Week 1 (22/2/2023)

My experience: I worked with others to make an indie game before, but for some reasons the game was not finished and the team was disbanded.

Semi-finished game link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX0cRVseocY

The advantage I showed in this experience is that I have a good foundation in art, and I have a great interest in games, I am willing to spend a lot of time to learn unity and pixel art.

But my disadvantage is that I was confused about the art production process, did not do sufficient preliminary research, and did not know the important level between various work, resulting in the project progress often stuck in a certain link.

As a person with outstanding art skills, I prefer to do everything on my own, not to find the merits of others, and then not to assign tasks to others.

I hope that in this cooperation, I can improve my strengths and you can make up for my weaknesses.

In the beginning, we were just two game art students working on some ideas, and after we researched games like Hollow Knight, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, and an image I saw that made me marvel, I designed this character: a chivalrous man disguised as a Chinese fisherman, who is exploring the monuments by boat. He attacks and crosses gaps by way of two birds that the fisherman hunts.

But after we talked with the game design students about their game idea, they wanted to make a time-themed puzzle game, so I started my research with this theme.

For the elements in the game, after our discussion, our final solution is: time advances when the player advances, time reverses when he recedes, and he can interact with some objects in the scene so as to travel to the past or the future.

Because of Robert’s recommendation, first I tried using spine to bind bones to pixel art, because it would save us a lot of time working on it, but I wasn’t sure if it would look good.

The final result can only be described as manageable, but the effect is definitely not as good as frame-by-frame animation, so this value is used as an alternate choice.

23/2/22

Style Research

First I did some MoodBroad

Then I made some color attempts:

But I found that the lack of belief in painting is very empty, I am very confused about what I want to paint, so I decided to meet with Game art and Game design students to discuss and confirm the art style and background story, before this I did some preparation.

First of all, I have some of my own ideas about the world view

Secondly, I conducted targeted research on the style of the picture.

Some of my own thoughts on the subject:

But after communicating with the team, although I have some of my own ideas on the experience and the feeling to the players (such as not moving when it is dark, moving when the whole world runs with it), I have to say that Game design’s ideas are more excellent, they think in a more general perspective, so we finally chose to develop the design based on each other. Game design students’ world settings A: A watchmaker comes to the end of his life, and at the end of his consciousness, he seems to travel into his own spiritual world, navigating the struggles and light of his inner world, and completing his own walking light.

Dramatic conflict: Because of the unresolved knots, time stands still in each memory, and the player needs to find a solution in that “space” to repair time.

B: This is an empty world where new life is being birthed. In this artistic and stylized world, a new world evolves over a very long period of time, and the player is the interloper of this world. In the trial and error over and over again, a vibrant world is recreated from the perspective of the observer and the interferer

Dramatic conflict: the world evolution encountered various obstacles, the need for players to intervene and repair

In the end, I thought the first one had more room for development, so I chose the first one to go deeper into the creation.

Character design

About this role is similar to a dream of the watchmaker, so I want to do more “fairy tale”, like the watchmaker before a favorite story told to children: a country after the destruction of the only remaining prince, after inheriting the crown awakened the ability of time, although he was hunted by the enemy, but he also persistently thought of using the ability to save his country.

This role was inspired by my research on Zelda when I became very interested in the source of inspiration for Zelda (Spray style Jōmon pottery) Detailed research links: https://niunaiqiaokelipai.wixsite.com/blog-of-ahe-zhang/post/exploratory-practice-blog

And I refer to the style of Kingdom: two crowns

idle using skills

24/2/23

Today we encountered a problem that there is no way to directly replace the animation of the texture in unity (because of the specificity of our drawing style).

We tried this approach first, but had to modify the uv each time.

test:

I think this should be done quickly and the art of animation is also convenient But there is no way to see the effect in real time

metal texture

It’s crazy to add normal lines to pixel art so that a flat thing shows so much detail when there is light

25/2/23

After drawing the idle animation, I have a rough sketch for the running animation, but I think it may look a little too big for the character, so I may continue to modify it afterwards.

28/2/23

I found that because I’m a very sensitive person, it causes me to think blindly and get into anxiety a lot, but at the same time I can write insightful episodes and I revised our story and here’s the feedback I got.

3/3/23 morning

TianCheng Wang has made the scene available for testing, because of the art effect, we can’t use unity’s own animation to make, so we need to modify the animation in the code.

-Folder for art

-Scene Adjustments Includes camera, post processing, sky box changes, grass, tall grass, trees, lighting adjustments.

After the direction: add the slope of the earth and other surface pieces, different trees, grass, small stones, floor material drawing.

7/3/23

Communicated with Game design students about the level they designed, and then designed Concept art based on the level design, background story.

And we tried to connect blender with Aseprite to make models and mapping to optimize the scene.

10/3/23

Plotting as well as building.

Change the speed of time clock

Guard statue

Moveable stone

Then put the main character running animation

17/3/23

Added an aging crane

Raise the walls so that the protagonist can walk inside through the windows on the walls

Add a map schematic

Use clocks to change the speed of time

About going downstairs I was trying to get the camera to look outside the house, and then downstairs there are some windows and broken can see the main character, there are some simple collision body inside, left and right to go down

10/4/23

16/4/23

19/4/23

Scene a build almost, before the use of two scene production method will make post-processing invalid, so I copied a GMD students to create a prototype scene to build, adding a tower crane walls these, other such as platform ah stone ah are put back on the image as a subset, and then the original grid components eliminated

Scene prototype (created by game design students)

Screenshot of building a scene:

28/4/23

29/4/23

2/5/23

10/5/23