Head-Swapping Pet Dinosaurs From The Jungle!

That’s the name of our new iPhone MMORPG which will be coming out very soon! Obviously not, like, we’re just doing a bit of a roundup of couple of titles we’ve recently concluded (hopefully) or have in current development...

Keep Ahead

            Ivor and Yora are two explorers, they have got lost in the jungle (they’re not very good explorers) and have fallen foul of a curse which means they only have one head between them to share. You have to help navigate them through 50 levels over four different locations, collecting the totems as you go (which help break the curse).

The lack of mutually exclusive heads means that you can only control one explorer at a time, and you have to swap the head between the two bodies to change control between the explorers.  Along the way, there are natural obstacles and terrible enemies to avoid, man-eating plants will eat the explorers (shocker!), lava will spread across the jungle and absorb everything in its way. Shrunken heads will home in on a headless body and take control of it if they reach it, zombee’s will shadow the explorers movements and try to trap and devour either explorer. Worst of all, mischievous monkeys will chase you and try to steal your head, which means you have to follow them around; headless, trying to rescue your head back from them. 

You’d think that would be enough for these unfortunate explorers to contend with, yeah? WRONG! There are a number of cursed areas which, when stepped on, will affect the behaviour/mobility of the explorer, although there are cures to hunt out within the levels, but it all means recovering Ivor and Yora’s other head is not going to be easy!

Keep Ahead sees the visual stylings of our third art conduit, Jerry Carpenter. We’ve worked with Jerry since the early Morpheme days, and like us he’s took the brave step to stride out on his own as Magnetic Boots. You can check some of his stuff out at his link (along with the links of the rest of our conduits) at the bottom of the sidebar, he also has some top stuff which he coded in Flash himself on the Gimme5Games website.

When you’re done with all that, check out the game picture slideshow below, and don’t forget to check back here soon for information on when and where you’ll be able to play Keep Ahead!

 

My Pet Dinosaur

            Dinosaurs are nothing if they’re not versatile.  When they’re not bothering Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern, they’re coloured purple and singing songs to infants and buddying up with presenters of cashbox-lucky dip based gameshows. Would such versatility translate into being a good pet? Well, My Pet Dinosaur allows you to put that to the test. Look after your prehistoric pet by washing, feeding and stroking it. You can dress them up and go for walkies. Take good care of it and it’ll be an epic friend forever!

My Pet Dinosaur is in the early stages of development right now, so we’re keeping the best stuff under wraps for later, but we have some concept art below for your eyes to look at.

Raid Galleries. Steal Paintings. Make Millions!

If you’re like me, then you’re an incomprehensible scouse idiot with a penchant for “hilarious” t-shirt slogans and, more importantly, you think the work of Mark Rothko is complete bobbins*, but then art is about emotions (in this case, anger) and, importantly, how much money you can get someone to part with for a piece of work.

In the event I ever found myself turning over some art gallery, I’d be stealing the lead off the roof rather than “Light Red Over Black”, but when you realise one of Rothko’s emperors new clothes pictures went for a jaw-dropping $73m in 2007, even I start to think again about pinching it.

A person without such a sniffy attitude towards art and robbery is the anti-hero of our new game, Ric Rococo: International Art Thief. You control our light fingered friend through a series of art galleries, pinching old masters and more contemporary pieces, all the time having to avoid guards and other surveillance, before handing them to your girlfriend, Nancy, who is suspended outside the window from your trusty RococoCopter.

One of the impressive things about this game’s development is the time it took for all the code, art and design to come together from the initial high concept. Fleshing out of the concept and the visual style was a couple of days and once we had that nailed, the level design, full art, music and coding all came together quickly, followed by a short testing phase. In terms of total man effort, the game took around 20 man-days, but the coming together of the project as a whole to the stage it is at now took around 7 man-days from the initial draft.

