• Dad n’ Me
• Cannon Bods
• Portal Defender

Dad n’ Me

Dad n’ Me (DnM) is a multi-level, side-scroll, smash and bash game from Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp. Wearing a white mask, one plays as the purple biped beating and bullying kids. The player can interact with the environment like picking and throwing elements or exploding them by punching it. DnM also features a  mini-soccer game which provides good game-play variation. As of today, the game has received over 15 million game plays and has been well received by the Newgrounds community.

Studying the user-experience flow of DnM, this game has a large number of stopping screens. This is probably because the game art assets were updated later to accommodate new information. The updated splash and end pages of the game serves as a callout box to the release of the console game by the same creators. Both the intro animations and the death animation are well integrated into the story.

Cannon Bods

Cannon Bods is matching game at heart, where one has to shoot matching pirates out of a cannon to the parachuting pirates raining from the sky. Use the mouse to control the angle and strength of the cannon shots and create a chain reaction with well placed pirates that rebound off the edge causing more damage. The game is filled with a few surprises and is worth a good casual game. As of today, the game has received over 186k  game plays.

Looking at the user-experience flow of Cannon Bods, the starting experience contains two advertisements and the gamer previews the splash. The game requires at least three clicks to get to the game-play.

Portal Defender

Portal Defender is a hack-n-slash side scroll game that pays homage to Castle Crashing the Beard and Pico Blast. One gets to play as Tom Fulp, Dan Paladin or unlock any of the remaining four players. Using a variety of moves, fight a large range of bad guys and mini bosses. The game has received over two million game-plays.

For a game with a well-deserved long play, Portal Defender can be justified for it’s relatively large number of screens before game-play. The end animation is very simple and gives the user the choice to jump back to the character selection page. This offer the gamer a variety of choices with these mixed game variables.

Studying these there games, we can point out that all the three games have a bunch of screen stoppers that serves as a marketing/ad-revenue generating model. This is a necessity as it is one of the many ways to monetize  indie-based web games. I guess the big challenge for game designers is to find a good balance of UX and screen stoppers.The basic need to fulfill this requirement would be to create a smooth and uninterrupted game UX, yet be profitable to the developer.

KSM is a side scroller 2D pixel-style game with a multitude of enemies and equal number of special combo moves as the player hacks and slashes his way though the kingdom in search of treasures.

KSM is only a test game and will be made with Stencyl (Flash game maker). Working on this mini project would give me an opportunity to collaborate with other Stencyl behavior programmers and strengthen my knowledge on how to make a solid game with Stencyl.

Recently, Nate mailed saying that he’s uploading his documentary to Kickstarter, asking netizens of the Interbutt to help fund his movie. We spoke about other ways to get this message out there so that more people could support this project. My friend and I have been working on a concept to make this message go a bit more viral. We’re also on a tight deadline to get this completed before the Kickstarter deadline. (Project funding closes on September 1, 11:59 pm EDT)

The concept is quite simple: one plays as Nate, the Indie(ana) Jones who is being chased by this big boulder of time to get all the funding he needs for his project. He needs to collect every little gem he comes across and avoid pitfalls and dodge objects that come across his way.

After we worked out a list of art and animation assets to be made, I roughed out some concept art for the game play and dived right into the style that I wanted the game to look like. First targeting the character designs, turnarounds and run cycle.

Now Nate doesn’t look anything like the character and I felt that I really needed to tweak the art style or do a completely different approach to make the character look more like the reference. Deciding to go 8-bit style, I was able to get Indie to look exactly like Nate…
For the technically curious, Pixel Tools, v2.0 pixel plugin by the neuroscientist Patrick Mineault, is a boon to Flash artists/animators everywhere. I was able to work around the bug that kept crashing Flash.

This game style is a bit new to me as I haven’t worked much on this patience-draining-yet-worth-every-second art approach.

Will keep you posted on further updates.

