Hukkelon Aikahärdelli http://demolaproject140.posterous.com A game development blog of an children's game posterous.com Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:28:31 -0800 Pyramid building machine engineering in progress http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/pyramid-building-machine-engineering-in-progr http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/pyramid-building-machine-engineering-in-progr

Hellou! I am Annika, one third of the graphical team for this project. so far for this game I have done pyramid building machine designs. As you can see under there. I hope kids will rather learn physics from this game than history. Since the machine might not be historically accurate. So what I am doing at the moment is plans for user interfaces for puzzles. My aim is just to keep it simple and clear. For example buttons are more colorful than rest of the stuff on puzzle screen. And trying to avoid making things that might be mistaken to be clickable. 


Another UI I am working with at the moment is for the viking time puzzle. There will be lenses, telescope, vikings and boats. All that is still under construction. 


I am also doing the info bubbles that will help the player when ever help is needed. Our helper character is Hukkelo. Hukkelo is really smart and knows everything about physics and all the machines on different times. Illustrating this for the bubbles is my task. The bubbles will be completely without text but there will be spoken words. Bubbles will have more monochromatic style so that they are not mistaken from other items on game.

Here is what Hukkelo is gonna look finally. I changes Hukkelo from it´s first designs to be more like other characters. 


-Annika

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Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:50:00 -0800 Hello, World! http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/hello-world http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/hello-world

I'm the 1-member coding team of our project team and, obviously, I am responsible for all the programming work our project involves.

Inside our project team we decided to keep the coding process and the graphics stuff independent of each other in order to avoid unnecessary overhead and to make the development process fast and flexible. In practice this means that I can do things pretty much based on my own schedule, and whenever we have some finished code and corresponding graphics available, we can "merge" the code and the graphics branches.

From my point of view, the project has started very seamlessly and there hasn't been any major problems. At the moment I'm working hard to make the puzzles of our game come alive. The first puzzle (the seesaw puzzle) is almost finished requiring only some minor UI improvements and final assembling with graphics and sound. Also the second puzzle (the viking puzzle) is already in a pretty good shape.

Having some previous experience from game development, Flash and ActionScript, the development process has been so far pretty straightforward, even though there are of course always new things to learn. In this project my approach to coding has been a kind of "write-quickly-some-ugly-code-to-make-it-work-and-then-refactor-it" method which allows fully-working prototypes and demos to be made quickly.

During the next 2-3 weeks I am going to finish the coding for the individual puzzles and start working with the structure of the complete game.

Here are some screenshots of what I've been up to recently:

Screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_11
0screen_shot_2011-03-01_at_11

-Lauri-

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Fri, 18 Feb 2011 01:51:00 -0800 More art http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/more-art http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/more-art

We had deadline to deliver more finished AD proposals from our initial proposals and this is what we came up with.

Annika's proposals:

Characters

Controls_timemachine
Egypt_playscreen
Egyptbg

Amir's proposals:

Background2
Ch3

Emppu's proposals:

Sheet

We started working on combining Amir's and Annika's styles together. Also we distributed the responsibility areas for each of us, which you will see further on, when we are starting to work with them. 

We named also the characters finally. The main characters are Raisa and Riku and the helper character we picked up, the owl, was named as Hukkelo, creative combination of two words, hullu and hökkelö. 

Next time more about the game mechanics...!

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Fri, 11 Feb 2011 06:26:00 -0800 Finding the D for AD! http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/art-for-the-masses http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/art-for-the-masses

Since we have three visually orientated team members, we decided to bring it all to table: better to check out what all  of us thought about art direction of the game. Here's some pretaste for what kind of art direction we will eventually have...!

Art_01_01

Annika's proposal included some darling examples of character designing and lovely, languid colors for the game. On it's own, it's already a good starting point for further developing! Also she applied the Egypt-theme what we had discussed of location themes for puzzles.

Art_01_02

Amir's porposal had clearly cute characters and some sketches to show progress for it. He had also depicted the time machine the way he had thought about in the attic.

Art_01_03

Emppu's proposal had a bit of American cartoon style twist with some old school red pencils. Also she included some scene sketches.

Next step what we'll have is to do more finished looked for each AD proposal and then work with Yle people to combine parts of these three proposals. It'll be exiting to see how these proposals will be developed further on from this...!

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Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800 Basics first! http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/basics-first http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/basics-first

So, we had the meeting with always so nice Yle people to show our wireframes of the game structure. Rough ones, but delivering the idea is all it needs.

Wireframe_for_the_game

 

Basicly the structure of the game is that the main character ends up in the timemachineand isn't able to return home immediately because the time machine got broken for travelling in time. So the main character needs to solve few puzzle from the old times to get back to the year where all of it started from. End user is able to choose in which time (or in this picture, puzzle) they choose first to check up, and there for this never-ending puzzle limbo graphics...!

