When asked to draw something pertaining to the subject of "Debut" for the upcoming Indie Royale bundle, you could say my creative brain had popped out for a scone and afternoon tea. Nope, no ideas forthcoming until Graeme (IndieRoyale bundle master) suggested a stage with curtains, and thus the image of an old theatre and it's rather rouge stage dressing made it's presence known in my mind! That's it I thought and promptly scribbled down some ideas using my favourite digital painting application, MyPaint.(I sound like an anorak!) Here's the final result currently live on the Indie Royale site, though once this bundle goes live this link will of course be outdated!
If we look at my original rough below it doesn't look quite like the finished one seen above..Here's why...
I wanted the art to stand out more from the screen than this initial sketch and one quick trick is to use our old friend perspective. For the finished art I would need to draw some perspective lines for the wooden planks on the stage, so why not carry those lines out a little further and use them as a guide for not only the stage, but also the curtain tops too! Seen below you can just make out my blue guide lines which form the basis on which the planks were drawn.
By curving the front of the stage downward not only do we force the perspective out, we also draw the eye towards the centre as the whole stage takes on a bowed appearance. This is re-enforced once I added in the microphone stand. Although the vanishing point is masked behind the red curtain it is important enough to create just enough perspective in order to draw the eye in and complete the illusion of depth. Compare the original rough to the finished illustration and you can see this in full effect.
*Created on my ageing laptop using MyPaint 1.1, Gimp 2.8and a Wacom tablet running under Linux Mint 14 KDE, which I have to say runs rings round my windows Vista desktop PC
that I normally use.
One of my recent projects was to design the artwork for a pinball game. The first table had the theme of Aliens and UFO's. So not wasting any time I came up with these little chaps who fly about the Nevada desert looking for things to abduct with their dazzling tractor beam of light. OK it's actually a blurred out line with an alpha blended gradient and all that other artistic malarkey, but you get the idea.
Initially I did a concept sketch , why break from the norm eh? After a quick scan into the computer I loaded the newly digitised drawing in to Inkscape where I recreated it using vector lines before colouring in using quite a few layers of fills and gradients, oh and the most important ingredient Tea!. The beauty of vector art is it can be exported to pretty much any resolution. This is brilliant for those times in your life when when 6 months down the line you're asked to do a HD+++ version for iPad Mega Retina 9 or the need arises to create a version in print.
As a test I took the art I'd created for the table and produced a canvas print for my studio wall, the results were excellent.
To finish off here's what the flying saucer looked like prior to me adding colour and shading.
I recentlystarted working with the guys atIndie Royale, providing title art for each of their new games bundles. My first piece of art was this rather hungry giant tortoise for their Evolved bundle. The art style on the website had to be adhered to so my first job was to familiarise myself with the existing look and feel and create the new art in this style.
Penciltastic!
To give you an idea of how the initial sketch differs from the finished artwork here's the pencil sketch I did after I'd been given the design brief. I was later told it needed to be a giant tortoise, just as well as this one don't 'arf look a misery guts!
As an after thought, the banner graphics for the website needed filling out so I also added some eggs too! The finished art also has a couple of babies hatching from the eggs, just to finish it off. As you do!!
For this job I used the most excellent MyPaintin conjunction with Gimp for the odd bit of cutting out and colourising.
Take Sensible Soccer on the Super Nintendo for example,(SNES for those not in the know or have forgotten).Unlike the version we ported to the Sega Mega-drive, Nintendo's 16bit wonder involved a bit more work than the relatively easy port to the Sega hardware. For a start the original Amiga code was written in 68000 assembler which also happens to be the same processor used in the Mega-drive.Converting a game is just a tad easier when both your original code and the target code can effectively run on the same processor.
Unfortunately the same can not be said when converting to a totally different microprocessor, say one that has its foot still in the 8bit era. You see the processor in the SNES was at it's brass roots level a MOS 6502, yes 'that' very same family of processors used in the Commodore C64 and many other 8bit computers, consoles and arcade machines. Not that I have anything against the 6502 in fact I cut my coding teeth on it back in the day. Thankfully Nintendo opted to use the updated version developed by Western Design Center which has a wonderful assortment of extras over it's older brother. What extras are these then? Well, extras like 16 bit registers, more instructions and and the ability to address up to 16 megabytes of memory which is somewhat greater than the 6502 and it's comparatively puny 64k addressing range. Cool! (Thanks Wikipedia! come on you didn't think I'd remember all that geek stuff? )
So what's all that got to do with the price of fish? Well nothing but it does remind us that converting a game isn't a just a case of converting the graphics, changing a few lines of code and hey presto you have a new target platform with which to publish your game on. No, it's far more involved than that, even today with multi platform game engines like Unity or Corona which makes the whole process far easier there are still rules to follow but these falter in my opinion when compared to the technical work required doing it old skool!.
