Category Archives: Makin’ a game, yo

Developing Treachery in Beatdown City – 1st developer diary of sorts

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First I wanted to show off this amazing art that my wife created for the female lead, Lisa. After initially designing her my wife went in and painstakingly created a beautiful color pencil & ink drawing of Lisa akin to the one of Brad, one of the two male leads, back in June.

I then went in and reduced her work to simplified pixel art for use in game for wherever it might go (thinking Character Select screen for now). That process was fairly tricky and required a lot of interpretation of the original art and ultimately picking what looked best in the harshness of 5 color pixels.

At this moment a lot of the game’s art is done, but there is a ton more to do. There are a lot of locales and characters in TiBC and we really don’t want the game to feel too “samey” so we’re trying to avoid simple palette swaps and the like.

Development of the game has been going well, especially in the last month or two. We had a prototype build running in Game Maker in October that gave us a lot of great feedback on what we needed to change, add, etc. from playtesting it a bunch. Thankfully the game was fun! Continue reading →

A new enemy: Evolution of the Prepster

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A while back I had an idea for this kinda generic preppy looking enemy. Kinda like the epitome of the vacuous dude-bro bar hopping gentrification machine represented by Bradley Cooper’s character in a lot of movies. A pink polo and khakis seemed appropriate along with his hands up covering his face. So one day I spat out this terrible sketch you see and afterward that sketch turned into a piece of sprite art that I liked the idea of but wasn’t really happy with.

A couple of weeks ago I took another stab at the art while walking around Macy’s:

I think I did a much better job at expressing how I wanted him to look, adding examples, etc. and that new sketch in turn helped me re-envision how the prepster should look. I wanted him to look like a guy you wanted to hit, and I think the end result was fairly successful. Just shows that even if you have an existing style, creating sprite art from bad or no actual art can lead to creating something you won’t be happy with.

I present you with screenshots (!) for Treachery in Beatdown City!

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Now, bear in mind, this is all very early. The HUD is nowhere near complete and there’s a bunch of debug text and back end stuff present for tracking how things are working… but right now the fight is playable, and you can beat up a couple of guys… if they don’t kick your ass first.

First screen, showing Brad pounding John’s face in. Right now we’re just playtesting using a single enemy sprite, but we will avoid having the same enemies together in fights, or if an enemy does repeat, one will be carrying a weapon.

Second screen shows Brad on the opposite end of the beatdown stick. Continue reading →

Sprite animation: 2 badass women showing off their fighting skills

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First up is an enemy character, a blond haired, leopard print wearing scrapper… I don’t have a name for her yet. As with most of the enemy designs, she’s loosely based on a quick sketch I made of a person I saw walking down the street one day. I added some purple here and there and BOOM, new character. I went back and forth with the hair between keeping the wavy fro vs. a flat top (which seems all the rage these days, where are we, 1991?), but I think it came out pretty well.

Her one-two attack is a nail scratch attack that can cause a bleeding type status effect, influenced almost completely by my brief stint with Marvel Avenger’s Alliance. Status effects are going to play heavily in the pacing of battles in Treachery in Beatdown City.

Next is a character you’ve already seen, Lisa Santiago.

Here she’s showing off her boxing/MMA roots with boxing style jabs followed by an uppercut plus some MMA style leg kicks to slow her opponent down and a clinch grab followed by some face punches to that no good punk (who also doesn’t have a name yet).

Hope you like the animations, let me know what you think in the comments or on twitter!

“the universe within…” is now available on the iPad app store!

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I’ve been working in a relative closed box these days trying to finish a bunch of stuff, and had to put any and all blog posts on hold, but I am proud to say the Global Game Jam game I worked on, the universe within… is now up for FREE on the iPad app store. Check it out here.

And we submitted it to indiecade… who knows, someone might like it there too!

Next post to come the weekend before E3, stay tuned!

A closer look at the game creation process for Glorious Ending Cinematic – Molyjam 2012

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You may have seen this image before (hell it’s 2 posts down) as a part of my thoughts on the MolyJam 2012. After creating the header image I realized it was better suited for a post that was about the game itself and how I went from a vague tweet to a strangely twisted game concept, and finally, a “finished” thing all in a weekend, with only 2 guys with one computer working on it. Continue reading →

My side, side project: If I Were…

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When I came home from GDC I decided I was going to make a couple of games. One about a rampaging cactus, the other about how things would be if I could turn into a battletoad. I didn’t want to divert time from Treachery in Beatdown City, so I had to do this alone and rather than going with tried and true Game Maker, I decided to give Construct 2 a try (html 5 is fucking great and cross platform, as I learned from my team mate Vikram when working on the universe within…). Continue reading →