Lianne Booton - Check Out My junk

For the last month I’ve been working on a solo game project using Gamemaker. I don’t know how to program and all attempts to learn Python or C++ alone have been, quite honestly, boring. Gamemaker provides a simple interface similar to the old Games Factory tool, but also allows scripting. So I’m learning C++ whilst being given the option of doing things the ‘easier way’. I’m loving this style of working, because I can get a simple game made in 30 minutes, and hopefully in the future I can take these skills into a pure coding environment.

At the moment my game is unnamed, but I’ll introduce the setting and such.

First we have one of our main characters:

This is Arie, he’s a simple adventurer living in a world that has returned to a basics. Long after governments fell and society crumbled, people returned to a simple way of life, not out of a desire to be closer to nature, but out of apathy and disgust. This kind of life was always thought to be idyllic, but because of resentment and hatred it just caused people to shelter away from each other. Eventually many of the advancements humans had made over history became lost and forgotten and people had no will to repair their fallen society.

Arie, and other adventurers like him take it upon themselves to traverse caverns, tombs, and other forgotten sites and gather things from when people were at their greatest, in a hope that they can convince people that there is something worth striving for. Their work is unrewarding and dangerous, and often met with a dismissive attitude.

Wanda is a small creature you free, she acts as your cursor and will help you break through blocks and hurt enemies. She resembles a spider and her role is the weaver of dreams and stories. Wanda realises that these missions always almost mean certain death for the adventurers, so promises to help you escape as a reward for freeing her. As a token of her gratitude she tells Arie that she will help him weave a great and rich history that people can be proud of, to inspire them to start over and hopefully learn from past mistakes.

Goblins and other ‘dark’ beings are the enemies of the games. With the fall of society they have been able to take their place in the world again. They inhabit the caverns and tombs, guarding human artifacts and stealing them for themselves.

Gameplay mechanics

The game is in the style of an ‘auto-runner’ but has destructible terrain in the style of Terraria. However, in the main game mode there is no building or block collecting like those sandbox games.

Arie is controlled by the keyboard, and has no weapons. This is on purpose as he is just an adventurer on a suicide mission. Wanda represents your cursor and will be able to break blocks, hurt enemies, and be the recipient of power-ups.

There will be treasure gathering, this is the core of the game. Each level will have a set number of level-specific treasure, and then generic pieces that appear across all levels. The amount of treasure you’ve gathered will affect the game. I’m hoping to put in a hub area that Wanda will change at certain percentages of completion.

The current level I’m working on is split into two levels, the easy route and the hard route. The hard route will have better treasure and ores, but will be significantly harder to keep moving through.

And of course, there will be high scores. Scores are modified by ores scattered through the level. Wanda can break ore blocks but you’ll have to physically collect the nuggets that drop (otherwise it’d be too easy ;) )

Development so far

Well, at the start this wasn’t going to be a game. I was testing methods for creating automatically scrolling terrain generation for another game I wanted to make. Here’s some screenshots of the process.

This is the very first thing I made. It’s entirely useless of course and is just a really long sprite that is spawned from a moving controller. From this I decided to play with the idea of objects you could break.

This was the very first iteration of the engine. It was incredibly inefficient since I was very new to Gamemaker and couldn’t figure out how to get multiple blocks to spawn from one control object. I had a row of over 50 controllers doing the work, which caused graphical problems. The level was also a lot deeper and I wasn’t sure of what graphical style I wanted yet.

This was the second iteration, once I’d gotten lighting working. As you can see it’s quite different! The bottom level is now lava and the map has been significantly shortened. It was still inefficient though since I still hadn’t worked out how to not use a huge amount of control objects. I still wasn’t happy with the graphical style here though.

This is the first iteration of the new engine. Controller objects were successfully reduced to a respectable 3, and I had finalised the graphics style. It’s inspired by Spelunky as I think the colours and tiles in that game lend themselves really well to a feeling of claustrophobia. That’s what I want the player to feel in this, the map itself does not move quickly, but you have to think fast and weave through tight corners. This was before I had collisions and platform movement fully figured out (you can see the legs of the old player sprite in the wall!)

