Milestone 4

Good morning everyone!

Our team has been up to some serious work lately; we've been busy tightening up in-game mechanics, added art to the prototype, and challenged stage 3 last week and passed! This means we're now in the possible pool for being able to present at mid-year show. We're trying to gather as much together as we can to challenge stage 4 and see if we can get by it.

Our game is a combat platformer where players take on the role of ghosts residing in a mansion who fight each other for sole 'ownership' of the house. Now that you're all refreshed, let's take a look at some screenshots and concept stuff, then.

Here we have some screenshots of what the prototype looks like. The top one is more in-game and the bottom is a more detailed look. This level is mainly what we've been focusing on. The levels of the game are going to be based on specific rooms in the mansion (or small groups of rooms). So for example here, we have the dining room and below it, the wine cellar.
A main goal/thing I want for our environments is to be able to have some modularity in the levels. (This means that I'd like for different items to be usable in different parts of the house without having to alter them  much. So I can use those chairs in other rooms in the house, or that table, or break those stair 'pieces' apart and be able to mix and match them. Think of it like Lego blocks.)

As you can see here, this was one of the main concepts for designing the levels. Other parts of the room are slightly visible, showing the player they can use their phasing mechanic to ghost through the wall and go into the other room. You'll be able to see the framework of the house, mimicking a sort of dollhouse-like feeling.

Here are some concepts for the characters and members of the family in the house. They're colored in this way as that's the way we're going to denote each different player

This is a more concrete example of the stylization we're going to go for in the characters when they're in-game. This example is of the mother ghost.

A big roadblock for our game had been animation and all things entailed with that. I had a lot of issues with setting up the rig and skinning the character, but we got things to a workable place.

There's still some work left to do until senior show, but I think we're getting into a better place. This whole experience has been quite the ride, and we're in it for one more week, mid year presentations take place on Monday the 18th!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for this week.

Thoughts on Our Game and Games in General

  These days, it seems like there's so much more possibility in creating games. Thanks for those new possibilities, I think, goes a lot to the burgeoning indie market and different outlets for play besides consoles. Not too long ago, a game, no matter how innovative or interesting wouldn't see the light of day if it wasn't released for console. At the very least, it had a small, very specific audience. While they have their flaws (as consoles have their advantages), applications like Steam, and websites like Kickstarter are allowing for so many more people to have the chance to interact with and learn from video games. It still amazes me that with everything we have now, it'd be possible for so many people to play even our game.

  While we want it to reach as many people as possible, there is still a core audience for our game. We want to reach out to players who enjoy games like Super Smash Brothers and Mario Party. At one spectrum of our audience, there is the more laid-back player who spends most of their time playing games with friends. The only thing really on the line is pride, and even then it's pretty low-key. We're also trying to reach players on the other side of the spectrum. These are the sort of players who took Super smash bros and shaped it into the competitive game it's partly turned into today. Smash bros has a great capacity to reward less skilled players with button mashing but also offers intuitive controls and moves for skilled players looking to improve. There's enough diversity in character play styles to suit everyone and give them something to work towards. Our game is addressing this audience with play that will be familiar enough to draw them in, and mechanics and concept that will be interesting enough to keep them engrossed. From testing our art concept so far, it seems that many people are interested in our idea of being able to play as ghosts in a dark, mansion setting. It's very often that we see ghosts and spectral beings as enemies in games. We thought it would be interesting to try to change that dynamic and mesh it with the secondary mechanics we have in store. This theme is also a challenge as the characters need to balance on the fine line between being relatable to people and being too 'monsterish' and losing their humanizing appeal.

  What separates our game from similar experiences to it is the combination of mechanics we have and are working to include. We have the basics of running, jumping, and shooting projectiles, but this is hardly the full extent of our game. We want our game to go deeper than most combat platformers and have heavy interaction with the environment players are fighting in. We want them to be invested in their environment, and to help with that, be invested in their characters. To do this, we are giving players some choices not usually received in typical fighting games. Players will be able to choose statistics and passives for their character. The character is virtually a blank slate until the player gives it a back story and abilities through our drafting system and choice of passives. While these are normal tenants for other genres, such as RPGs or simulation games, it's still a pretty new system to fighters/combat platformers.