]]> http://www.devilsgarage.com/analysis/everything-by-everyone/feed/ 3 http://www.devilsgarage.com/analysis/project-x-game-development/ http://www.devilsgarage.com/analysis/project-x-game-development/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:32:52 +0000 Diablo http://www.devilsgarage.com/?p=2721

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The character went through a bit more evolution and I fine-tuned the colors so it’s easy to animate. I decided not to use strokes or lines so as to keep the animation easy and that way the turnaround time for the assets would be quicker.

As much as I really didn’t like WordPress, I never thought I could pull off this whole website in under two week without the help of the Interbutt, WP, everyone’s philanthropic contributions, plugins and themes.

Most recent updates: Other than the fact that a good portion of the site has been revamped, do check in for new content over the next few weeks. I also understand that a lot of the earlier posts have broken links and I’m working on correcting all that.

Here are some initial concepts I was leaning towards when redesigning this site.

The biggest challenge while working on the layouts was to create an intuitive navigation that was easy to understand and always had scope for expansion.

It was this layout design (below) that I felt best suited the new design. I dropped the Print and Illustration links and combined the content under a Design category.

I received an email from Blogspot saying they’ll be dropping support for FTP-based blogs as they’ve come to realize that it doesn’t make monetary sense for them to provide such services. Thus, the Devil’s Garage blog … will yet again be moving on to another service. Readers may not be seeing any immediate updates in the next coming weeks.

~a

Update: looks like I got this thing up and running, super fine! A big thanks to Janice and Sean for all the help.

Clock Day is celebrated every 15th of August (since 2001) on Newgrounds. It started when a user named StrawberryClock turned in his flash submission which contained merely the letter “B.” This submission, as much as it was blammed, withstood the blams of time and has churned out an Internet subculture. From these bytes of silliness grew the phenomenon of the creative Clock Crew.

According to history books, before StrawberryClock submitted “B,” he turned in “A” which was blammed to the brink of oblivion. Thus, my project is based on that submission by StrawberyClock.

It’s a short animation that personifies the letter “A” and A’s bleak, short-lived future it faced by the forces that bind Newgrounds.

Below are some of the pre-production works that went into this project. Enjoy!

First, I started off by penciling some basic shapes to get a good feel for the character and simplify his figure.

Upon nailing down the final design, I decided to go straight ahead and not do the turnarounds, something I essentially do on all projects.

After thumbnailing the concept storyboard, I dove right into a tight animatic with Jedadiah’s Pardon? (Theme) from the Audio Portal. Songs that didn’t make it into the list or were dropped last minute are the following; a salute to these talented audio slaves:

CJ’s: Ghosts of the Past
DanPaladin’s: PEAR
Zeke30695′s: Lilium (Music Box)
Jedadiah’s: Reprise and Finale

The Clock Crew in the mean time have finalized on this year’s preloader, which I’ve modified to fit my animation.

Getting to the end of this post, I had fun working on this project. The total time it took me from script to screen was approximately 12 hours, broken over a few nights. Getting technical, this animation was made in Flash CS3 (bloody thing crashed a lot of times), the background texture is from CGTextures.com which is a collective maintained by Marcel Vijfwinkel, also used Photoshop for editing and optimizing the final image. Audacity was the weapon of choice for sound editing.

I’m submitting the finished animation this Saturday to Newgrounds and by next week, it will go up on thedevilsgarage.com too. So for now, I shall leave you with two stills from the animation.

Shout-out to Sean “Chains” Mckenzie who helped me out with that strange language called ActionScript.

Update: Death of “A” has been featured on the Newgrounds homepage! It got 15,000 hits in the first 24 hours; most excellent!

Clink, the pet bot of Brandissimo!, Inc.! was created to introduce the company to its viewers and clients. Thinking out of the box gets Clink into a lot of trouble, but hey! Who could ever be upset with a cute lil bot?

This post contains design and development of the character and alternate storyboards and animatics that were pitched.

Some doodles for this creation. (Inspired by R2D2?!)

All robots manufactured at the Garage go through a color test.

Complete turnaround of the character and rigged for animation.

To watch the final intro animation, go to Brandissimo.

I still don’t understood all the features WordPress offers, but I guess that’s all in time.