Now the game is really getting somewhere :D The left graphic ended up being temporary, and is just to harm the player if they venture into it. Collisions are in thanks to a slightly tweaked Grandmas Platform Engine ( http://mattmakesgames.com) and blocks are breakable.

This is where I’m up to right now. As you can see the snake things are gone and there’s now what I dubbed a ‘Goblin War Machine’ that is imo beautifully animated ;) The war goblins will have the ability to throw terrain destroying bombs. There’s also earthquakes! And some sounds! Oooh.

So what now? Well, I have to create the tiles for the lower harder layer, as you can see it’s quite empty. Also I need to make loot icons and score. Oh and the player sprite, since I don’t think anyone wants to play as quadruple amputee faceless Super Meat Boy.

Proposed features

As with most game makers there’s a lot of things I want to put in that might be scrapped:

Treasure system (Has to be in 100%)

I’d like treasure to be divided up into different categories, so things like hats, power ups that can be enabled before the game, silly items. Hats for sure cos anyone will tell you I freaking love games with hats.

Different level types.

The plan is to definitely have a snow biome. I’d like to also include a level that is a vertical climb, and maybe one that doesn’t scroll but allows free digging for treasure. I’d also like to include a fully hard mode level.

Some sort of item crafting

This seems like a feature that ‘might not be’ but I’d like to include a level that shows your progress through the game. Starting off as a dull lifeless place and then being transformed. It’d be nice to have it as your home, where you can maybe craft potions to use that increase your health in the next playthrough.

So at the moment I’m keeping it simple, I know in theory how to add this stuff, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of ideas down the road. Alas, I am just one person though so I have no idea how long this stuff will take. Hopefully I can work on some other mini game projects during this so I don’t get too fed up.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but that’s not to say that I haven’t been busy. This year I have been focusing a lot more working on getting my ‘dream job’ working in games. I have barebones programming knowledge, and I’m simply just an illustrator, but being a concept artist, or game artist has always been the one thing I’ve wanted to do. With the explosion of the indie gaming scene this should be even easier to do, theoretically.

At the start of the year I learned about the Global Gamejam, which for those who don’t know, is an event that takes place over 48 hours across the world. You are given a theme - this year it was the Ouroboros, and then split up into groups to talk about game ideas. You then pitch your idea (if you want to) to the entire gathering and those who like your idea will join your team, and bring their own ideas into the mix. It’s a mixture of programmers, artists, musicians, and people interested in the process. There’s no requirement to be a professional, which leads to a fantastic environment that’s (mostly) free from egos.

My game idea was to take the idea of real game glitches and incorporate them in a controlled manner, in terms of the artistic style of the game. I’ve always thought that glitches can be quite terrifying when unexpected, especially things like falling out of level bounds, unloaded face textures, or models becoming twisted and warped. I think it could be a neat mechanic for a horror game, and a lot better than throwing gore and the same shambling monsters into the mix over and over.

I pitched my idea, which was frightening since I really hate public speaking. From this I was able to form a team with Paul Catling, who was our team programmer, and brought in the concept of a never-ending maze game. The other members of the team were Regan Music - 2D/3D artist, Sergio Cornaga - indie game dev, Pavel Laletin - iOS developer, and Anthony Lau - 2D artist

And so on the first evening we came up with…

My role in this was to produce the title cards, instructions, in-game sprites, and some of the ending cards.

The game centred around our unnamed protagonist waking up in an asylum. His job is to find a way out, however along his way he encounters nightmareish looking rooms and monsters. Finally when the player has found the random room with the boss spawn, and defeated it, they see a graphic depicting his life before the asylum.

Though the idea was more of a concept, since it’s really difficult to produce a fully fledged game in 48 hours, our team did pretty well. The glitches were incorporated into the art style, with animations of the player being hit showing split second deformations and breaking down of sprites. I tried to emulate how old games will load incorrect graphics from memory if there’s an error sometimes. Also, each time the player is hit the screen will become more distorted with noise, making it harder to see where you’re going. Though this at first seems like an annoying mechanic the whole point was to demonstrate the corruption and breakdown of the game world as you get further in. Another game mechanic we had was the player’s key changing colour each time an enemy was hit and killed. The key colour would correspond to door locks, and enable the player to ONLY go through those doors. The gameplay itself was reminiscent of Binding of Isaac.

