Traditional Drawings & Digital Drawings.

Task1 - Thumbnails,

For this task, I had to make thumbnails as images to be used in games. We started off with Alex making us play a really old game that he played as a child called rick dangerous (which I was naturally bad at) to show us the differences between how an object transaction between the many sprites which are attached to the object their might be. In the game the same sprite are used as tiles to make the background and edges of the level. Sprites are also layout as tiles as a huge map of sprites. Alex said this is useful when selecting sprites in game engines as all we have to do is crop it down.

Rick Dangerous Title Screen

After all that, Alex made us create our own game images and environments as thumbnails. The best part is we had to chose what type of game these images will be used in. I didn't know what to base the thumbnails that I will be making on, so I researched some really old school games. Many genres came up, for example puzzle, platforms and fighting. The games which I research where super Mario bro, worlds hardest game and the really old fighting games that you would get on console.
platformers and puzzle games where layed out simply and I wanted to challenge myself.




I personally liked the fighting genre, so I choose the fighting genre to make the thumbnails. I set a goal of creating at least 6 characters, 3 objects to make the game realistic and 2 backgrounds.

I started off by making the 1st 2 characters. The first one being a boy who special moves where fire related. The second character is  a girl and her special move are energy related. I made a template of both characters then worked on the moving animation. I learnt that I don't need to create the character as a flipped version because I can edit that on a computer.

To make life easier for myself I used tracing paper to recreate characters and change the perspective of the legs so it would look like the character was moving. Each character will have different strengths and weaknesses and I plan on making a profile for the character to be used for character selecting when game starts.



the 1st two character in development
(template)

I wanted these characters to fight in front of tourist attractions. So I made the 1st scenery of the Eiffel Tower, which isn't bad so far. I also made objects as tiles for  detail in the Eiffel Tower scenery. I made 1 fountain and 1 bush. I also made the player interface images. Sprites that show and informs the user about variables in the game, for example a win/loose/end screen, health points and the cool down bar for special moves. This relates to when the character weapons are fully recharged and they can do the special move again.

making the scenery and objects to be in game

Later on I decided to redraw everything and remove some stuff to make my thumbnails a lot more neater, I made it neater by re-organising every image I drew grouped together. The images i removed where the extra detail because i realised i can use the same battle scene  but the background could change.

After that I drew all my characters on one separate page, all scenery on a separate page. and all the user information interference are on one separate page. Now the only challenge i have is drawing all thumbnail onto one sheet of A3 paper, which is really difficult because  all my scenes are quite big. The scene i decided to draw where the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I didn't bother colouring the Taj Mahal because it was the worst scene i drew, I completely rejected the Taj Mahal.

scenery to be used in the background

I'm actually glad i made more scenes that i initially planned as it would make the game feel more realistic and interesting.When all the scenes where done i worked on the last 4 characters, i got lazy and reused some animation and body parts to make the last 4 characters. This however keeps the characters in a world which they all fit in and hopefully the players will be able to see the sync of the characters. All characters are given different strengths and weakness i want the game to have a feature where one character's weakness is another character strength  and it will make it better for the AI to play.

all characters thumbnails in coloured versions.

After making all my scenery, objects and characters, i had to decided one scene and one character for the final A3 thumbnail. i decided to use the Eiffel Tower scene and Character 1 for the  final A3 thumbnail. The reason why i chose the Eiffel tower was because it had alot of lines involved and i was able to use that to make it more pixely. I also tried making character 1 more pixely.  I did this by using sharp edges and diagonal lines. It still gave character one the rounded style i wanted however it didn't look smooth.



Eiffel tower as final A3

character 1 as Final A3

Task 2 - Digital Drawings. 

After I finalised my A3 sketches, I had to choose one which I would make a digital copy on the computer using Photoshop, the task required me to make the canvas size 1920*1080 pixels.

I decided to make character 1 as a digital drawing. To make the character I used a Wacom tablet, which is basically a drawings tablet.