  It is in this way that we hope we can show our innovation and integrity. As it stands, combat games like Smash Bros are pretty well-received. The broad range of couch-gamer to skilled pro seems like a great starting point and a proven audience for this kind of game. Many fighters feature eclectic, sometimes strange locales and characters for their settings and theme, so I'm sure we will have gamers eager to dive into a strange, new world like ours and experience what we have to offer. I feel like our game is adding to the future of games that will show the benefits of blending genres and elements that normally would not go together. As games continue to move forward, genres need to be stepped out of and twisted around instead of trying to fit games into specific categories where they might not really belong.  

The Aftermath of Challenging Stage 2

Hello everyone!

I apologize for the lapse in posts lately, and intend to use this one to catch up as much as possible. Short story, we passed through Challenge 2 with little bumps! And we're getting ourselves together to Challenge stage 3, probably the week after next.
This weekend will be sort of a double-whammy for posts as we have a separate assignment to do for the core portion of this class. Let's get to it, then.

So the past few weeks have consisted of trying to flesh out the 'masquerade' concept I talked about in my last post. It's been fleshed out substantially since then. The chef one was left to cool a bit since it was already much more developed. Recently, however, I did do a reboot of the chef's based on some comments from our lead designer. He asked that I give the other chefs more personality in the same way that the green chef (the punk-looking one) had personality. I changed him up a bit too, just for some fun and to give more of a nod to his inspiration (Guy Fieri).

Moving along though, let's continue to the masquerade idea and how it's morphed. We started originally with it at the sort of vague idea of masks having a connection to upgrading abilities in mechanics and such. I took that and ran with it, giving it a little bit of a purgatory/hellish feel. 

Players would choose masks based on how their characters lived their life. This would affect their passive abilities during battle. For example, a person who lived a vain life would have an ability that would go off that would give them a 'shield of their own brilliance'. The downside to it would be something along the lines of everyone's attacks being magnetized to the vain player after the shield goes down, making them take increased damage.

The players would then be fighting on a metaphorical stage where the players would be judged on their fighting skills and whether or not they could ascend from purgatory. Their abilities and skills they could choose would be based on the deeds they committed while they were alive. It had a sort of 7 sins sort of feel to it, especially so with the hell and purgatory themes (when all their lives were lost, the player would fall through a trapdoor with flames gushing out).
Going into class, there were a lot of holes that were poked into this temporary concept (understandably so). Our classmates and professors liked the idea of the masks, and also the hint of character creation in a genre its not usually in. The idea still needed more fleshing out.

So, on Thursday, we got together and decided on our art style. We had a week prior to figure out arguments of the pros and cons of each. 

The major argument against the chef idea, while it was very cohesive, was that when humor falls flat, it falls hard. Several of our group members were very worried about this. We didn't spend as much time fleshing out mechanics and reasoning for the chef game because we had already worked everything out for it, more or less. So we spent most of our time trying to find something for the masquerade idea.

We finally worked our way to an idea we could all agree upon and that had something in it for all of us. We latched more onto the ghostly-qualities of our characters and stripped away most of the religious affiliations and just kept it to sort of an afterlife theme. The players will be selecting ghosts of those who have lived in a house over the many years it has been there. They want to be the only one haunting the property, so they fight, using ghostly ectoplasmic abilities and items possessed with ghostly energy. Being an old house, each item has its history and the person it belonged to. As a secondary mechanic, we are also considering being able to possess objects in the house to hinder your enemies. A common example is possessing a chandelier and having it fall down.

One of the moves we have created, blink, seems to be really favored by players based on play-testing. Because of this, it's picked a lot, which causes balance issues over other moves. Our designers discussed this in our meeting and we played around with the idea of powering the blink down a bit and replacing it with the dodge mechanic we have in already. Players new to playing our demo hardly used the dodge or didn't understand it, so changing it to fit the context of ghosts seemed natural. We thought it'd be cool to have the 'mist blink' ability play into interacting with the environment as well.

Overall, I'm very happy we were able to come to a decision after all of the thoughtful discussion we had. I'm still fond of the chef idea, but I'm happy that we were able to take the masquerade concept and make it as solid. I also really love the aesthetic of old mansions. It's a plus, too, that I can keep the mask idea that everyone was so fond of and continue to work with the ghosts. 

