Hey, Party Animals pt2

It's been brought to my attention that one of my #screenshotsaturday posts was picked up by Indiestatik, and they seemed very taken with Party Animals.  Which is great, except oddly enough they posted to my personal blog instead of the devlog.  They did have some very nice words about my other artwork, so I'm not miffed or anything, but anyone who was interested in actually finding out more about Party Animals might feel mislead.  To rectify that and to show off some of the art that's on the devlog, I figured I'd write a new post here.

Party Animals

These are the titular Party Animals, who you will interact with and possibly recruit during your political campaign.

Ka Eldereta is a tribal chieftain that represents the interests of the original inhabitants of Summer Island.  His name is a pun on "Caldereta", which is a tomato based stew normally made with goat meat.

Boo Tee Kee is a businesswoman that represents the interests of the merchant class.  Her name is also a pun, in that "Butiki" means lizard in Filipino.  The spelling Boo Tee Kee is the Sinicized form, which I did because the Chinese are the primary merchant class in many Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines.  I'm obviously a sucker for word play.

Summer Island

I recently gave our world map a more board-game or pop-up type look, which I think works very well.

My idea was when you zoom into a district, the special buildings in that district will have cute little animations like the bell in this cathedral...

...or this fish trying desperately to escape its farm.

Comic Strips

I also tried making one panel comic strips for the blogs that don't naturally have images to go with them, like this one for Julius' series on winning local elections...

...and this one for my pained attempt at profundity in figuring out game mechanics.

Anyway if you've been intrigued by any of this then please do hop on over to the Party Animals devlog to find out more!

Minor Blog Updates

Hi folks, just a little update to let you know some changes I've made to the blog.  I've removed the Personal Projects Page and replaced it with a Party Animals page.  Since Party Animals now occupies most of my personal project time it made sense to make the switch.  Party Animals is a deceptively cute political strategy game.  If any of that floats your boat why not read more about it on our devblog?

I'm also happy to say that some of my illustrations are now being sold as royalty free stock art by Misfit Studios and I've updated my illustrations page to reflect this.  They've actually been up there since January but since I finally made my first sale I thought I'd finally announce it here.  I've been thinking of selling stock art for quite some time now to satisfy the itch to draw and paint while earning a little extra cash on the side.  This will never be my primary income, but a couple bucks here and there sure can't hurt.

That's all for now, hope to have more updates soon!

Hey Party Animals!

If you're interested in hearing about how Party Animals came to be, then read on.  But if you're just interested in learning more about the game, feel free to skip the backstory and just head on to our presskit at heypartyanimals.com

Disaster Relief

Last year, I co-created a game that broke my heart.  I released Elevator Joe with Kuyi Mobile and we were hoping that Kuyi's previous success with Streetfood Tycoon would somehow carry over to this new game. It didn't, and frankly speaking I've soured on the idea of making mobile games for now.  Around November last year in the grips of that depression, I reached out to my friend Julius to see if he'd like to join a gamejolt contest with me.  We'd always talked about making some dumb game together, and I knew I was in a funk and I wanted to do something light and funny to get me out of my mood.  Then right before the contest began, Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines.  Julius's home town is in Eastern Samar, just a few hours away from Tacloban City, which was ground zero for this disaster.  Suddenly my depression seemed rather silly, and making the game took on a new dimension.  Julius was having trouble reaching his family, what with communication lines cut and cellphone carrier capacities stretched to their limits. He needed to work on something to keep himself from worrying about his family, so we threw ourselves into the game.

One month later, we found out two things.  One, Julius' family was safe, but parts of his town were flattened.  Two, we didn't win the gamejolt contest.  That's all right though.  A game jam tends to favor very specific games : platformers, puzzlers, etc. where the interactions are fairly simplistic and gameplay is usually shooting something or fitting a block into the right hole.  Picking a political strategy game was probably a poor choice, but it was and continues to be the game we wanted to make.  I was terrified of committing myself to what might be another financial flop by pushing forward with this game, but a few factors swayed me to make this choice.  Any recognition I gave in the gamedev world comes from my work on Indie titles like Spacechem and Prison Architect (in fact, it was Space Chem that caught Chris Delay's attention and led him to contact me).  None of that matters to the mobile market, but I'm hoping that'll have some sway with the indie market. Games like Cart Life and Papers, Please have also proven that there is some interest in subject matter that goes beyond the traditional boundaries of game genres.  If we can help to push those boundaries and make a decent living I'd be very pleased.