Here’s some of the artwork I did!

And that’s about it! Not everything made it into the game in time sadly, but we still had a good end product. It’s definitely an idea I’d like to revisit some time in the future. As for the Gamejam itself - it was a great amount of fun, even for someone like me who has only ever tooled around in simple game authoring  software. I learnt a lot and made some rad new friends. Did it put me off making games? Nope - Even though it was a sleep deprived 48 hours with basically non-stop work, I still want to do it more than anything.

I’ve been playing around with photography a bit recently. I don’t have a fancy setup, but I’ve always learnt to work with the tools I have - drawing using a mouse for years before I got my graphics tablet being an extreme example of that. Using whatever scenery is at hand at the time, and coming to terms with the fact that I have disturbingly shaky hands, has been pretty challenging. I do think I’m getting better though, and if I want to justify saving up for a DSLR in the long run then I need to keep practising.

I’m nowhere near ‘pro’ at this and I’m still learning how to fix things correctly in Photoshop afterwards, but hopefully there is something pretty in these shots :)

I started out by photographing sunsets from my house. I did plan on doing one every day, but since it’s Winter in NZ and has been relatively clear lately we aren’t really getting too many spectacular ones. Still, these are the ones I did get:

August 17th

August 18th

August 20th

August 25th (Start of sunset)

August 25th (End of sunset)

August 27th, taken from Mt Eden, overlooking Auckland.

These are some other photos I have taken:

It’s very difficult to work with the tiny zoom on a point and shoot, but I did my best. I know it’s just a common bird, but all the pretty ones didn’t want to come out to say hello :)

I definitely wished I had a super expensive camera for this one :P I still like it though. I wasn’t very close to them since I didn’t want to startle the adult sheep.

I guess everyone is entitled to a pretentious art shot huh…

So that’s what I’ve been up to, hope you liked some of the pics :) Or if you have any photography pointers you think I could use please feel free to comment!

Yikes, well it’s been one of those months for the last few months and I haven’t drawn nearly as much as I’d like to. Well, for a small update, I got an invite to do a concept art test for Gameloft here in NZ. So I might be closer to having a job I’ve dreamt about having for years :) So below you’ll see my effort at the test, which was to draw a female Amazon warrior. Hopefully it’s good enough… but if not it has given me a huge confidence boost that I *am* good enough to be applying for these jobs. A year ago I was too afraid to ever think of submitting my portfolio to something like this. It’s a huge amount of progress for me.

Cover for Craccum Magazine for next week, the theme of the mag for the week is the end of the world. Originally I was going for a look of old cheesy horror movies but once I started colouring it became more of a comic book styled picture. It’s nice to draw something completely out of my comfort zone :)

Photoshop (colouring) & OpenCanvas (linework)

Just a quick sketch…

Because this cat rules:

bittersweetart:

Independence by Matheus Lopes Castro

(via smokingmegaphone)

“Self” - an illustration of my ‘creative plane’ so to speak. Photoshop CS5 and Sketchbook Pro

Art cards so far for Brutemus & Friends custom plushies. Characters trademark of Chelsea Navarro. I’ve really enjoyed working on these cards so far, got lots more to come :)

When you’re working on your social standing in the beginning it can be very difficult to convince yourself that you’re worth the attention. Often we’ll hear inner thoughts about how we “can’t compete”, “aren’t good enough”, or have “nothing to offer” to the vast world of art. Though these kind of thoughts are common they can lead to us having unhealthy ideas about criticism and lead us to shut ourselves down which can have the effect of unreasonably boosting our ego and stagnating our work. It may sound contradictory, but think about it, the more you shut yourself down to promoting yourself to a wider audience, the less varied input you receive. This means that rather than hearing the biased opinions of a few hundred, you are only hearing the same 5 to a dozen voices of your closest friends, who probably don’t want to hurt your feelings. The most common phrase you can hear these people uttering is “My mum thinks I’m cool.”

