As promised last time here is some item artwork that I’ve been working on. The larger ones being used for the item details screen and the smaller ones being used in the inventory list screen.
Items that you will be able to find and use.
So far I’ve been keeping the exact details of the game a little hush hush until I’ve got a full working prototype but I’m sure looking at the items available you can glean a little bit of info about what the game is.
This past few weeks I’ve spent finalising the design of the primary foe in the game and incurring Wacom claw by drawing a pain staking 34 different frames of animation for the beast to be used in the fight screens. Here’s a few for you to check out…
Alien artwork used in fight screens.
I’m currently working on a load of inventory artwork which I will no doubt post up soon after they are done, but at some point in the next few weeks I’ll also try and upload a more detailed concept of the Alien for you to take a gander at.
Until then, enjoy!
Here’s some slightly older artwork of the main game character which I’ve realised wasn’t on the blog up until now. The first is for use in cinematic cut scenes.
Player art used in cinematic cut scene events.
The second is a piece of concept artwork done to try and figure out what the lead character was going to look like, there were many sketches drawn before arriving at this point and the character evolved slowly as the project has progressed.
Concept artwork used in developing the main characters look and style.
Hopefully this should show what I was trying to achieve on a smaller scale with the sprites in the previous post.
It’s been rather quiet around these parts just lately but that should be changing very soon and to kick things off here’s some new artwork I’ve been creating for the main characters sprite animations during fight screens.
Player artwork used in fight screens when switching cover.
Things have been progressing nicely while finishing the work for hire contracts I’ve been working on as well as having a week off to go snow boarding. A lot of the updates to the game have been programming and tool related which isn’t very exciting visually hence the lack of updates. For those interested the game is now building for Android though I can’t create the APK as the game is already too big for the free version of Xamarin, I’ve programmed the new cut scene engine to be used for fight screen intros and story related stuff. I’ve also created a script based tool for animating and exporting XML for the cut scene panel artwork and animation curves. The other good news is that Firing Pin is now a member of Microsofts BizSpark Programme which gives some neat benefits including free copies off Visual Studio Pro and a 12 month Windows 8 developer account… Yay!
Until Next Time!
I now have the project building for the Windows 8 Store which coupled with the Windows Phone 8 and Windows Desktop variations means the entirety of Windows 8 is now covered.
Well, I think that’s enough porting for a while! Back to the actual game!
Progress has been slow of late so updates have been a little thin on the ground.
I’m still busy working on the game where I can however I’ve mainly been doing work for hire with the lovely guys over at Fat Pebble on a couple of top secret projects which have given me some very helpful Android and iOS development experience. I’ve also been helping to design and create a soon to be open shopping site for designer and vintage women’s clothing which goes by the name of Evie Knight. As you can see time dedicated to the game has been fairly minimal but that gives me a bit more cash in the bank to rest easy.
So what’s been done? Well the game is now fully ported over from orthogonal tile maps to isometric with some new artwork to boot and it certainly looks massive amounts better than before. I’m making good head way on saving the state of the world for when you exit the game and I’ve been doing a lot of background house cleaning code wise so it’s better organised for when I expand it to new platforms.
Which leads me to the other bunch of work I’ve been doing… porting! I’ve been getting ready and starting to port the game using MonoGame to all the platforms I’m hoping to build for, it’s been going well if not for a few hiccups along the way.
I spent a good few nights setting up my PC to quad boot into all four operating systems which I need to test and build with, this involved buying copies of Mac OSX and Windows 8 and a lot of tampering! It now successfully boots into Windows 7, Windows 8, Ubuntu and OSX Mountain Lion so I have the ability to test everything which is great!
I now have Xamarin 2.0 installed with a semi working version of the Android port however the game is currently too big for the Free version which is a minor blockage… I was so excited to get it deployed to a device as well!
I’m looking at the Windows 8 Metro port today and the Windows Phone 8 port is currently in progress, unfortunately the emulator doesn’t run on my machine so I need to hold off for a few weeks until I get my hands on a new phone to deploy to… fun times!
That’s a lot of text for a quick update… oh well!
It appears I have started the new year with a bang… the bang being my brain exploding as I try to convert the games tiling map code over from the easy peasy orthographic style of mapping to the much more head hurting isometric style.
It’s taken me a couple of days to really get anywhere solid, however now the game is rendering the map on screen in “roughly” the correct position and updating correctly as you move, hurrah! I think I may have even developed a new technique for rendering tile maps as the usual diamond and staggered ways weren’t quite cutting it, I feel an explanation of that will be coming later. There are still some kinks to work out before I can tick it as done but it’s nice knowing that I will soon be able to get working away on some decent world art tiles.
Here’s a comparison of the place holder orthographic art along with my rather neater looking isometric art test. Can you guess which is which 😉
How the world is changing from orthographic to isometric
Until next time… Over & Out!
Kicking off the development blog I have a few images of how the user interface screens are currently looking.
The aim at the moment is to create a playable prototype or proof of concept, I’ve spent most of the time so far programming the core game mechanics and up until now there hasn’t been anything that visual to show. The games user interface is the most fully developed area of the game art wise at present, the dimensions are intended for mobile phone resolution however to cut down on development time I’ve locked the desktop version of the game to the same sizes as the mobile format.
In terms of details of the game you will have to stay tuned, for now I’m just going to say its an RPG with a hint of Rogue Like in there and it’s targeted at the main mobile, tablet and desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, iOS, Windows Phone).
Prototype Inventory Screen
Prototype Equipment Screen
Prototype Item Details Screen
Prototype Container Contents Screen
Prototype Storage Screen
Prototype Player Status Screen
Over And Out!
Firing Pin Games are go!
Starting tomorrow this will be the new development blog for Firing Pin Games and will detail the progress of the Kickstarter project which is due to start funding in 2013.
Fire In The Hole!