Here's hoping that what we show in class will be met with interest and interesting discussions! Stay tuned!

Challenge 2 Prep

We passed Challenge 1! This week in concept art land has been interesting. I've still been collecting research and sort of feeling out different ways to go with the platform fighter.

Based on critiques in class, the chef fight theme still seems to be pretty popular. But, one of the group concerns is that the game could not be the right kind of humorous that we'd like to go for.

Please excuse the bad puns; they do not reflect our team's view of humor
but merely my love of bad puns

We've got a few good designs from going through this concept direction, ideas which could be channeled into a different art direction should we not choose to go this route.

One of the first is the idea of combinations of abilities 'mixing' and creating your super special abilities. Special abilities aren't limited to one set recipe. There's more than one way to make stew, for example. But some things just shouldn't be mixed and made into food...

Choosing certain combinations of abilities creates
certain special attacks; strawberry, chicken, and pumpkin a good recipe does not make

Players can interact with the level to avoid being harmed by it

The second shows a sort of 'spice' system we thought of where players could align their character with a flavor. This flavor could be thrown in the form of a spice which would be used to interact with things in the level. Having the most of your spice in that object, for example the chicken soup, makes it so that when the soup explodes, you aren't harmed because you contributed the most to the recipe.

This conceptual direction won out over the 'painting' direction, as can happen. 

'Hello Darkness, my old friend'

There was appreciation for the fact that these sorts of art styles aren't seen in games, but I came to find that might be for good reason; they're hard to reproduce successfully. So in the interest of our team and time, I decided to stop pursuing it. We shall spare a moment to shed a single tear for the melted clocks and Dali-esque long legged monstrosities that won't be given life this semester.


As much as I am fond of the chef fight concept, not everyone is totally on board with it. I made two quick sheets to see if there would be interest for the ideas. The first was an origami theme, with the abilities being based on animals and elements. And the second is based around a masquerade theme. The masks could possibly have some connection to upgrading abilities or affecting their properties, whether they be based on animals or maybe elements.

Sources for images on the bottom row: 1, 2, 3, 4

 I figured stages would be good for possibility for interactions with the players as a mechanic (i.e. the stage opening and closing to show new setups of platforms or introduce a mechanic similar to the enemy one in the chef theme). I also just really like masquerade masks and fancy ballroom clothes as an aesthetic. I thought it might be cool to go sort of Phantom of the Opera-esque. I'm hoping these aesthestics will be interesting for the player and something of a draw for the game.

I think this game's place in 'game culture' would be that of the interesting fighting game. There are many very fun fighting games, and while this one isn't a traditional fighter (focused more on platform combat than melee), I still want it to have the flair of games such as Skull Girls or the quirkiness of Power Stone, both games that I enjoy very much, for their game play, style, and characters.

The game that ours is most similar to would be Super Smash Brothers (Melee and Brawl), which were received rather well in gaming culture. In society, it seemed to garner a pretty good reputation, probably from the fact that all of it's characters are more or less pretty well known. People seemed to take on pretty easily to the mechanics of the game itself though. The base part of button mashing (as is wont for every fighter) was satisfying for those new to the genre, while there was still enough nuance and material for those who dug deeper into the game.

For our game, we want to have that kind of dual interaction. We want there to be enough for the button mashers and frantic fighters to enjoy the game while having depth and deeper mechanics for people familiar to this genre. 

I'm really enjoying coming up with these ideas and I feel like we're very close to deciding which to move forward with for the end.

Stay tuned for next week where we are possibly going to face Challenge 2 with our newly locked in game art direction and fine-tuned concepts!

Challenge 1 Prep

Hello everyone!

This week was a lot of working towards getting ready for challenging stage 1. We came up with several good ideas in meetings during this time, so it was interesting trying to get things together in a quick manner.


I met with Professor Patel last Thursday and we discussed the concepts that I had and some of the ideas we had going forward. She seemed to like the painting and cooking concepts and the fact that they had high potential for humor. She thought the painting concept seemed a little highbrow (I'll discuss that one later in this post).
As for the digger concept, she liked the ideas I had, especially that I explored so many game play styles, but thought I did not have enough different directions as I did with the platform combat game. I made a few character examples exploring possible options.