Bootstrapping Bitsummit

As we hunkered down to start figuring out timelines and changes to the game design, an interesting opportunity presented itself : Bitsummit 2014.  The second annual Bitsummit had just been announced in Kyoto, promising a bigger venue and most importantly for us opening up registration to foreign devs.  Even more opportune was the fact that Cebu Pacific Airlines was holding one of their regular seat sales.  As I nervously scanned the available seats, I found round trip tickets from Manila to Osaka for roughly $130 dollars.  Bitsummit was free for indie devs and is one of the few conferences in our region that attracts Western press. There was no way I could waste the opportunity to have some face to face time with press.  So despite feeling financially fragile at the time I pulled out my credit card and within a few minutes I had tickets to Osaka.  I was going to Bitsummit.

Japan's hotels are traditionally quite expensive, especially to someone from a developing country.  Accommodations are even trickier for someone like me because I'm such a light sleeper. I would have roomed with a friend but that was a bit of an imposition and I don't know their sleeping habits.  Hostels are generally out of the picture because now you're in a room full of people with different sleeping habits, and you're not even friends with them so it's harder to kick them because they're snoring.  Hotels were way too expensive, though I did consider staying in a cheaper one since the breakfast buffets might offset the cost.  Ultimately I chose Airbnb, particularly because I was able to maximize a promo they had and saved $100 on accomodations.

The place that I ultimately found on airbnb was going for $35 a night.  That's already pretty cheap by Japanese standards, especially since it comes with bikes, which cuts down on your transportation costs.  But I noticed on my credit card bill that my bank had a deal with Airbnb to shave off $25 per transaction.  I'd already used this promo on a previous trip to Bangkok, but I wondered if I could use it again.  The promo specified that you input the first 4 numbers of your credit card as the promo code.  I tried using my credit card again and was informed that the code had already been used up.  But I also had an "e-credit card" that the bank gave me, and I tried its numbers : they worked.  I quickly realized now that the promo codes were dependent on the different credit card numbers, and that theoretically you could keep using the promo as many times as you had credit card numbers.  I scanned the rules and regulations of the promo and could not find anything saying that there was a minimum amount or number of days that you needed in order to use the promo.  I had just discovered a loophole.  Fast forward to a few days later after some discussions with the Japanese owner of the space, I had made 4 separate transactions at the place, saving me $25 dollars per transaction, totalling to $100 worth of savings.  I felt like a bootstrapping genius.

Trial By Fire

Now that everything was all set, all that remained was to try to craft a playable demo within two months.  It seemed simple enough at the time, but it turns out we vastly overestimated our capacity to do this.  I spent December and January were mostly spent working on Prison Architect, which is basically my bread and butter at this point.  I would have most of February to commit to the game, apart from a 5 days vacation in Thailand. Too much was going against us.  Aside from the time constraint, Julius was working with a cutting edge SDK called Loom that allowed rapid deploy/live reload workflow but was new and buggy.  To be short, we weren't actually able to make a proper demo, but we were able to cobble together a prototype of our sortie system, which will be the main interface in which the player tries to gather votes for his campaign.  It made sense for us to focus on that since it was integral to the game that it works.  If the sorties aren't fun, then there's no point continuing to develop around them.  Additionally, they are also the part of the game that has the most moving parts and animations, which is much more exciting to show off on the show floor compared to showing a character moving across a map screen.

To compensate for our lack of a demo, I decided that making an "explainer" document of some sort would help me to at least communicate what we want to do with the game.  In essence this would become a Kickstarter marketing pitch in PDF form, and in my mind I visualized it like an old school SNES Manual.  Not only would this be useful to explain the game to press, it also helped crystallize some of the ideas we had into words and pictures so that we can reference them in the future, kind of a like a loose design doc.  Since we are planning to crowdfund this some point in the future, this will all be very useful marketing material somewhere down the line.