So anyway as I was saying it's funny how things turn out isn't it? I was going through some old graphics files recently when out of the blue I was contacted by Nintendo Gamer Magazine who invited me to comment on my memories of converting Sensible Soccer to the Super Nintendo. Well it took me a while to remember what we did but after after viewing a few old Amiga IFF files, drinking a large mug of tea (or three) those old memories soon resurfaced and before I knew it I'd written enough waffle to pad out a few paragraphs.
So if you want to know how this version of Sensi Soccer differs from that of the original , grab yourself a copy today! Nintendo Gamer July 2012.
Quick post today as I've been really, really busy of late.
So a few minutes ago I needed to pick a colour from an image I'd found on that internet thing we all seem to spend our lives using. So I hit F7 moved the mouse curser over to the colour area I wanted and well the resulting hue was not quite what I wanted. .Hmmm if only I could sample a range of colours from an area and acquire the average hue, now that would be cool.
Oh how surprised I was when by total accident I held the mouse button down again but this time I dragged it without letting go. Wow! A circle appears and the further out you drag the larger the circle becomes! No way I thought, but way it was and behold the average colour contained within the circle was picked up and as soon as I let go of the mouse button appeared as the current draw colour. Most excellent!!
So today after using Inkscape daily for the past 8 months or so I have discovered something new and something very useful. Awesome stuff!
There's a secret that I'm surprised hasn't surfaced by now? It's not something to change societal structure, nor create widespread panic on a global scale. No, this secret is about a game I worked on during my Sensible Software days, a title that was written using elements of the Sensible Soccer code.
Holy smoke, no way? Get outta here pronto and take your burger with you.(ok ok leave the fries, oh and those onion rings too.. ta)
Here's a screen shot of said game as I'm sure many of you have no idea what I'm talking about..or is that most of you?
Unfortunately I don't have any of the original graphics files for this title although there is a slim chance a copy resides on one of my old Amiga drives somewhere. Not to fear though as I have found a copy of the game on a ROM site and using that wonder of modern software technology known as 'emulation' have taken a few screen shots for your delight and my own historical record.
I didn't do all the art, no no no, my partner in crime was ex-Graftgold artist John Lilley who created the title animation and the cut scene animations used throughout the game, with me providing all game sprites, backgrounds and menu art.
Back then it was quite nice to work on something different, yeah yeah I know how different is one footy game to another? Well different with respect to the artwork and view. Let's be honest the appeal of the original Sensi Soccer was the simplistic uncluttered 'see all view' of the game which lead us to adopt an almost icon like style for the sprites and pitch art. So the chance to work on a "secret" project that allowed me to draw big players and create some nice menu icons with lots of flags and formation icons was too cool for school.
Looking back now through those warm retro loving eyes there is an obvious criticism I could make,"Why are all the players the same?". If I recall memory was quite tight on the cartridge and to keep things within the code structure of the original game everything had to sit within the same framework, including the number of animations for the players and the way they were stored in memory. I believe this was to retain the same colour changing technique used on Sensible Soccer although I could be mistaken. I think you will agree the end result did the job, although the animations are quite crude for their size they work without being too clunky.
I've recently learned that the blue box European release is actually quite a rare and sought after beast and has been known to fetch at auction as much as £750! Wow, unbelievable!
Having recently played the game via emulation* it's certainly worth trying it out but I would suggest bagging a joypad from somewhere as playing on a keyboard is not going to provide the same experience as using a proper pad. I've got a USB to Sega Saturn pad converter which for this game works brilliantly, especially with a Japanese Saturn pad as they feel great and are easily mapped to cover all Genesis pad functions. *I tend to use Fusion but Gens will do the job just as well.