The ant idea was especially popular in our team for a 'God Save the Queen' mode 

Regarding the combat platformer, we came up with new ideas based on the last round of concepts I created.

For the paint concept, we came up with a mechanic that would require the player to manage a paint resource. Using one's abilities would sap their paint resource and they would have to receive more paint by successfully attacking other players or finding paint that would enter into the scene randomly during the battle. In addition, we kicked around the idea of the character's abilities affecting the environment by making it change colors, but we're still working out the details of how that would work in scope. 

We added onto the paint idea by expanding it to the whole theme and expanding the world where it would take place. One idea was that characters would be based on famous painting styles, as well as the abilities they would use.

Monster themed on 'Garden of Earthly Delights', a cubist creature,
 a pointillist lady, and a Van Gogh styled Cypress Treant

For the chef battle idea, we thought it would be interesting to expand upon the customizeable nature of food. We are playing with the idea of having the abilities be upgrade-able based on skill trees as the battle goes on. One example we had was having the skill trees be based on the 4 flavors of the tongue: sweet, sour, spicy, and bitter. Oh, and there's umami, too, but I still have a hard time believing that one :P Remy (one of my designers) explained it to me, and I guess for all intents and purposes it would be good to have.


We've decided to go forward with the platform combat game. I'm too excited about all of the possibilities for this one and the ideas we've come up with so far. I feel like it'll be a really good chance to stretch my creative reach and explore things I haven't really seen in games so far.

Tune in next week to see if we pass the first Challenge!

Hey everyone. So this week was a week of more concepting! I'm still not very used to creating art for whole game concepts. I enjoy making concepts for singular characters or perhaps character sets like I've done in the past, but there's just so much more to think about with worlds and environments. I guess in that end it is also very exciting and challenging.

I was very unsure of how long to take on a single concept piece. After talking with one of the professors for a bit when I had questions about concept art, she suggested I work small and quick with thumbnails and silhouettes. This was a bit of a leap from where I was working (concentrating on one or two images and fleshing them out more than greyscale). I sat down and tried it though, setting 5 minute timers for about 20 minutes and seeing how many concepts I could come up with.  I'll have to play with pushing the thumbnails smaller, though I  don't know if Id' want to; I still like having some details.

These were all concept environments for the fighting game. Some relate to the character concepts I have, some relate to some of the mechanic concepts in theme, and some are just random shots in the dark.

These are more of the 'fleshed out' ideas that I had. I think I spent more time than I should have on just these few characters. Some of them wouldn't be able to work in the fighting game mechanically. For example, the moth spirits. I came up with them because their wings would be good for customization to hint at what each player had chosen for their abilities in the first part of the game. However, them having wings would mean they'd need to be able to fly using them which would change our fighting mechanic considerably. The oddities at the bottom... well, they were based on a few references I had from cubist painters and Salvador Dali's pictures. They were created from the prompt of my teacher to 'push it more, make it weirder, don't stick to tropes'. I'm not sure if I suceeded in that sense, but I do plan on making more 'weird creatures' to see what everyone thinks.

example of an in-game fight using our dark-light death mechanic

The mole game is progressing along slowly. It feels like there is a big dichotomy between the games art direction-wise. The fighter is so nebulous and vast as to what the art direction can be, while the mole game is more slow paced and seems to know what it is.

I'm definitely going to work on shaking that up this week and pulling some more weird concepts out of the hat for this one.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for Week 4!

Introductions and Concepts

Hello everyone. My name's Liznel and I'm the Art Lead on Team Swanboats. I'll be your host(ess) through this exciting world of game development. This blog was created to fulfill some requirements for our senior capstone project and to document the trials of the art side of Team Swanboats. As this is an intro post of our ideas, this one may get a little long-winded, so please bear with me. =)

Team Swanboats was first banded at the end of last semester. We met up a few weeks ago for our first meeting came up with several concepts. Last Tuesday, we pitched two ideas to our class that seemed to get pretty good feedback. These are the ideas, and some accompanying concept art for both of them so far.