In fact, it's already proven it's worth.  Pecha Kucha Executive Director Jean Snow is inviting gamedevs to do live presentations during Bitsummit.  The idea of putting together a Pecha Kucha in a day is terrifying to someone like me, who likes to plan out as many details as I can before getting on a stage.  But since I had the manual as a guide I essentially crafted the presentation around the points that I brought up in the manual, making it far easier for me to plot it out.  Anyway the great thing about a Pecha Kucha is that at worst you only look like an idiot for 7 minutes onstage and then it's done!

Helping Hand

Since there's no sense showing off a prototype during the public days, I also decided to make efficient use of my table space by turning it into a de facto "Philippine Indie Games" table.  I rounded up a bunch of local indie developers that I know (Kuyi Mobile, Keybol Games, Quickfire Games, White Widget, Mochibits, Studio Kontrabida)and said that if they could put together a brochure of their games and companies I would stack these on my table and share it with reporters and the public.  Getting Philippine games in front of a wider audience is an enourmous task, so I'm happy to be able to help them out while I can.  I even bought a Philippine flag and some local candies to entice people to drop by the table!

Hello Again, Kyoto

When my wife and I visited Kyoto last October, we met up with some awesome devs from Q games that invited me to attend Bistummit.  At the time I was skeptical, since it was mainly geared towards Japanese indies.  That all changed when they opened it up to foreign devs.  As I write this I am one day away from flying to Kyoto for Bitsummit.  I wish I had more to present, but my tickets and accomodations have been booked and there's no backing out now.  At the very least I will see some old friends and make some new ones too.  Opportunities like Bitsummit don't come along everyday for folks in my region, so I've resolved to absolutely throw myself into any possible marketing opportunities that I find, even if I'm already exhausted just thinking about it.

The Dildo Factory Mod, Etc.

The last Alpha update for Prison Architect last year finally opened up the game to mods.  Clever people had already figured out a way to hack mods onto the game, but by opening up the gates PA's fans were finally allowed to go buck wild with their imaginations.

1. The Dildo Factory

When I sent a tweet to @IVsoftware notifying them of this mod, all they had to say was "surprised its taken them this long".  

2. Star Wars

Awwwww yeaaaah.  This is what modding was for right?  Those custom Stormtroopers are just plain adorable.  They have R2 droids too!

3. British Boarding School

Fancy playing a top-down version of Bully?  Well you're in luck! Coms complete with plush carpeting and everything.  Surely a Hogwarts mod is on the way.

4. Seasons Mod (4 seasons, get it? GETIT?)

This was one of the first mods that came out when the Alpha was released, and the aim is provide a different mod for whichever season we're currently in.  This was winter, so it featured snow on the trees, Snowmen as your workmen, and Santa Wardens.  Winter lends itself to this kind of modding, so I'd be curious to see what they do with spring (Easter Bunny Wardens?) and summer (Baywatch Prison?).

5. Clearer Needs Mod

This mod gave me the most pause, because it's very obviously critiquing my own work.  Specifically it takes issue with the iconography I used to describe the prisoners' needs.  If the mod were badly done I could laugh it off, but the thing is I sort of agree with this modder that the icons I made are unclear, especially at smaller sizes.  I got caught up with the idea of the body language of my prisoner icons helping to inform the icon and neglected the fact that at smaller sizes a lot of the detail would be lost.

I'm no stranger to critique and indeed I'm happy that someone took the time to think over the same design problem that I did.  However my built-in insecurity about the worth of my work reared its ugly head.  I had been paid to create those icons, and the guy that made this mod did arguably a better job than I did. So he should get my job, right?!?!?

But looking at the other mods I realized that essentially every modder thinks that he can do a better job than the original designers.  It's the very nature of modding!  So people will tweak the code, the settings and the art and make it something they think is "better".  It might be, but better is usually a matter of personal taste, in the same way that I'm using a launcher that completely changes the way Android works because I thought it was cool.

