melee attack so I thought the addition of boxing gloves gave the image off quite well. I also added how I wanted the walk animation to look with his arms moving in a cycle along with the bottom of his body.
Week 5 –
I was told to digitise the Bad Guy during this lesson so I began with scanning in the picture and going over the side drawing as this is a 2D game. This was quite a complicated process as I had to make sure I was zoomed in enough to just be working with pixels using a 150×150 canvas. So I began with the outline of the character first but made sure to separate it by the different parts of the body.
Here is the Before and After picture.
Week 6 – I went ahead and animated the digitised bad guy. This was quite a complicated step as I had never animated through photoshop but the whole process was quite easy to learn and so with that I set off and did so. The only problem I had run into whilst animating the character was that because I went over the character with a stroke and and added a second tone, Whenever I moved certain parts of the body it glitched into the character. The quick fix for this was doubling up the frames and making sure the character ran smooth and this took a little while to do but I was more than happy with the results.
Week 7 – During this week I spent a lot of time fixing Kasra’s digitisation of the main guy. Due to there being no way of the character being able to move as he didn’t split up the character using the different parts of him. The colouring was also messed up quite a bit and that effected the frame by frame animation. There were two variations that I was told to animate and complete on Photoshop and that was the Character with arms and without. This was because the character was meant to earn these arms after jumping on an enemy’s head.
Week 8 – This week I was given a completely different role by our project manager which was to go with Kamil to record two sounds for the Wall of Death animation and the Bad Guy I worked on’s punching noise. We hired out some equipment from the Sound Technicians which was a Solid State Recorder and a Microphone. The final result was recorded in the bathroom in the sink with a bag and the tap running. I then ran it through Logic audio editor and made a few alterations to make it sound more accurate. We exported the audio files and handed them over to Jake to embed into the game.
Week 9 – On the ninth week I was asked by Jake to design part of the starting level using the tiles that Francesco, Kamani and Javougn made. The Game Maker engine was really easy to navigate through once the Tiles were imported as objects and with that a simple left click and drag the platforms began to form. Once I did that Jake coded the character and made sure the impact wouldn’t kill him and with that the character was able walk.
Nekrojar of Design 