Branding - logo for everything

Something that I always tend to do is branding my ideas; give them logo, themes and anything that can help making it feel like a unified project. 

In the case of Sanctuary I tried to embraced the art nouveau/ Victorian style as much as possible, by keeping detail and lively colours. Of course this theme is subjective and didn't stick to the rules of any style, but that's mainly to give it a twist of my own creation. 

For the logo at fist I wanted to make something quite stylish, and went all the way with the idea that I liked the most: 

I knew it was saturated, but I think I thought about it far too much to the little flaw on it's creation: it's unreadable! 

People who looked at it just couldn't work it out at first, so what's the point of a logo if it's not easy to recognise. At this point I decided to stop working on it and get rid of it. 

In the mean time I also created little logos for the characters, maybe a bit unnecessary, but I could't help myself. 

I wanted to use iconic imagery from what the mythical creatures behind their creation represent. Kamea has a Unicorn, Edric a medieval dragon. I used a lion for Azmer as Wemics are not common part of mythology. For Teles I didn't wanted to use a mermaid as it would drive people to think he was a girl, instead I used a jewel in the shape of a water drop, to represent a bit of the royalty in his family line. Alba and Kera where the difficult ones; nymphs don't have a representation other than nature so my first thought was flowers, then I thought about the sun and the moon, but I decided to put them as birds, mainly because I didn't wanted to give away the idea of  the source of their powers straight away. 

I didn't really spent much time on these, so I know they could have done with a lot more work, but it was just to have them printed with their names on. 

 After a bit I came back to remake the logo into one of the ideas I had from the beginning. It's more simple and it doesn't have any fancy shapes. Because it was just the word, I wanted to work more on it than just keep it in simple colours. At the end I tried to make it look like a fairy tale book cover by simulating gold and leather in the background. Not sure if I did it right, but at some point before adding more details I thought about it having to be in pixel art as well, therefore I stop to avoid making my life more difficult.

Re-branding myself: new logo, new advertising

Now that I feel completely stressed out thinking about Uni work, my job and the dream job that I HAVE for personal reasons it all started to pile up and manifest as stress.

Certainly it's a difficult time for me, yet I've been trying to do what I can in order to sell myself as an artist to bigger game companies. Not only updating my work and CV, but I thought I wanted to fix a bit of the issues that I didn't like about my previous attempts: business cards. 

Yes, the ones I did before where quick and cheap, therefore I don't feel like talking bad about the printing company, but this time I wanted to create myself a new logo, and include it all my new stuff. 

Branding is always an easy way for people to identify and remember, therefore I wanted something personal, iconic and simple. (Obviously, a clover). I wanted to keep it simple and mixed the idea of calligraphy and those chinese stamps they use as signatures. 

After creating this I ended up designing new business cards using Moo.com as the provider, and also using the printfinity function where you can print as many different backs to the business cards, making them a kind of portfolio on a business card. Also, by buying this I got offer a 10% discount on any other product so I decided to go crazy and print some post cards that could work as an extension of my portfolio. 

The image bellow is the final design of the business cards, plus I ended up adding one extra to show some environment concept art. 

The quality of the printing was pretty decent and looking forward to give some away :) (not sure how to give the postcards without looking odd, but they are pretty... at least my mom will get one) 

Dialogue script

I knew from the beginning that I didn't have the time to achieve some kind of combat inside the level and keep the metroidvania/rpg/exploration at the same time. Keeping my usual tendency for going for flightless games, I opted to make it more narrative driver, or at least this level. If the game was to go further, I would love to add a combat mechanic, magic spells and power upgrades, but mainly because of the time it takes to make animation sprites, this level will be a small narrative quest.

When I was creating the main NPC and the main character I was picturing their voices and the kind of personalities they would have. They all have very unique characteristic and just like the main character, they have they're own unique qualities and defects. 

It's going to be hard tour triad them on a single sprite and on just one level; they're animation will be very basic due to time constrains so reflecting their personalities on a berthing idle-2/3 frame sprite is nearly impossible.

So, knowing that the dialogue would represent a crucial part to portraid a bit of the personalities, I didn't wanted the NPCs to be saying the same frase all the time so I decided to make a little script to have them saying a different conversation depending on where they are in the level. 

Because I couldn't get the text speed control via pressing a button, it will all have to be timed, so whe the player speaks to a character a bit of a mini event will take place and the conversation between Keara and the NPC will start.

I made my script in excel, as I thought I could organise them in cells per speech bubble and depending on the length I could time it more accurately and quickly.

Now I've never done any dialogue script, so I must admit I felt a bit silly by picturing different voices in my head and try to type it down. Hoping to avoid overly cliche frames and awful misspellings, I asked my friend Sarah for some assistance. She has her own manga project so I assumed she would be familiar with script making.

So far her corrections have been pretty helpful, but I can't add the text until I'm happy with the overall mechanics, otherwise testing will take up a lot more time.

Music ideas

Adam Fergler was kind enough to help me once again with the creation do a melody for the background of my game.

I've never been good to choose myself a soundtrack or even sound effects, but I do appreciate the importance of them.

I know Adam is busy with his own projects, therefore I never thought about anything different to a single simple melody looping in the background. 

After the first few days of talking about what kind of mood I was looking for the game, what the story was, the game play and the main characters personality, he started coming up with ideas of what could be done.

Because at this point I barely touched any sound related topics for the engine, I didn't know what restrictions I would encounter. My original IDE was to have a tune per stage of courage and simply fade in and out between them. 

After trying for a bit I couldn't find a way to make a smooth transitions and having sudden changes of music was not a good idea.

After some talking and considerations we came up with more practical ideas to represent Kamea's courage increase that in this level's case it increases 3 times plus the initial state:

A) have a the same melody 4 times with the exact timing, but with more and more instruments on each level. The idea was to have them all runnin at the same time in the background on mute and just turn the volume up after each courage checkpoint was reached. This created a kind of layering and would avoid an abrupt change of music.

B) have smaller melodies that sound good looping but that the ending of one is the beginning of the next one. With this method, we expected to be able to loop one until a courage point was reache, stop the looping and once the song is finish switch to the next one which then would loop until the next courage point is reach, and so on. 

I decided to make quick and rough testing playable levels to see if they would actually work. It turns out that the 'coding' behind it was pretty simple and managed to get both ideas to work.

Here's idea A and idea B

(Note that A doesn't line up properly, but that's because one song starts slightly later than the other, but the concept is there).
(Also! just noticed that you sometimes have to refresh at least once the browser window to get the audio working properly!) 

I think the easies way for Adam was to go for option B. He said he had more than one idea that he was already working on, more like Kamea's theme song! 

Maybe that melody will be used for the titles screen :D 

Really looking forward to hear more of it.

Evolution of engines

So far, the graphics in games is evolving at an alarming rate. Alarming for me as I feel that as soon as I'm making any progress on my artwork, the industry standards already moved on far beyond. The only thing that keeps me sane is knowing that usually what we see in games or demonstrations is the hard work of a team that has had the time and budget to do so.
Every time a new engine comes out or even a new version, I'm always impressed to see the new advances or possibilities. It certainly makes me want to try them out and make something as beautiful as what they do. It was only recently that I saw the new Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 Demos and I had to constantly remind myself that it is a group of professionals putting that together, otherwise I would lose my...cool.
The video below is UDK 4. UDK is not an engine that I've tried much; the only work I've done is export a mesh, textures, put lighting and get a turn table working. This is nothing compared to what apparently you can do now. I bet it requires more coding than what they make it look like, but certainly the fluids look absolutely amazing.


In the case of Unity 5 (below), I believe is catching up quickly with the other engines. The time where I tried Unity, I must admit, I wasn't very adventurous. I stuck to the basics at the time, and I remember having issues with importing animations and double sided textures with alphas. Not to blame the engine though, but it certainly looks like real time rendering quality has gone quite high.