The moral of the story?  Just work as hard and as smart as you can and stop worrying so much about other people.  Looking forward to some more amazing mods!

Elevator Joe is Corona Labs' App of the Month

A little validation is always nice.  If you haven't yet, please do try Elevator Joe.  Thanks!

Cute Cartoon Animals Running!

I suppose the right term would be: Cute anthropomorphic animals running, but that's a bit of a mouthful.  Just a quick update today.  My friend Julius and I made a game about a month ago to join the Gamejolt Contest 10.  We managed to finish it, but it was very underdeveloped, so we decided to keep at it and maybe release it sometime next year.  I want to keep it under wraps for now, so all I'll say is that it involves animals running...for politics!

Elevator Joe icon redux

Elevator Joe launched to pretty dismal sales last September, and it's taken me a while to come to grips with the realities of releasing a game as opposed to simply creating the art and moving on.  I'd considered writing about that, but I'm not sure I have it in me to go through that process just yet.  Instead I'd like to be a little positive, and talk about one of the ways we're thinking of to increase our downloads, and that's by updating the icon.  All of Kuyi Mobile's have a built in ticker that lets Erick (the owner of Kuyi Mobile and my partner on Elevator Joe) cross promote through his library of games.  We were hoping that this would provide a constant stream of downloads for Elevator Joe, since Kuyi Mobile's last game, Streetfood Tycoon, has amassed quite a few downloads.  Unfortunately this wasn't the case.  We're not sure why, but people just weren't clicking on the icons like they did Erick's other games.  There was ultimately no way to find out why this was happening, but one of the things we discussed was redoing the app icon to try to visually entice more people to download the game.  The above icon was our original app icon.  We're both satisfied with it, but it since there was nothing to lose by trying, I went ahead and redid the icon.

Here is the new icon.  I used some of the same color schemes Apple is using in its new UI as well as retaining Elevator Joe.  the colored bars are a reference to the new minigame that we added to the game, and the buttons are obviously in reference to the nature of the game, which is to simulate (in a really cute way) being an elevator operator.  If the original icon had one drawback it was that it didn't really explain the game in any way, and I was hopeful this new design would do just that.

So did it help?  Well, ultimately yes, although not as much as I would have hoped.  There was a small uptick in downloads after the update went live, but not enough to really change things.  We're hopeful that the new icon and other changes we made to the game have made it that much better, and that all it needs is some more marketing to push it over the edge.

I'd be very pleased if you could try out Elevator Joe and vote for it to be Coronalabs' November App of the Month (we were recently chosen as app of the week).  Also, if you think that the icon layout I used here is cool, head on over to the awesome appicontemplate.com and give some kind words (or better yet a donation!) to Michael Flarup.

High resolution Polaroids for Prison Architect

In the game Prison Architect there's a main story arc that introduces the player to the key components of running a prison.  In those story arcs PA's cartoony characters act out different scenes, while illustrations in the form of polaroids fall out of the sky to depict the same scenes in more realistic detail.  

For reasons of efficiency those polaroids have been drawn at pretty low resolutions, meaning they can't really be blown up and used for promotional purposes (say, in posters or possible boxed sets).  However since we had a bit of down time in terms of art needs Chris asked if I could redo some of our favorite polaroids to be hi-res. I jumped at the opportunity because some of those polaroids are at this point 2 yeas old, and reflect my skills as an artist back then (ie they look terrible to me now).  Giving them a fresh lick of paint made me feel a whole lot better.  We're not sure what these will turn into eventually, but it's possible that they might become prints or some sort of merch for fans. 

The image you see above of Edward (bit of trivia: Edward's character design was very much influenced by pre-Heisenberg Walter White) in cuffs should be familiar to anyone who's ever played Prison Architect.  The other two polaroids? I think I'll leave that open to speculation.