So over however many years imagine you’re hearing these few people tell you your work is perfection, that you don’t need to improve because it’s flawless, and that you’re better than a good 5.9 billion other people on the planet. Naturally you’ll end up with a pretty big head about things and probably won’t even want to put yourself out to more people, because these few love you so much, why would you want to burst that bubble?! We all know the truth is often less prettier. We all have flaws in our work, we could all improve and learn more, we could all ask for help, and there’s nothing wrong with that! That human arm may look like it came off a leprotic T-Rex, but my mum thinks I’m cool!

This is where you have to make a choice. You want to expand your horizons but your ego subconsciously makes you seek out the demographics who will agree with you the most. Do you take a breath, suck it up, and step out of your bubble? Or do you tell yourself “This is it, I’ve learnt all I can, I have reached my peak.”

Trust me, that bubble will burst. It may take a few years of those devotees clicking like on every link. It may take several hundred effortless images or photographs. It may take a few dozen frustrating one sided arguments about artistic integrity. Someone will burst it, someone will refuse to play by the rules the ego has defined and shatter that world view into a million pieces, and the thing is they’ll probably enjoy it because nobody else had the guts to do it.

How to tell if your ego is clouding your judgement of criticism:

• Your response or potential response to criticism is “Well let’s see if you can do better”. This is the absolute worst way to respond to criticism! Naughty!
• You actually get severely hurt feelings over a critique and it stays on your mind in a negative way for hours, even days. You may feel betrayed by those people, particularly if they are close friends.
• You feel like giving up on your creative pursuits because of a single comment.
• Look at your art over a period of months, or years. Has it evolved? Be honest with yourself! If you haven’t changed much over the years either you really are perfect, or you’re forcing yourself into stagnation.
• You make excuses as to why there are issues in a drawing and try to pass them off as a stylistic choice when in reality it could be a simple oversight or laziness.

These are the main points I can think of at the time of writing, but there’s probably dozens ranging from depressive moods to waning motivation. Some of these things can even be indications of a larger problem. So how do we turn criticism from fiend to friend?

• Always experiment with different styles, this doesn’t mean drawing slightly different noses. I mean all out different. Do something you know will suck. If you know it’s going to suck does it matter what people say? If you have to spend a few months forcing yourself to do something different then do it and retrain your brain.
• We all know people who can be harsh critics but are probably biting their tongues, get them to give you an honest input in a private venue such as over Facebook messages, email, or in person. If nobody else can see it you will hopefully feel less like you’re being ‘called out’ and the critic may be more comfortable with giving an honest opinion. Then go through the above list and make sure you’re keeping your feelings in check. Don’t get angry at the other person for what they say, you reached out for the opinion.
• If you see free art contests enter them. Sometimes the experience of losing in an environment that’s mostly anonymous can be helpful in breaking the ego loop.
• If you’re really brave and want to go all out then get a portfolio together, or sample pictures, and send them to agents or even galleries if you have paintings. A lot of times these places will say they won’t offer feedback, which is true. But you might get lucky and someone may offer you some advice.
• Go to art classes: figure drawing, watercolour painting, whatever. It doesn’t matter if its irrelevant to your style, all these things are valuable skills to have and you will get to meet other trained artists and get a feel for where you stand. A lot of people get caught up in their way of producing art and forget that you need to master a lot of different skills and bring them together to be effective at what you do.

These are just the small steps to readjusting how you approach criticism and opinions, it can be quite a long process depending on other personality traits like stubbornness or being prone to depressed phases. Once you start treating criticism as a neutral thing rather than anger-provoking you’ll find that you’ll open up more to different types of artists and potential clients. You won’t pick and choose who sees what, and you’ll be able to tell the difference between a legitimately stupid opinion and a critique pointing out a large flaw. You won’t even feel bad about it! You’ll say “oh yup my bad” fix it, and move on! Who knows, maybe one day you’ll even want to be the one who bursts someone’s bubble :)