Once again, Ricky’s brother does a bang up job with the music, tipping a nod to the works of Ennio Morricone in the process. The excellent artwork is done by another of our art conduits Adam Schofield, and amongst the influences he has used is the fantastically cheesy 60’s film “Danger: Diabolik!” (for which Morricone did the music) about a master thief stealing off the Italian government and living in a palatial apartment surrounded by his ill-gotten gains. Other visual style references include the Pink Panther cartoons and that cartoon style from the 60’s of using simple flat characters and larger physical space.

* Just my opinion, like, not those of Nat and Ricky, who wander off into rambling guff about "brush strokes" and "all about scale".

How to Capture a Kahoot!

I’ve finally finished all the remaining design issues in Kahoots so now I can finally post something! There would’ve been more goodies in the game but...well let’s just say they didn’t last long enough... Anyway, enough talk about sweets (for now) and more about design and animation.

We knew we wanted to use claymation for the characters in Kahoots and, after much debate, finally settled on buttons, sweets (uh oh..that refrain didn’t last long!) and other random items for level graphics as they made for a more interesting aesthetic. After drawing some simple character designs, we chose the one we liked best, after which, I made the model. I started by making a basic wire frame skeleton for the inside of the model. This allows you to pose them far more easily than if they were solid plasticine, it also gives you an excuse to use glue guns! I used polystyrene in the frame to pad out areas without the need for tons of plasticine, which would be heavy and more difficult to work with. Once the frame was made, I sculpted my design over the top using white plasticine, that way we could manipulate the colours in Photoshop once the animation had be done.

The Cardborg was made in a similar manner, although his wire frame was covered in plasticine and tinfoil. My advice now that I’ve experimented in animating something that’s covered in tinfoil is...don’t do it!! Absolute nightmare as the tinfoil ripped every time I moved its arm or leg! The Cardborg also has a cardboard box head and I made a selection of cardboard eyes and mouths for us to stick onto the box and decide what combinations worked best.

When the characters were complete, I set about animating them. I used a webcam, desk lamp and made a mini red screen area so the characters could be keyed out after animating. I used a program called MonkeyJam to take single frame shots of the models (http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/). All you need to do is position the model in the frame, ensure its lit well and capture the image. Then move the model a little bit and take another picture...then move it again and yes..you’ve guessed it, take another pic! Repeat the process until you have all the frames you need, which you can then put together into what should hopefully be a full animation cycle. I animated all the basic actions needed for the game, a walk cycle, falling, smashing boxes etc. All of the separate frames are shown in a previous posting; below I’ve included a walk cycle of the Kahoot as I captured him and how he appears in the game.

Bless You, Morpheme.

We rarely do heartfelt sentiment here at Honeyslug, but we are unable to let the passing of Morpheme into history once and for all go without mention – it has played a huge part in where we are today, and the redundancy of the final 4 staff including remaining founder Matt Spall this week has been a real shame, because it finally means the end of a company which nutured a great deal of talented people over the last decade or so, wherever possible giving them the freedom to experiment, work on things until they were ready, and in many cases the space to figure out what kind of job they even wanted to be doing anyway.

More recently, Matt and the remaining team (as well as a number of ex-staff) have been hugely supportive of us - we may never have got off the ground had we not had their advice and support (and work).

I’ve led something of a nomadic existence in the games industry, and Morpheme (in all its forms) was my home for just under 7 years - that’s the second longest job I’ve had. It was Ricky’s home for 9 years (his only full time job) and Nat’s for over 3 - you don’t stay in one place too long if it’s “just a job”, and these people were not just our colleagues, many are our friends too. Now as the remaining staff move onto pastures new, we wish them every success as they did with us not so long ago. For a final time, the Morpheme roll call (in alphabetical order) was:

Ronald Batty, Justin Buck, Jeremy Carpenter, Robin Clarke, Elliot Curtis, Zane Desir, Jonathan Fisher, Andrew Fitter, Daniel Fordham, Chancal Gill, Ricky Haggett, William Hanson, Lee Higgins, Jonathan Hughes, Stephen Hughes, Mark Inman, Ben Jessell, Davina Lee, Joanne Low, Peter Lumby, Natalie Marco, Paul O’Sullivan, Lucy Reed, Dr. Steven Shipton, Matthew Spall, Frank Sun, Paul Welton, Christopher White, Julian Wolter, Haralambos Xiouros.