4th Annual Manila Game Jam

I'll always remember my term as IGDA Manila chapter coordinator as a turning point in my life.  It made me grow as an individual and made me realize that while leadership is exhausting, it can also be very rewarding.  I promised myself I'd stay away from IGDA and let it grow on its own two years ago, but circumstances have brought me back into the fold.  I won't be running for chapter coordinator anytime soon (or ever again) but I'll definitely be helping out a lot in this year's Manila Game Jam.  This year's Jam actually has two sites in Manila and one site in CLSU in the Science City of Munoz (I just love typing "the Science City"), so these are exciting times!  If you're an artist, writer, game designer, programmer or musician who's always wanted to make games feel free to join in the fun!

For more info on the game jam you can check out igdamanila or the manila game jam websit]e.  Special thanks to Robot With A Smile for the awesome poster.

Chimeras and Other Things

Throwing up a quick Chimera WIP here.  I haven't been painting anything for about a week so this is a nice change of pace.  Funny, I had no idea there were goats involved in D&D Chimeras.  They always seemed rather harmless to me.  Except the billy goats gruff, those guys were just jerks.

Also, if you haven't yet, please do check out what will become the website for Pintsize Productions, where our challenge is ongoing, and two iOS app developers have generously donated copies of their games for our winners.

Traffix

After much preamble and numerous blog posts, I'm happy to finally announce Pintsized Production's first game, Traffix.  Pintsized Productions is the name Luis and I are calling our nascent "company", and Traffix is a not too clever portmanteau of "Traffic" and "Fix".  It's a simple traffic management game that actually looks nothing like the poster above, which I suppose should be explained.  

In the middle of production (ie a month into it) of Traffix, Luis showed me a sample of the game without any graphics.  It was essentially a bunch of squares traveling across straight lines.  I remarked that it looked similar to a Mondrian artwork, Broadway Boogie Woogie and suggested that we make a "Traffix Mondrian" version of the game as a lark and releasing it on Mondrian's birthday. Unfortunately, Mondrian's birthday is in the first week of March, so it really wasn't worth putting all that effort into something that would only really be understood by a couple of art nerds.  I still thought it was a cute idea, so I put together a mock release poster for Traffix, Mondrian style.  I may keep doing these for future games, just for fun.

If you actually want to see what the game looks like, please head on over to pintsized.co, where you'll find my hastily put together promotional blog, which will someday become a proper website.  In the meantime, there's a post there about our Pokki Traffix Challenge, in which we challenge you to get as high a score as possible in Traffix, and reward you with iOS games.  Please do try the Pokki version and join our challenge, and stay tuned for when we finally release Traffix on the iPad!

Traffic Game Bibliography

As I may have discussed before, the game my friend and I are working on revolves around traffic.  Traffic and infrastructure has been on my mind for the past year or so mostly because Manila's infrastructure is so woefully inadequate, and I suppose making games about it is my way of, if not solving the problem, then at least probing and exploring it further.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's like writing a book or creating a painting about it, but there are certainly similarities there.  As any good writer or painter must do, I've buried myself in as many books as I can about the subject to do some research.  While I know I am not doing these books justice with these rapid fire descriptions, I do hope you'll find them interesting enough to give them a shot.

Green Metropolis : Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

This is a fascinating book with a pretty controversial premise.  In contrast to common knowledge, city living is actually the most eco-friendly way of life.  Living densely, David Owen argues, makes us all inherently more efficient, and is the key to sustainability.  While there's a lot to chew on in this book, this idea of density and the kind of mass transportation that allows fascinates me.  I've already got a game idea in mind that plays into at least some of those concepts, and I think my ultimate game making goal is to create a new Sim City type game that relies less on strict zoning requirements and more on how to efficiently use a restricted space.

Traffic : Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) 

While this book might seem to have some impact on our current game, the truth is that the traffic concepts discussed will take me much more time than I have right now to distill and turn into a game mechanic.  Terms like induced traffic and traffic calming will be of no interest to players if I can't figure out how to make them fun.  Chapters of this book that excited and interested me are its peek into LA's high tech traffic control system, which is mostly necessary because LA and its environs are built around automobile usage, and only recently have they started upgrading their public transit system.  His research into Mexico and India is also interesting because of the similarities between those places and Manila, in terms of traffic congestion.

