Moving Around

I haven't updated in a while, mainly because I've been in the process of moving.  I've finally more or less settled into my Brooklyn apartment, and as of last week have been able to work on A Golden Wake again.  It was really a bit disturbing how antsy I got after not being around a PC to work on it for the better part of 3 weeks.

So, this brief update is just to confirm that things are back to normal, and production will be full steam ahead.

Character Portraits Part 2

As of the last post, Eric Feurstein (aka Mr Colossal) was kind enough to show me some Photoshop tricks which have greatly helped with my character portraits.  The day after, I also attempted another speed painting portrait in high res, but this time using a photo for reference for the face so I could get the proportions right. 

This guy was the result.

I was much more satisfied with the look, but I still have a ways to go.  Practice makes perfect, after all!  As far as the trick Eric showed me, I spent yesterday redoing all the character portraits in AGW, basically tweaking them and making the color ramps less flat.  I'm extremely pleased with the result, which, although subtle, I feel makes a world of difference.

Alfie Banks before.

Alfie Banks after some color tweaking.

Strengths and Weaknesses: Character Portraits

There's no denying that when it comes to any creative output, we've all got our strengths and weaknesses.  As long as you figure out what you're good at and what you're not so good at, it opens the way to being able to work on your weaknesses and play to your strengths.

Lately, I have been practicing my art skills in an attempt to grow and improve, and have been able to identify my own personal strengths and weaknesses.  When it comes to drawing people or faces, I find that working in high resolution becomes way more tricky than working in low resolution.  I've been used to working in low res in all the time I've been making games, that it just feels the most natural now.  This isn't to say that I've always been good at low res portraits.  I cut my teeth on the Ben Jordan games, and looking back at the early ones, the character portraits are pretty terrible. 

Why the long face?

As I went on practicing and improving, I began cheating a bit and using photographs for character portraits, tracing over them and being a slave to their shading.  In some cases, the results were ok.

Simon's facial proportions somewhat resemble that of a human being.

In other cases, the results were terrifying.

I want you to have some proper facial lighting, that's what.

Finally, in the last Ben Jordan game, I learned to stop using the accursed dodge and burn tools and actually use different color values for shadows and highlights.  I drew great inspiration from Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and not only used some dramatic chiaroscuro-esque contrasts, but also some colored lighting.

Ben now carries a blacklight with him wherever he goes.

For A Golden Wake, my methods have differed somewhat.  I'm still using photographs, because I haven't mastered facial proportions exactly as I'd like, but I feel I've gotten a handle on basic shading.  The difference now is I make an outline of the character's portrait as a guide, and then, like a kindergartener coloring, I color within the lines and shade until the portrait is complete.

Not too shabby.

 Finally, to show an example of areas of improvement, here are two speed paintings I did tonight to work on doing faces from scratch without any reference.  First, the high res disaster:

Done in roughly 30 minutes.  Not even 30 hours could have saved him.

And next a very quick low res study:

Less than 10 minutes and he looks more human.

 As you can see, there's lots of room for improvement, but that's what practice is for.

Shamless Self-Promotion

It's been a while since I last posted, mainly because I've been busy working on other games besides A Golden Wake.  As I said in the last post about "game sorbets," sometimes breaks are needed.

In the past month, I made a very short and silly game for the MAGS competition called Bertha Butt's Boogie! as well as a game for the One Room One Week competition.  This particular game is called The Rebirth, and was a lot of fun to do, because I collaborated with Ben304 to make 2 individual games which serve as teaser vignettes for something more.  You can get both my game as well as Ben's, called The Reaper right here.

So what about A Golden Wake?  I have gone back and tweaked every single background, as I found a much better lighting technique which makes them look a lot nicer than they did before, though honestly I think I might be the only person to notice this.  I've also been practicing drawing character portraits, and feel I have reached a level I am pleased with for the time being.

On a personal note, I will be moving to New York on August 16, so I expect a bit of a delay in game-making during that transition.  However, my goal is to have Chapter 2 completely playable by the time I leave, so I can focus on getting the second half of the game done once all the dust from moving settles.  I'll definitely remember to back up my game before then, however!

Game Sorbet

Sometimes you get an idea that you really like for a game, and you feel so excited about it that you spend every waking moment thinking about it and eagerly awaiting the opportunity to just let all the ideas out so you can get to work designing it.  Time passes, and your excitement continues as you work on your game on a fairly regular schedule.  Eventually, you get to the point where you've done a fair amount of work, but either you're just not as excited about it, or you've gotten sick of the sight of the same thing over and over.  This is a crucial period, as it can easily lead to you putting your game on the back burner, or worse still, completely abandoning it.  In times like these, it's time for what I like to call a "game sorbet."