For a more eloquent and well structured review of its history, you should read the excellent City State site written by Rob Clarke: http://citystate.co.uk/archives/morpheme-1999-2008

It's Games Development, Jim...

...but not as we know it. We're approaching the tail end of the development of "Kahoots" and I promised a bit of an update as to what the game involved, but quite frankly that's all going to wait until the end. At this precise moment we have the games dev equivalent of Noel and Liam (that's Ricky and his brother Rob) penning lyrics for the tutorial songs (that's right, songs. Not text and carefully scripted level design, songs. Take that, well utilised and respected gaming traditions). Today has been one of those mad days where not only have we been insanely busy trying to chuck everything in, but cos of the home made style of the game, the stuff we've done has been very bizarre. I've spent a period of the afternoon cropping images of fridge magnet letters, and helping Nat sort out capturing images of cotton wool balls.

Talking of our diminutive design queen, she's finally finished slaving over a hot desk lamp, animating the main character and its main enemy, the terrifying CardBorg! Hopefully once she's broke the back of the remaining design issues, she'll be able to explain on here how she's done it, but in the meantime, here's a nice picture of the character anims in full.

There's still tons of stuff to be done, the map screen, title screen and achievements still need sorting. Our Honeyslug logo, the unlockable reward and the end sequence will require trips to various locations in the capital. Then the whole thing needs the hell testing out of it to make sure it all hangs together and the dependencies on the hosting site all work fine. It's gonna be very tight indeed, especially as we have another two games in the pipeline.

As for what "Kahoots" is all about, well, you have to steer your Kahoot to the safety of the exit door by moving the floor around it (Kahoots walk perpetually or until the fall/die, obviously), certain floor has specific properties, so there's trapdoors to drop to lower areas, boing blocks to jump gaps or onto higher platforms, cannons to get fired to another location, etc. Along the way, the CardBorgs, enemy of the Kahoot, will do their best to stop your progress, though they can also come in quite useful for helping you advance through seemingly inaccessible areas.

Right, got to stop now, listening to Ricky and Rob write the song for the Peg Beast (don't ask) is about the funniest and surreal thing I've witnessed in quite some time. Here's some more pics of us feretting away this week. Also a first appearance of another art conduit Adam, whose game we will talk about next week (intrigue!)

Particles

Hello blog!

So I finally got around to porting my particle engine to Actionscript 3 last week. You can see a little test swf here.





What I particularly like about my engine is that it allows behaviours to be defined in XML. Which means the code stays nice and clean (you just create an emitter, give it an XML file and start it up), but more importantly that a non-programmer can tweak particle effects to their heart's content.

To give you an idea, here is the XML for the emitters in my test - both the one attached to the mouse pointer, and the one when you click.

Pound Shop Development

We're pretty excited about our new game in development, although that statement implies that we also work on stuff that we're really not that arsed about, but what we're particularly excited about here is the home-made approach we have taken with all aspects of "Kahoots". Ricky, on top of his usual coding duties, is penning some song lyrics for the game, and working with his brother Rob to do the music and sound effects. Nat, along with designing the game levels, has reverted to her animation roots and has created a whole bunch of art assets for the game using plasticine, and animated them doing their thing (walking, jumping, whatever). Even I've taken time out from looking at our cashflow and turning white, to do some level design work and capture some pictures of things we can use for backgrounds in the game.

The cheap and cheerful approach doesn't end there, oh no. We've raided a local crafts store for beads, buttons and textiles to use as platform graphics, as well as the pantries and pound shops of Kentish Town, Camden, Edgware and Kilburn for lots of sweets to also use within the game for platforms and whatever (at the same time we also happened across Peking Duck Pringles for a quid, they're quite an experience, I can tell you). The good thing about comestibles as art assets is that you can eat them once you're done with getting them in the game, Nat's particularly partial to anything where sugar makes up 90% of the ingredients.

It's been a good laugh sourcing all this stuff, next time I'll tell you more about the game itself, for now, here's a taster for the how the game looks.