The Great Reset : How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post Crash Prosperity

This was probably the least interesting of the three books, at least in terms of finding anything useful to turn into a game.  It's not a bad read though, and starts out as a history book detailing the US Recession of the late 1800s, the more famous 1930s Great Depression, and how American Society changed then, and how they'll be seeing some major changes now.  Most of the city and transit changes that he envisions for the future borrow a lot from Green Metropolis, so if that's what you're interested in I'd pick that up instead.  Frankly Richard Florida has disappointed me lately, and  the only book of his I can really recommend is The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent (That has nothing to do with either traffic or infrastructure though).

Full disclosure, I've linked these books to my Amazon Associates account so on the off chance you're actually interested in these books please do click the links to help me out!  Speaking of helping out, I'll be making an announcement about the game this coming Monday, so do make sure to check out the blog next week and help us pimp our game!

Spacechem Valentine's Sale!

Just a quick shoutout for Spacechem, which is having a Valentine's sale from today till the 22nd.  Get one of the best indie games of 2011 for only 1.99 on your iPad!

Building Concepts

A couple of days ago I blogged about about the car designs I made for our upcoming game (side note: I really should announce the game's name already, since it's really nothing spectacular, but I feel like I've held off for so long that I might as well keep up the charade).  Now I want to show off some of the designs I came up with for the buildings that populate our game, and share the design philosophy(!) that went behind them.

Once again I turn to the amazing The Art of Monsters vs. Aliens. In the section under environments there's a two page spread of the art they used for the golden gate bridge.  I don't know if it's legible, but there's a phrase that's written there a couple of times : Add wonky detail.  For whatever reason this phrase stuck with me, and I took it to heart when designing the buildings.

Speaking of designing, I highly suggest that any designer always have a sketchbook with them.  You never know when you'll need to kill time, and you might as well be productive while doing it!  The sketches above were made while Aissa and I were in line renewing our driver's licences.  What usually took only a couple of hours ended up taking the entire day because the renewal center's card machine got busted.  Luckily for me I needed to design some office/residential skyscrapers, and we were stuck in Makati.  These sketches are pretty stylized but if you're ever in the Ayala MRT station, find the LTO license renewal center and look out  across EDSA and you might spot one of the buildings I used as a reference.

Back to being "wonky", so my basic design instruction to myself was "straight outside, wonky inside".  What I meant by that was that the outside lines of the buildings should be straight and clean, but the insides should be a little wonky.  So you'll notice that the floors of the upper right corner building are all symmetrical, but the stuff inside like the windows, aircon etc. are all a little different from each other.  I think this makes things interesting since there's a contrast between controlled and wonky shapes.  Actually if you look closely (or maybe not even) you'll notice that I don't really stick to that rule the whole time, but at the very least if I try to keep that in mind it helps to keep the design of the buildings unified.

Car Concepts

Keeping in line with the recent blog post about our game, I thought I'd share with you some of the conceptualization that went behind the look of the game.  When I was thinking of how I wanted the game to look, and how to make it look if not unique at least a little different, I immediately remembered some car designs that I liked in The Art of Monsters vs. Aliens.  The concept art in the game featured a retro 50s-60s look (think diners and drive-in movies).  These caricatures of cars really caught my attention so with gusto, I set out to sketch some of my own cars.

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Obviously cars aren't my expertise, but I had a lot of fun sketching a Honda Jazz and trying to simplify its look to turn it into a game sprite.  I sketched the jeepney from pictures (thanks, Google Images!), because frankly I didn't feel like standing in the hot sun explaining to curious passerby and suspicious police why I was so intently looking and sketching a public utility vehicle.

I had a lot more fun sketching cars than I thought I would, and by the end of the exercise I felt I was getting more and more proficient at it.  Unfortunately it really wasn't really time efficient, and I found (unsurprisingly) that when I finally shrank the images I made down to sprite size (roughly 40x20 pixels) any superfluous design elements had disappeared.  So in the interest of time I decided against preliminary sketches and instead went straight to the game sprites.  Seeing as we're already behind schedule (real paying work gets in the way of passion projects) I think it was the only move I could really make.

