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.