Wolf - Level 2

These backgrounds are made in Photoshop, all the levels of trees are on seperate layers which will move at different timings to create a sort of paralax.

This is the first version, as you can see it's insanely dark. My laptop screen was really bright, which was fine for me but I soon realised that noone else has similar screens to me! So I had to mess with the settings for ages.

This next one is when I fixed my laptop screen, but then I ended up plugging my PC monitor in and using that instead. The difference between this one and the previous is massive. Looks much better. But it's too blue.

Here is the final version which we used, I have added lighting effects which are more visible when you see it scrolling, they are basically coloured shafts of light filtering through the trees. It's much prettier now, using purples fading into greens.

Wolf Animations

These took many painful hours and many different versions to get it vaguely right. I am no animator, but I am fairly please with the result. They look much better in the mock up game Jim has made.

Fish, Squirrel Backgrounds

Fish background and foreground

I started working on the background for the Squirrel Game. Here you see the bottom, which is the Spring section. I'm not entirely happy with it just yet. And then it leads into the summer section which has no leaves right now, and no background trees.

Storyline plan

As you see here, we have made a diagram showing the progression of the story. We had the idea of making it so everytime a player plays the games he/she would get a slightly different experience depending on whether he/she wins or loses.

So as you can see you start with the Bird always, and you can either go on to the Fish or the Cat. It does also mean that each time you will only play 4 of the 5 games. I think this could encourage people to play again, if they discussed playing it with their friends and heard about a level they didn't play it could make them come back and play again to try and get that level they missed out.

Perhaps once one has played all the way through the story, the games could be available to play singularly. Makes them quicker to play for someone who doesn't have hours on their time.

Wolf Concept

The Wolf
This would be the final level. You play as a wolf, you run along the forest catching bunnies for energy.
A story idea we had is that the Witch [bottom right] has cursed you because she's mean, and you now can't stop running until you find the monk in his shrine at the top of the mountain. But he's not there. because you've just seen him climbing trees in the Squirrel level ;)

Squirrel Concept

The Squirrel.
You have to jump from leaf to leaf, in an upward scrolling game. You must reach the top of the level before it becomes winter. Acorns will fall you must avoid being hit by these. There will be acorns on leaves for collection also. You need to collect as many as you can so you can hibernate.
The monk, badger and fox shown in this picture relate to a story I read by Peter Gaiman, and illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano, called The Sandman. I loved the story and really wanted to incorporate it in my games.

Cat Concept

The Cat game.
This one is probably the most simple of all 5 games. You are the cat. Sat by the sea, or a lake. Fish will jump out, and you have to catch them in time. There will be different colours. You have to collect only the colour that the cat likes. It will be a random colour each time a player plays this game. For example. the colour could be blue, so you get points for catching blue, and you lose points for catching any of the other colours.If you catch a colour he doesn't like, he will thow some of his previous catches back in just to spite himself. Cats are fickle creatures.

Fish Concept

Fish game
The Bird game will lead onto Fish. The Bird could fly over to the fisherman at the end of its game and the fish could jump out. This would be a nice transition between the two games.

The Idea behind this game is you are the black and white fish as shown. You will be swimming around and you blow bubbles up to catch falling plankton-like things. The other fish shown will be in the foreground, quite large, they would block your view.

Other details include other things swimming in the background, like the whale as shown, or a diver, or something similar.

Bird Concept

Bird Game
This is the first game. The 'Bird' level. You play as a bird. You must navigate the area, collecting bugs as you go. More bugs mean more points at the end.These pictures show some of the details that will be in the level. There is a fisherman and his dog. The guy in his leopard hat and his horse [above]. Both of these could potentially have their own little comics of some description. Or they could be part of the main story.

New Concept

New Concept Idea

There will be 5 separate mini games, based around the basic story premise which is actually for a larger game concept. These 5 games will share the same style and design treatment, and will interlink with each other using small details such as being able to see elements of the other 4 games in the background, indicating more to the story. The bigger game would be in a 3D world. But these 5 mini games will be 2D in flash and up online so anyone can view/play them.

There is also plans to do some webcomics, or something thats not part of the game exactly, but using elements from the games to produce something else. Convergence is good.

Engines

The original pitch I have realised is not going to work.

Unreal is all we have available to us to work with. But sadly this is only good if we wanted to make an FPS style thing similar to Unreal. It is not able to produce a racing game, unless we have a LOT of knowledge of the programme. Which we don't. This is an art course.

Other programmes we looked at using were, Havok and Ogre. Again we didnt use these because we had no training in them, the University couldn't provide us with tuition for these and there wasn't enough source online.

Our final programme we looked at was Monolith's Lithtech engine. Codenamed "Jupiter EX," Fear was made in this. They offered it to us at a lower price of something like £5000. Thanks dudes.

So we changed back to Flash. It's simple. Jim has an extensive knowledge of Actionscript 2, and is very able to teach himself the necessary stuff to code these games. Plus, I'm more of a 2D artist than a 3D one anyway. I think we have potential to produce something better this way.

I am thinking I want to make something along the lines of Ferry Halim's collection of Flash games. I want to use high resolution art assets, I feel like most flash games are vectorised, which is great because you can fit more into the space. But I want my games to be relatively simple, but really pretty. We're going to see how far we can push Flash.

Original Pitch (As pitched in September 2008)

[Click here for the Pitch]

Click the link to see my original pitch presentation. There is no preloader sorry so just wait and it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes to load. Use directional keys on keyboard to navigate through.

My idea was to make a racing game. Which involved controlling animals with little riders, similar to that of 'Bomberman Fantasy Race'.

Unlike Bomberman, I wanted much more variety. I wanted many creatures, with customiseable options, like clothing, and patterns, different fur styles etc. For example you could have a giant spider with a top hat, or have a chariot pulled by 3 tiny stripped giraffes. This would lead on to a very extensive game, as I think people like to have the option to customise their avatars in games.

I would want the game to be able to have downloadable content so there could be more creatures/riders/chariots/items added constantly.

Firstly you will see reference pictures from the Art of Okami book. I loved the little characters in this and wanted to do something involving tiny people with naturalistic outfits made from bits and pieces.
The next images are by Daphne Yap. In her book, 'Daphne 01' She has outfit designs which are so creative and interesting, they really inspired me to do something a bit off the wall.

You will then see character and creature designs by me, these are rough sketches as this was just pitch ideas, nothing was absolutely final.