Traffic Game Concepts

I realized with a little dismay that today is February 1, and the game that Luis and I have been working on has yet to see the light of day.  It's not that no work was done.  In fact the game is mostly complete at this point, and we're just making the final tweaks and hoping to release before the end of this month.  Till then, let me share a couple of sketches of the initial game ideas I presented to Luis over bottles of Craft beer.

For the past few months I've had a tortured relationship with my career.  I always hated that everything I made is digital and had to impact on the real world.  I wanted to do stuff that changed the environment (Metro Manila) I lived in, and there was never going to be a way to do that through making art for games.  I went through a brief, insane moment where I was semi-seriously considering going back to school to become an architect or railroad engineer, basically anything that lets me affect the world around me in a positive way.

After these flights of fancy died down however, I realized that even if I did push through with this radical career change, it would take me years of study and building up a career before I even managed to do anything remotely near as world-changing as I want to.  I already feel like I'm running out of time as it is.  So I made a compromise with myself : I will satisfy the urge to fix the problems I see around me by making games about solving them.

The first problem I wanted to "solve" was traffic.  Solving traffic marries my love for efficiency with my almost disturbing fetish for mass transit.  This first game idea doesn't actually touch on mass transit however. It's more about managing the flow of vehicles.  People love to complain about how bad traffic is and how they could do a much better job than our traffic enforcers (which may be true), so I wanted to make a simple game about how managing even a couple of intersections can be pretty damned hard.  It's very much inspired by this game I found while doing research on traffic games, but I wanted to streamline it as well as make it aesthetically prettier than it is right now.  Gridlock Buster goes deeper into actual traffic management systems used by traffic engineers worldwide, and while I personally find that fascinating, I don't know that it would translate into good gameplay.

My second game idea has to do a lot more with efficiency and making traffic lighter. The basic idea is to map out a route for a bus or other mass transit system based on the number of users on that route.  So a successful route would be one that managed to serve the most number of customers and be profitable while not creating too many stops and slowing things down.  This sketch was even color coded according to the density of the city blocks.  This was inspired by the game Cities in Motion, which is a game that is based solely around creating Mass Transit (ie it was made for me).  This was the game that opened my eyes to the possibility of creating games about traffic.  It's not a triple A game by any means and it's not raking in triple A money, but it's a well made niche game made by a small team that's profitable.

Ironically profitability is one of the things that I feel makes the game less interesting than it could be to me.  I felt that the overriding purpose of the game was to make a profitable company, and not to ease congestion and make traffic and public transport better.  That's not necessarily a huge problem, but I never felt like my transit systems were making much of a difference improving the flow of traffic.  In fact in some cases, like operating bus lines, it ended up making the traffic worse, which undermines the whole point of mass transit.

This second game idea of mine would place slightly less emphasis on profitability and more on improving traffic flow and efficiency.  Plotting out a good route would not only make you a tidy profit because more people will want to use your services, it will also create visible improvements in the traffic situation.

Luis and I ultimately chose to make the first game because it was much simpler.  This being our first game ever, we wanted to try something that wouldn't be too complicated and discourage us too quickly.  The second game idea is the one I like better, and offers the possibility of a much deeper, complex game system, but that will have to wait.

On Introversion and Prison Architect

Having worked in the games industry for quite some time I was always aware of Introversion Software.  I will admit that until they'd contacted me I wasn't exactly playing their games, but I was reading about them intently and cheering on this plucky indie developer in the UK that had somehow managed to make it big before the golden age of indie games.  So it came as a huge surprise when I received this email in my inbox:

Ryan,

Would you be interested in discussing working with Introversion Software on our next game?  We are the indie developers behind Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON and Multiwinia, and we have a new project currently in development that requires a talented 2d artist such as yourself.  I’ve had a screenshot of Spacechem in my “Visual Style Ideas” folder for a while now, and today I found your portfolio website and had a look.  I really like the visual style you’ve used in SpaceChem and think it would work great for our new project.

