Meet Envy - Nellyvision

When I went down to TIGA's Game Hack in London I teamed up with Nellyvision, a small company based in Brighton, to make a 24 hour game. Some one in the team had the idea of making a game that could help foreigners to learn some basic Chinese, as he was about to get married to his Chinese girlfriend and they were planning to visit. 

There was not much time to develop ideas as the coding and graphics had to be done as quick as possible. 

I ended up being in charge of character design, animation and props. 

The idea of the game called 'Envy' was about this little english girl that gets lost in a Chinese city. With her imagination, she starts creating and transforming her surrounding into an adventure, where by writing come chinese characters she unlocks areas of the city, defeats monsters and solves puzzles.  

I developed some moodboard that later on where compared to the ones Steve made (there was two of us doing the graphics). I thought about making a populated city, with loads of interaction with the objects, maybe with a grey scale of colours and enhance the ones that will help you out with colour. Character wise, I liked the idea of line-less characters, rich in colour, and enhancing the idea of her being a foreigner with loads of contrast in her eyes and hair. 

The development of the character when from stylised/cartoon-ish to a more japanese/manga style (which suits my style easier) and started being a boy to the final concept of a girl (gender wasn't that important I suppose). 

The animation wasn't good if I'm honest. I think it was the pressure of making a decent animation for a walking cycle in pretty much a couple of hours that put me off. Also it needed a jumping animation and a burning one, because she was to fight some dragons along the way. 

It was quite fun in some respects as I've never been to one of these events before, yet i would have love more time to work on it. 

User Interface (UI) experience - out of the comfort zone

Since I joined Nellyvision as a game artist, I was put to work on two small side projects; one was the remake of the game we made for last's year Game Hack called Envy and another school pixel project. I was pretty happy coming out with concepts for it, but then they asked me to help them with a more urgent project they had in hand. Part of the Football ManagerZone website wanted to have the game on an mobile app. When I joined they already had some work done, but pretty much it required a completely make over as the icons looked outdated. I thought I was just going to be working on it temporally, yet I ended up staying with it. 

I must confess, I hate football... sports is not my thing and football is one of the worst ones, I know nothing! 

Either way, I had to do it. User Interface is something I've always wanted to try; it involves a lot of graphic design knowledge as they entire project has to look unified. Fonts are something we couldnt get involved with it as the app will have multiple language translations so we were quite restricted in that sense, which at the end it worked better for my benefit. 

Getting me out of my comfort zone has been more positive than what I expected, as I've learn to work with topics that I'm not familiar/interested with. Had to do some research to understand what I'm doing and get involved with sport trends for colours and shapes.  The app is still in process but I'll put some screenshots from the testing app we share within the company. 

One of the biggest challenges is learning to work in a non destructive way in photoshop, keep everything properly named and organized. Working along with programmers involves a matter of them testing and telling you 'reduce the size of ___button by 2 pixels high' for example, so you have to be ready with all the files and make quick changes without affecting the over all look. So far I've done over 100 icons and buttons and more to come. Certainly is something you have to do quick.

Certainly been a challenge and has put me on interest to keep updating designing trends. (definitely still don't like football...) 

TIGA GameHack 2013

Not long ago I got in contacted by Steve Cusi whose a graduated a generation above mine and who I met on a couple of Game Republic socials. He asked me if I wanted to be part of a team leaded by Nellyvision and support him on TIGA's GameHack.
This game jam was a 24 hour event in which you had to deliver a playable product under certain categories each with different requirements. One member of the team is going to china soon, and because I was the only new member of the team it seamed that they already had a concept in mind; a platform game that aims to teach Chinese. This was certainly not easy as it is a complicated language, but we were determined to not include any English at all. Just like we felt when we where thinking on how to target this subject, we decided to go for a foreign little girl who gets lost in the streets of China. She doesn't understand the language or characters so her imagination is the only thing that will get her around.

An so we arrived on Saturday morning having a small reception followed by the introduction of the different categories. I was surprised of the amount of people that where there! more than 35 teams where just in the same building from 3 to 6 members each, and also this jam was running along at the same time at the Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. It was pretty scary to hear that most teams are quite recurrent to this kind of events and that some previous winners were among the teams.

 (yei with my super blurry pictures)
The official jam started at 11 am finishing at 11 am on Sunday. It felt pretty hardcore, but at the same time I was impressed of how well organized it was; there was more food that you could eat, tea and coffee at all times and even resting areas for those who needed a power nap. At first I didn't know what to expect as this was my first event, so I brought with me heavy clothing, sleeping bag and provisional snacks; my idea was of a big cold warehouse. Lovely surprise to find that Pinewood Studios provided us with a lovely place to work! (it was like a big mansion!)
Nisha Valand, who organised the whole event was there the whole time and incredibly supportive by having everything we needed and cheering people up.

My part on the role of making assets ended up creating and animating Envy, the main character. Pretty shocked to think that the animation had to be hand drawn and that I had to do it as quick as possible to start helping with the rest of the assets. The concept started as a boy, but taking in count that there weren't many girls at the competition we decided to go for a girl. colour scheme and composition might not have been the best but there was a lot of pressure on finishing it quickly.

I had to tile the animation in a way that suited the coders, something I've seen before but never done myself. Another factor was having to work with very specific resolutions all along.

After finishing the character (say it was finished, but it had so much to be polished!) I went to create as many assets as possible. Some of them where important part of the game play, so the had to have a small animation, some others where just used as platforms.

It certainly was a whole different experience to see how much you can do in such a short period of time. The game had some complicated mechanics as it was thought to be used on touch devices, such as drawing chinese characters on the screen on the right order to pass the level. It was far from finishing, but we managed to get something playable for the three minute demostration at the end. 

Seeing the work of everyone else made me realised many  things about where I was standing and what I need to achieve. Certainly something to look in the future and improve in time. There where many great games out there, certainly some that might as well be already a game on it's own. It was probably the lack of sleep that put me in a negative mood by thinking that we weren't cut out for any nominations, but oh! suprice to hear the team's name being awarded for the Most Awesome Game! 

Couldn't believe it! it was awkward to stand in front of people and get a picture and stuff. To this point I can't even remember what we won, but it was sure enough to know that our efforts where so worth it! (a day of motion capture ...somewhere...or something like that).

We came back home straight away and by the time I went to bed it was nearly 40 hours without sleep...certainly not something I would to every weekend, but will definitely make sure to go at least once a year! :D 

The coders wanted to tweak the game a bit more so hopefully I'll have a web version to post soon ;) 

Thanks Nellyvision for the oportunity!!!