Wireframe_of_the_puzzle

But checking more closely on how the each puzzle is constructed, it includes mainly two phases: a menu window showing which time the user has chosen and the actual puzzle gameplay. In Menu window the end user finds a helper character telling the story of what happened and what might be good to check out in Menu window and then the puzzle kid, asking for end user to help him or her in specific problem, which is the puzzle to be accomplished.

After every puzzle the end user gets a piece of time machine and in the very end, the magical re-assembly of time machine shall begin! After finishing the puzzle, end user is able to select to get the main character back in own time and the end. Everyone lived happily ever after...!

Next step what we will have with this, will be bit different one: the actual story. We have very good starting point, so it'll be exciting to see what we will cook up from these ingredients!

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Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:40:07 -0800 Time really flies while working with Time Machine...! http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/theres-nothing-like-doing-the-time-warp-again http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/theres-nothing-like-doing-the-time-warp-again

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Thought there’s been a little delay from the last blog post, the project is rolling on nicely. After meeting with the client, we decided to take one approach, which core idea was to have time machine and a kid travelling with that. For past weeks we have flesh out the story, thought about different puzzles for it and of course, the art direction of the game.

Right after the meeting we had a brainstorming session with thinking more about the actual playable stuff for the game and we come across with this fantastic book: “The way things works” by David Macaulay (“Kuinka kaikki toimii?” as a Finnish edition by Otava). Thought it’s a children book, it does tell really detailed info graphics how, well, everything works. It did inspirit us quite a lot, since the first puzzle we absolute wanted, was nearly on the first pages of the book.

Of course, we benchmarked still some games such as Clik Clak, old Amiga game, which sole idea was to place gears to be able to continue the movement from place A to B. We checked also nice and challenging game about magnets, called Magnetism, which is quite hc-game for natural science point of view. Also, one of us had found out a bricolage book for kids and had found same sort of puzzle what http://www.kongregate.com/games/Onefifth/flood-fill" title="Flood-Fill" target="_blank">Flood Fill contained. It just shows that all the funny stuff isn’t only located in world wide web!

We went through also some art stuff for checking out what sort of feeling everyone had about art directional wise. It was nice to notice how different basis everyone had started: some went straight in the action by drawing out ideas, others with already done illustrations and so on. We also checked some animations and this one popped right up for it's juicy textures: Monkey Truck by Micheal Slack. 

So much stuff to go through next time with the client and of course, huge itching already to share that also in this blog!

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Sun, 16 Jan 2011 02:47:00 -0800 The project #140 is ON! http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/the-project-140-is-on http://demolaproject140.posterous.com/the-project-140-is-on

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And what a week we had! Lots of excitement and enthusiasm was on the air, when we started our first brainstorm session at Monday. Since Demola Project number #140 idea is to do “stuff for kids with Yle in flash” (or in the other words making a game for children), the brief for the project was nicely open for any kind of suggestion. Theme to start with was generally natural sciences, so after browsing the Yle’s kids website, Pikku Kakkonen , we checked out our own suggestions for what we had come up for the theme we had.

Lots of small and simple games popped out, when it was about theme of the project. BBC had many good games, like KS1 Bitesize. KS1 Bitesize had to different modes, mathematics and literacy. Both modes offered 9 different ways of learning to write the words correctly, grammar rules, basic mathematics and also the most practical uses for mathematics, what children can use on their daily basis.

A step for more advanced use for laws of physics, yet making that also interesting and funny, was seen on this clip, what we found about The Incredible Machine. The game’s idea was to achieve the given objective by constructing over-engineered machine from given objects.  Might sound complex on paper, but with clear and easy drag and drop method for constructing the machine seems to be amusing game for even grownups!

Since we wanted to keep the concept of the game still open, we had concentrated more on those aspects of how to make the game more enjoyable for kids.

Customizing the character was one idea, what popped out here and there. For Bug Hunt, you were able to customize the chameleon before playing the game. Thought this might seem to be minor detail for adults, it’s really something, where kids might spend most of the time…!

Of course, we shouldn’t forget the comedy aspect. Cutting the Cheese was all about it: the game idea is to fart on suitable times, when the panda was snoring and if you woke the panda…well, needless to say, that it’s quite embarrassing and the game ends. This just show with how little things kids (and grownups also!) find something to be funny: was it just silly gesture or a voice.

Machinarium was one adorable example of keeping all storytelling and informative tips about the game told completely on visual basis. This gloomy point-and-click-game might not be the best one for little children, but working on completely visual basis the use of comic bubbles to tell what to do or how to do something, might be quite suitable for kids, who haven’t learn to read yet.

And for the last, but not the least, this funny little game, Sushi Cat, had such graphics to look up for. Dropping the cat for eating more sushi might not be really challenging, but simplifying graphics to the extreme and giving some button eyes, will make even onigiris look cute!

So, those were the few things we thought about and showed for each other. We ended up having two different approached for actual game concept, but we’ll tell more of that on next post!

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