 Drawing the character was really hard, because I wanted it to be as pixely as possible but my character wasn't pixely but more rounded square. When drawing the character I found it was hard because the canvas size was to small as the dimension were 1920*1080 pixel so I change it to 1920*1920, this gave me a lot of space to work on,

I used the Wacom tablet with a square brush from Photoshop to draw an outline of the character, then I used the line tool in Photoshop drawing over the outlines, to give the character more sharp edges so it would pixely look,

When I 1st coloured in the character I used the same colours and filled in the places with no detailed whatsoever, however it didn't look pixely as the colours I used to fill it in were solid.

So I used a shading and highlight technique by using the brush tool to paint white and black over my character with the layer transparency set to a low level, this would give a lighter and darker shade of the fill colour.

 After this I merged all the layers together and resized the canvas sized to how the task wanted it to be 1920*1080. Now the character is complete and finished and its looks like an old retro fighting game from the 1st play-station.

Evil Clutches & Galactic Mail

Task 3 - GDD and 2D Games Engine

After making catch the clown, mike made us read and do chapter 2 & 3 for the next lesson.
Since then a week has already passed and I completed chapter 2 at home and it was called evil clutches.

Evil clutches is a game where the player controls a dragon that tries to take out the bad dragons and save the baby dragon which all come out of the boss. If a player is able to save a baby dragon they will be rewarded with points, and if they get caught by the bad dragon the game ends. Its literally the "how long you can survive with the most amount of point before you die" type of game.

evil clutches finished

Evil clutches taught me the basic of game maker and I learned to get use the software. I'm probably better at using game maker now then I was when I made catch the clown and when I was making evil clutches the skill I learned in chapter 2 help me in making chapter 3 which is Galactic Mail.

Galactic Mail is a game where the player controls the rocket and tries to deliver mail to moons different moons, when the player delivers mail to the moon they get rewarded however, if they spend too long on a moon their points will get deducted.

 The game is pretty simple and it only took me the first session of mike's lesson to finish. I started making Galactic Mail by adding all the images and sound files that was necessary, then I made objects that were needed as I was reading the chapter editing the object's value as I kept reading through chapter 3.

As I kept reading I was adding more object, editing values as I was reading and I saved the game as different version once key aspects of the game were working properly. I ended up making at least 6 different version of the game. Each version had a major aspect of the game functioning properly, and of course if something went wrong then I was able to roll back before I started working on the aspect of the game again.

I noticed not everything happened 1st try I did get error messages due to small silly mistakes. the 1st one happened when I was trying to config the rocket to land on the moon. It turned out that I didn't type the coordinates of the moon correctly. (Error Messages on Gamemaker are a lifesaver.) As I kept reading through the chapter I finally finished making the game all the images below shows my progression.

Version 1

requirement needed to make the game in version one

the first room of version 1. Soon to be level

Version 3

game requirements updated in version 3

the 1st level of version 3.

Version 6 (final version)

All the game requirements finished in version 6

Galatic Mail Title Screen

last level of Galactic Mail

After making Galactic Mail in advance mode i feel more confident with the software.

Catch the Clown,

Task 3 - GDD and 2D Games Engine

In this task I used a 2D game engine called Game Maker, to create a game called catch the clown.
later I will rename to find the clown. The game simply goal is simply to catch a clown as it bounces of walls and a score is added once the clown was caught.The game engine required me to use sprites to view objects so players could see them. Most of the sprites and many other useful files were provided on its learning, this was actually helpful as i didn't had to create any sprites myself from scratch.

files on its learning, Hopwood Hall.

However, I had to make 2 of my own sprites so this game was  a bit more challenging and a bit different.

The new sprites was the bad clown and teleporters. i had use photoshop to edit the existing images of the wall and clown and change those images abit so players can see the difference between the original images.

difference between the originals and edits.

I wanted the game to have a timer and high score system, I googled "how to add a timer in game maker" and i followed steps on techwalla, (link here). The tutorial I used made it so when the timer finished the game would close and then show the high score which I did myself.

After getting the game tested from Emily, i got feedback saying its too hard to see stuff as there is too much stuff happening, so i improved the game by decreasing the amount of teleporters and bad clowns and then make the teleporters go in a certain direction, as well as adding a new start screen and levels that show new game features as the player progression.
Now the game is pretty much playable and complete.



1st level of Catch the clown in gamemaker room edit view.