The first idea was a for a 2-dimensional multi-player game where the player takes on the role of a mole. The player digs around, plants traps, and harasses player opponents and NPCs (non-player characters). One of the end goals we kicked around was that because of mole's shortsightedness, their reason for attacking each other is that they think 'other' things around them are enemies. We've taken a lot of consideration into the gameplay based on the mole and it's characteristics. For instance, we have the idea of players being able to place scent based markers to tell what they put down. Or, and this was suggested in our first class, to utilize vibration in the controller so the player can tell when/what other things are around them.
This game's style of play was inspired by Worms and Bomber Man.

Artistically, I'm considering two different avenues as of now. I played around with two very different silhouettes as I'm still not convinced on whether or not the game should go in a realistic direction or a more stylized one. Over the summer, I worked on a game involving wildlife. The game was meant to be realistic as it was going to be ported to play at an aquarium to teach about the invasive species in the local area. We would have meetings with members from the aquarium, some of whom had a lot of in-depth scientific knowledge and gave critique on the fish and animals I was working on for the game.
I feel that if we did this for our game, and by that I mean making the moles realistic, there would be less design involved. While I'm not against this, I would still like to be able to push them to be stylized. I think a good medium between the two is to exaggerate the differences in shape of the species of moles in the picture above. I would still like to explore the more 'cartoony' look such as the example on the side. I'm a sucker for cute characters and moles seem to have a history in games of being rendered particularly 'cutesy', save for a few examples...

(Pictured above starting with top right and going clockwise:
Resetti from Animal Crossing, Monty Mole from Paper Mario,
Naked mole rat from Fallout, Mole from Harvest Moon) 

 I would like the player to have a fun experience playing this game and be reminded of good times playing with friends. A little friendly competition never hurt anyone, but it would be an honor for this game to end up being a 'friendship breaker' the likes of say, Mario Kart, Mario Party, or Dokapon Kingdom.

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Our second game concept was for a multi-player fighting game that works in two parts. The second part involves any normal fighting game similar to say, Super Smash Brothers. The characters stand on platforms and use their skills to lower the health of up to 3 other players. The first part however, is where it differs. Players will have the ability to choose their own character, but these characters do not come with their own skills. Players can choose their own skills to equip for their character's kit in a draft mode to the game.
This game concept draws inspiration from 'non-traditional' fighters like Super Smash Brothers and Awesomenauts, and card games like Magic the Gathering.

This game's art direction had a little bit more of an open-ended feeling. For this one we only had the mechanics, and nothing really to go off of for art style or direction, so to start with, I came up with these two ideas. Fighting games are usually very character heavy, so I had to think of a way to scope back on that as I am only one artist. The mechanic of the game itself helps in this way, since the moves are chosen and are not specific to one character. Because of this, I pitched these two starting ideas.

The Magic Academy concept came about because I like wizards and witches. I feel that having chosen abilities would work with playing as either a witch or wizard because they could be so open-ended. There's room to have a tinge of humor in the 'spell cards' they choose, hence why one of the spells involves a gelatin shield. The inspirations for this idea lay heavily in anime like Little Witch Academia and Card Captors.

The second concept went more in the direction of having the fighters be literal blank slates. I'm not sure one could get any blanker than something akin to a test dummy. The 'Builder Bots' come from a universe where bot fighting is very popular. Moves for the bots are chosen from the Bot Fighting Winner's Hall of Fame, and the bots themselves would have customization choices with different heads to switch out and different colors in order to make them more distinct.
This concept erred more on the line of silly, cartoon violence with big, possibly goofy weapons. In our meeting today, the idea was brought up that the bot's fights could be something televised and commercialized, similar to monster truck rallies. However, we're not entirely sold on this idea as we're afraid it might seem too close to one of the directions done by last year's seniors.

I feel I'm going to move more forward with the magic academy concept, and work on diverging from that direction. Our Lead designer wants me to explore the use of familiars as the cards selected, and I agree with that direction. As a child, I loved reading books such as the Dragon Riders of Pern and would often wonder what it'd be like to have a dragon or some sort of mystical creature as a companion. If we could have that feeling expressed in our game through that mechanic, I'd be happy with that.

I'd like for the player to take away the experience of wanting to learn more about the combinations of the moves they select, and which ones synergize the best to them. I want the experience from this game to be one of curiosity and thinking on how best to utilize one's options.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for next week as we should have some screenshots of our prototype thus far!