As the name implies, this is a smaller, way less ambitious project intended as a break, or palate cleanser.  The idea is not to lose momentum on your big project while still having something fresh to work on.  It can be something as simple as a one room joke game, or something with a mini story told in 3 or 4 rooms.  It's important, however, not to get too ambitious, or you'll end up right back where you started.  Ideally, your sorbet game won't take more than a week or two to finish.  By the time you're done with it, hopefully you'll be looking forward to returning to your main project.

I've hit that spot in A Golden Wake, and just yesterday I participated in a 4 hour game jam where I and a fellow AGSer created a silly joke game called Monty Python's Makeout Mansion.  It was a lot of fun to work on, and a welcome break from AGW.  Currently, I've been drawing a background and sprite for another game which I plan on spending a few days on as another distraction.

The thing to remember also is not to go overboard with sorbet games.  You don't want to find yourself with 6 games in production in addition to your main one.  If you make 2 or 3 sorbet games and still find you're not excited about going back to your main project, maybe it's time to step away from making games and do something else.  Read a book or go for a walk or take lots of showers.  At some point, hopefully some creative spark will enter your mind and you'll think of something new or a different approach to a problem you were having in your main game that will make you want to run back to it and work on it again.

To Walk or Not?

So now that you've learned how to animate a walk cycle using rotoscoping, let's talk about how much you'll need to do it.

Admittedly, the process can get a bit tedious, especially if you're doing 10 frames.  With a standard 4 direction view, we're talking 30 frames of animation per walking character (assuming you're just flipping your side view.)  The question then becomes: how many of your characters actually need full walk cycles?

It all depends on your game.  You might have a huge cast of characters, but none of them might ever have to move from the spot they're in.  Or, you might have several characters that follow the player, or just walk around to add a bit of atmosphere to things. 

Let's take a look at some well-known adventure games.  In Sierra's King's Quest VI, nearly every single character has a full four direction walk cycle.  Some even have diagonal views! Most of them are 6 frames, but it's still a lot of work, especially considering the majority of them aren't ever actually seen in-game.  In fact, it was like this for most Sierra games.  LucasArts games, especially the ones made in the early to mid '90s were the same. 

Two notable exceptions are Full Throttle and The Curse of Monkey Island.  In these games, only the main character has a full walk cycle.  Secondary characters who are shown walking only do so for a few frames, animated as needed.  It's especially understandable in Curse where you had traditionally hand-animated cutscenes as well as sprites, but I wonder how much of it was due to budget constraints vs creative decision.

Then you have games like Broken Sword, which were also animated with traditional cel animation, but several characters have walk cycles.  So does this mean games with more walk cycles are better?  Not necessarily, but it will surely break immersion if you are in a crowded city street and everyone is  just standing around not moving.  Worse still, if there's nobody around at all.

Rotoscoping Tutorial Part 3: Back Walk Cycle

For the final part of the walk cycle tutorial, we will focus on the back walk cycle.  The same technique here applies to the front walk cycle, which is why I'm not doing a separate tutorial for it or including it in this one.

Like the side walk cycle, you begin by filming yourself or model walking away from and towards the camera.  In an ideal setting, you would, again, have a treadmill, thus eliminating any problems with scaling.  However, if you don't, it presents an issue: you get bigger as you get closer and smaller as you get further.

Instead of being able to keep the same rectangle size as you were with the side walk cycle, you're going to have to do a separate one for each frame.  The trick to remember is to make sure your rectangle top and bottom both fall on the very top of the head and bottoms of the feet.

As you can see in the photo above, each frame is a different size.  Not to worry, however, since the tops and bottoms are at the same point, resizing them all to the same height will correct the problem.  In this case we are sticking with 70 pixels high.  Now all your frames are the same height, but each has a different width.  To solve this problem, we find out what the width of your widest sprite is.

Here we see that backwalk1.jpg, our widest, is 38 pixels wide.  Now all we have to do is enlarge the canvas size of all the other frames to be 38, keeping the image in the center.

Now all your frames are the same size.  At this point we do a quick check to make sure everything is aligned.

And finally, just as we did with the side walk cycle, we paste the head from the standing view onto each frame and trace the rest of the sprite from there, making sure that the head stays in more or less the same spot, although with front and back walk cycles, the head bob goes about one pixel to each side rather than up and down.

Final result: