We’ve been hard at work on adding more levels and content to Monster Words and Monstruo Pallabras. ‘Soon’ we’ll be shipping both. Here’s a background we did for the monster’s home world:
I think there are a couple distinct (and hopefully complementary) art styles in the game. I think of it as evolving, meshing the style with the game. Some of the artwork is done in Illustrator and painted in Photoshop, some of it is made completely in Photoshop. A large amount of it is done on paper first:

A lot of great artists are able to sketch out on the monitor, which I have yet to be able to do effectively. I can’t put my finger on why I prefer paper. I think it might be the higher ‘resolution’. I have a tendency to iterate quickly on paper, and I use an animation desk (technically, I just use just the disc most of the time) to draw things rough, and clean them up fast. Here’s the rough for the above image:

And this is from the roughs below. I iterated over a few different concepts before deciding upon a flatter composition. I initially went more panoramic, but felt that I could get a feeling of depth by using simple geometric shapes and fit more with the existing style.

Ultimately I drew it about 5 times. I showed a friend the cleaned up pencil drawing, then an hour and a half later the final piece. ‘Damn, that was fast’, he said but he didn’t see the hours I spent looking at ideas for composition, drawing little doodles, and staring at blank paper. Which is why I thought it might be interesting to write more of a ‘behind the scenes’ post.

There’s a lot of art that doesn’t make it, even though it might be cool:

This was a potential character within the game, but it didn’t make the cut. What replaced it? The new update will be out, and you’ll see soon enough!

This is a very, very small demo on how to do a simple color cycle using Cocos2d. Sometimes its necessary to use multiple color models to get things done. This code uses the HSL, hue, saturation, lightness color model to choose a color of a similar hue, and tween between the values.

Why use HSL over RGB? Essentially it looks better, and it can be more consistent. If you were to randomly choose two RGB values and tween between them, it is easy to get very bright or very dark images, the end result being very spastic. What would be ideal is if you could limit the range of possible colors to exist within a certain brightness level. It can also be helpful to define just how much saturation could be added, also. Enter HSL. But how do you convert between the two color models? Its not too difficult, but there is a bit of math involved, which has already been solved many times over.

Note the difference between HSL and HSB (aka HSV) in the above image. In HSB, 100% saturation is full saturation regardless of brightness. In HSL, 100% brightness trumps 100% saturation, and so it is better to use 50% brightness. HSB is a more common format, and if you use Photoshop a lot, you’re probably familiar with it.

Here’s the nugget of example code from the project:

You can grab the source code from GitHub here!

Valve likes to contrast bold colors, universal symbols and minimal design aesthetic with hyperrealistic art. And that’s exactly how I would describe their office. Yesterday Penny Arcade Report (they have a report, too? Wasn’t a TV show and video game enough?) gave us a great tour of the Valve offices. I felt the interior designers did a great job of translating the style of Valve’s games.

I wonder how often someone makes the joke that they just need to let off some steam in the office?

I’ve been attempting to play Hero Academy here for the last week. I still don’t know what to make of this game. There are things that really bother me, for example, this guy’s eyes:

Separated at birth?

I’ve been playing ONE, yes, ONE game for the past week. I cancelled another because one was already more than I wanted to  play. Finally I went ahead and turned notifications on so I could finish the thing.

GO GO GO

And I guess I didn’t understand that you can use some potion to ultra-buff your guy to destroy your opponent’s crystal in two turns (which is what ultimately happened). There are a lot of things that I don’t understand about Hero Academy. Its use of a font that is too close to Comic Sans for my liking or its awesome ads.

It’s ‘tutorial’ is very well tuned to provide lots of fodder for the core players who know what the hell is going on. This is a good tactic because any pvp game needs a constant influx of players into the ecosystem for the hardcore paying users to pwn.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure if I like Hero Academy or it annoys me. Perhaps I could like it, because there is a good game in there. And the dwarves look really fun:

Annoyingness:

a) its a very distracting game. You need to have notifications on to play this. And I think the expectation is you’ll have a lot of games running to make up for the very short playtime. More games == more distractions.

b) Non-existent tutorial == no idea what’s happening == pwnage. I’m not sure if I want to continue playing because I got pwned, or because its a genuinely good game. I kind of feel like the game is tricking me into wanting to understand the system by slapping my hand.

c) That dude’s eyes. They’re just creepy.

So…fun…or annoying? Aahhhh….who am I kidding? I’m going to play this game, and you know it.

Another Tucson developer (who I’ve never met) has released their new game Pizza Vs. Skeletons. Touch Arcade has a more in-depth preview of the game up here.

I was unaware of how pizza and skeletons interacted. The overall mechanic and the fun of smashing skeletons is very satisfying. The length of the levels are nice and short. I love seeing the passion and fun of making games come through in the final product, and this has it in spades.

The main criticism I have for the game would be that the tilt controls are a bit too ‘floaty’ to me, and I’m not sure that I’d be able to play for extended sessions. Rolando’s controls were also tilt-based and didn’t seem to have this issue, but perhaps the size of the pizza annoys my brain somehow.

Secondly the ‘decoration’ mode doesn’t allow me to preview on the pizza before purchasing, which is a minor issue.

Overall, I’m enjoying the uniqueness of the graphics, and the variety of levels is quite entertaining. Its a lot of crazy eye candy, and I think part of the appeal is seeing what the heck they are going to do next!

I don’t know how, but I got sucked into watching Notch play Day of the Tentacle for about a half an hour the other day. I see a restraining order in my future, because now I’ll be watching him this weekend Mojamming!

When I last checked the poll, it looks like they’re going to be making a steampunk real-time strategy title. Here’s my break down of Mojang’s art strategy based on their poll:

Steampunk – Bronzish boxes.

Post Apocalyptic – Gunmetallish boxes.

Fantasy – Purplish boxes.

WWII – Olive drab boxes.

Candy Land – White and Red stripy boxes.

Modern – Glowing wireframe boxes.

Ancient Egypt – Dusty boxes with lots of sand particle effects.

Horror – Creepers.

Telltale Games has a great sense for fun. I initially picked up their ‘Bone’ series (based on Jeff Smith’s awesome comic). Their reboots of Monkey Island and Sam & Max are also great. But…Back to the Future?

Get ready to see some serious shit.

Well, Telltale Games is giving out Back To The Future Episode 1 on iPad which is exactly the kind of marketing ploy that hooks me. Dammit. Now as soon as I get finished with Ghost Trick I’m going to probably be shelling out for more Marty and Doc.

Travel through time....with style!

The game shows the polish of a game dev who’s been doing this for quite a while. The cinematics, story, and characterization are spot on. The feel is very true to the series, and the voice work is pretty good. Ok, its not pretty good, its great. Christopher Lloyd, freaking CHRISTOPHER LLOYD is playing Doc, and AJ Locascio’s Marty McFly is fantastic.

I’m looking forward to playing the rest of the episodes, as it seems that the game has a lot of support and talent from the people who made the original movies as great as they are. Bob Gale, the original writer was involved, and Michael J. Fox also plays a role apparently. This one slipped under my radar, maybe it did for you, too. Check it out!

One of the biggest mistakes game developers make is assuming they understand their audience. I think this is also a big debate, as game developers, for the most part, just want to make games for ‘gamers’. This can include postmodern or ‘meta’ games, and one of our levels in Monster Words is game-themed. Here’s how well its performing in the game:

What you see in that graph is a 20% drop in players after they hit the ‘gamer’ level. I showed this to a couple game devs, and they couldn’t understand. How could a game-themed level be the poorest performing level in the entire game?

I think this points to a common issue. It makes sense to make the game you want to play. Not the game that others want to play. Its a constant challenge to explain the values of ‘casual’ gamers to ‘core’ developers. But the above graph shows the difference can be huge.

How much you like the story will determine how much you like Ghost Trick:Phantom Detective. If talking to lamps, pomeranians and giant spermy-looking ghosts is your thing, then just go pick it up. If not, go pick it up anyway, because the first couple chapters are free.

Minor characters are quirky and have interesting views on women's fashion.

The gameplay is a unique and quirky mix of ‘room escape’ and adventure mechanics. Unlike many room escape games, this one has yet to have any unintuitive and annoying mechanics. And unlike pretty much every room escape game I’ve played, there are people. Lots and lots of people. There are main characters, minor characters and bit roles. They have depth, and sadness, and joy. And from a technical perspective the motion capture and animation of the characters is spot on.

Personal hygiene is not this guy's strong suit.

There’s a lot to be said for wacky japanese games. Quirky characters and sheer randomness work well in games. Particularly because the rules of a game don’t easily mesh with the real world. Having characters with bizarre powers and weird environments makes it less arbitrary.

This is probably not what you are thinking it is.

The Nintendo DS-ness of this game shows through in its rather poor control scheme and low-res graphics. But with those issues aside, I’d definitely check it out!

Tim Schafer‘s games are idiosyncratic, eclectic, and always laugh out loud funny. But too often he’s come up against the difficulty of funding games. This funding problem then leads to the issue of editorial control:

With a triple-A game, when there’s so much money invested, the risks for a publisher are huge. The more money you ask for from an investor, the more that you have to give up. No matter where in the world your publisher is based, they will remove features that could potentially alienate any users when the stakes are so high.

But we know what Tim Schafer (and don’t forget Ron Gilbert) are good at: the best adventure games ever made.

Yesterday they had $0 in funding. As of this writing they had double their requested budget for the game. That is worthy of a pun: Truly a double fine moment.

Update: According to Joystiq, this is the fastest funded Kickstarter project ever!