At first my eyes widened, then one eyebrow went up as I did some research to make sure I got the names right.  For all I knew someone picked a name very close to "Introversion" to gain some indie cred when speaking to unsuspecting game developers.  Introversion Software.  Chris Delay.  It was real.  I relaxed and allowed my eyes to widen once again.  After a flurry of emails and a couple of skype conversations and quick mockups, it was made official.  I was part of the Prison Architect team.

It's been a great ride so far, and while there's still a lot of work to be done I can see it's shaping up to be quite a game.  The beginning stages were quite interesting, as Introversion were looking to me to provide the visual style for the game.  The image above shows off the peak of one of the design directions I had for the game.  It mixed in architectural blueprints with topographical maps and a dash of graphic design.

Here's one of the topographical maps I downloaded to use as a reference.  You can see that I picked up the font design from here, as well as using different colored buildings to show different uses for a space.  I really liked that the look was unique and striking, and also paid homage to Introversion's spare aesthetic that permeates all their games.

Ultimately Introversion decided against that direction and after a few weeks of finding our footing we ended up with the design we have now.  In some respects we may keep some of the elements of the previous design.  Giving the walls a certain shade of color will still be helpful in the game to delineate areas. We may use the blueprint lines as a graphic for when the player is planning out his buildings.  In the end I guess the guys really wanted to try something that looks totally different from what they've made before.  They had approached me because they liked the work on Spacechem and based on some of the comments I read after Prison Architect's announcement (It looks like Spacechem and Dwarf Fortress had a baby) it turns out that is exactly what they got!

Starting 2012 with a Bang

When I started this blog my goal was to be an illustrator for a property like Warhammer, M:TG, or L5R and slowly move my way out of games.  There was a good 3 months last year where I had my nose to the grindstone, buying up art videos left and right and doing weekly Conceptart challenges.  It was thrilling, frustrating, rewarding, and humbling all at the same time.

But games just kept creeping back into my system.  I'm still working on the game Prison Architect with the fine folks over at Introversion, and I felt like the network I had built in the indie game world was just too substantial to put to waste.

So I finally decided to make a game.

After years of encouraging developers to make their own games (as IGDA Manila head) I'm finally taking the leap myself.  I pitched the idea a good friend of mine (who I feel jumped at the opportunity to work on something/anything aside from his startup company) and he surprised me with a build of the basic game on my birthday.  We plan on rolling something out by the end of month and then just seeing what happens next.

Not sure how much I want to reveal about the game right now, but take a gander at the first few graphics above and start drawing you own conclusions!

Meteors! UFOs!

This piece was created to be cut up into promotional banner ads for a game.  Unfortunately for me the client didn't like the final product (though I was paid in half).  I had no hand in the design of the character, which is essentially a guy in a white shirt, jeans, chucks, and a long black trench-coat.  The biggest takeaway from this piece is that trench-coats are hard to draw in motion, and only look cool on Gambit.

Spacechem voted one of 2011's top indie games by Gamasutra!

My longtime friend and artistic idol Chris De Joya pointed out to me yesterday that Spacechem is one of the top indie games of 2011 as voted on by the Gamasutra editors.  While I've always maintained that my art is the least important aspect of the game (I'd rank it design first, music second, art least) It's always still a thrill to see it getting press on sites like Gamasutra.

As I like to do whenever I post about Spacechem, here's a little concept work from 2010 when we were first working on the game.  This mining boss is one of the first you'll "fight" against in Spacechem.  I drew upon industrial machinery when concepting for this, as well as mining vehicles in RTS games like Command and Conquer.  I'd also forgottent hat I'd actually  used Google Sketchup to help me better visualize the machine before drawing it in Photoshop.  While the Sketchup concept and the final product aren't 1:1, it's amazing how useful Sketchup as a free software can be for conceptualizing objects like vehicles and buildings.

By the way, even though Spacechem was nominated in this year's Indiedb awards, it still needs more nominations to find out where it ranks in the top 100 indie games of this year.  The whole Spacechem team would rally appreciate it if you could click here, then click on Puzzle Compilation, then click on Vote!  While you're at it go on and check out the other fantastic indie games on the list.