That's about it for now, I'll be continuing to document our development of Blobbit Push as we progress but for now it's over and out... until next time that is...(Atari Jaguar... shhhhh)
** To keep up to date with more meandering and waffle from me you can enter you email address (on the right near the top) and each new blog post I write will magically appear in your inbox! WOW! Yes and all spam free too so none of those African Prince fellas offering you a zillion squid for a small administration fee malarkey. **
Here's a snippet of the new 'updated' Blobbit Push tile set for the Sand Sludge Bog area. Yes I know it looks like the old one, or does it?
Hang on why don't you compare yourself. Marvelous.
(fiddles with some files... uploads...that was so quick , I've not finished typing this yet).
Right then, here's a shot of the old one below.
As you can see in order to make it work on super mega high res screens as featured on the new iPad 3 I have had to vector up the original art so it renders nicely at these new HD screen sizes. Unfortunately there's no magic button so every piece of art has to be recreated again which isn't too bad as I can now go in and add lots of detail and extras I couldn't do before. That's good right?
You can read more about this process in an earlier post I did back in *coughs* erm.. 2010..
I suppose we could have gone down the "pixel" route but in all honest I'm pretty sick of all these pixel games using graphics that back in the day would probably have been slated for being too simple. Funny how peoples perception of pixel art and proper HQ pixel art appear to be so widely separated.
I've widened the width of this blog! Yay let's all have a party! Ok it's not that big a deal but it does mean I can fit some Amiga size screenshots in now without having to scale them down and in the process losing that retrotastic scanline effect I like to add.
To start it off here's something I found recently from 1994. It's an old screen mock up of a game I was going to do with a couple of old mates of mine called TMR-II for the PC. For those interested the art was drawn using Brilliance on an Amiga A1200.
Paris with or without top?
Looking
at the width I still think there's some adjustments to be made but it's
better than it was. Only real tweak I've had to make so far was the blog
header which needed expanding to cover the extra space.
I almost forgot there was also a female character called 'Paris'. Can't think why I did a lesser clothed version? Hmmm... **** UPDATE **** Me mate Gary Symons just reminded me that the game was based on an old arcade title called 'Search and Rescue' by SNK which I was aware of at the time but due to creeping old age had totally forgotten about.. So to remind me and anyone else who is wondering, which is probably about 3 people here's a youtube clip of said arcade game being played.
It's screen shot time again folks! I've taken it upon myself to provide a few screen shots for the GamesTM article that's currently being written. 'Yeah no probs' I said thinking I'd load up the old Amiga emulator, take a few screen shots and be out in time for the virtual pub to open.. Nope!
Hang about, go back to the start, what am I talking about 'again' I've not done any for a while, damn I must be getting on a bit as I'm time warping back to 1995 and the many hours, days, months spent designing and editing golf courses for Sensible Golf. Strange.
Anyway as I was saying it took a bit longer than I thought but after several failed attempts to get me USB joystick working,(subject of a later post) I managed to sort out the shots as promised and just as I was about to close down the emulator I saw a disk image of the Sensible Golf map editor. Hmmm.. I wonder if it works? And if it does work will I be able to actually use it again? (cue tick tock music) It loads! Cool I thought... then.. well.. that's about as far as I got. The memory banks that stored the 'how to use it guide' have become somewhat corrupted so I'm relying on that old favourite , trial and error.
Something is working here...
Unlike Cannon Fodder these tiles are 16x8!
A brief break for some food followed by much clicking and pointing with more clicking and pointing thereafter revealed what can only be described as a light from the heavens. Well actually it was a loaded golf course map but you get the idea. So I'm now seeing a loaded map and those corrupted memory banks have began to self defrag. Result! Joyous triumphant cheering would be heard if I could be bothered. Strange thing memory, if you had asked me this morning how to use the Sensible Golf editor I would have look bewildered and puzzled, more than I would on a normal day.
So what's the point of this somewhat pointless exercise? Well I was kind of thinking how cool it would be to hack the original game graphics and levels I did back in the day with a newly created one off map and graphics, as you do.
Then I thought apart from me I doubt anyone would really be that bothered by it, my to do list is quite big and if I was going to do something along the hack route I would suspect Cannon Fodder is a clear winner for this kind of retro tom foolery.
Ah well the idea was good for all of about 5 mins including ad break. ;) That Cannon Fodder idea is starting to linger...hmmm....
