It all started with our dear Cassandra Khaw’s post over Indiegames.com! The day after new reviews of the trailer started popping on “the internets”(sic), with JovemNerd.com.br‘s Stephan Martins writing our first Brazilian review on the 21st! Here is the list of original posts, so far:

Indie Games
Game Side Story
Game Set Watch
Game Dot
Seand Knight IGN Blog
Igrorama
Indie Shelter
No Name Radio
Joven Nerd
Gameplay

Meanwhile, the trailer itself (if you  haven’t seen it yet pray go check it on vimeo!) is getting astonishing (at least for our humble expetations) view counts! By the time I’m writing this it’s far over 9000!

If you spot any other review please leave a comment with it, send us an email [aduge (at) adugestudio (dot) com] our tweet @aduge!

So we are back to work, rushing with the development ahead of the Beta2 release in the next few weeks, and checking our fellow entries on 2012 IGF! (we’ll post a list of the Brazilian ones very soon!)
I’ll post some sort of Art Director’s Production Diary ++ very soon! Stay in the loop!

The game is now in Alpha, which means it’s core is running healthily, the mechanics and most of the assets are there, but it has only 13 of the 28 planned levels, and you’ll be able to play with Moe and Jimmie, but not with Debbie and Andy. We’ll feed you with more news about the Festival ASAP, and hope you enjoy playing the Alpha with your friends!

You can download the game here or you can check the brand new game page instead.

We’ve reached the first night of Aduge’s 4th Strategic Planning and boy, I’m impressed! We’re productive, the mood is good and solutions come smoothly. After 3 and a half years living with my 5 goodfellas I still get impressed with the Adugan workteamenship and problem-solving capacities. Yet more impressed with how it worked today. Let me explain:

We’ve started with a retrospective since june 2007, our first Planning, reviewing the conferences we’ve attended, the trips, studies and researches we’ve done, the prizes we received, and specially, the projects we’ve started, delivered and archived. This was as much motivational due to our achievements as it was a rant on our past faults. This retrospective dictated the tone of our conversations and prepared ourselves for the next step: what Aduge is for each of us?

Almost two hours of dialogue and team dynamics explaining our expectations towards Aduge, and our personal and professional goals. As expected, specially after almost six months of forced recess, not all ideas converged at the beginning. The bright side is that in the last months we’ve reached the conclusion that well… they don’t need to. Aduge is the sum of 6 different people, and it is possible to build it according to the different wishes of those people. And at 6:00 PM one of the biggest wishes of the Adugans was coffee.

Coffeebrake done and we aim for the next step. Understanding our individual differences and planning from them we’ve done a brief revision of our organization chart. More specific decisions on this matter are to be done in one or two more days, based on the future strategies that we’re still to define, but some basic features are settled.

One more brake, this time with soda and pizza. Then we watched some inspirational episodes of Extra Credits, a weekly show by James Portnow, Daniel Floyd and Allison Theus for The Escapist. Considering their insightful words and what we’ve thinked during the whole day we moved to the most crucial point of the day: revision of our corporate values and mission statement.

It wasn’t a easy task, and to look again at the terms we’ve defined 3 years ago presented a true challenge for our mutual understanding. Surprisingly enough we’e passed the ordeal with ease. After all, a great deal of those last 3 years were invested in studies that aided us in better understanding what we’ve been looking forward and where we want to take Aduge from now on. A little change in our values and a complete rearrangement of the mission statement could seem a bit drastic, but fundamentally what we’ve done was to make it more clear and simple the same goal we always pursued: to push the boundaries of game expression.

· Dec 18 2:50PM: we’ll be out for 4 or 5 days, on our beach campus, planning the next year. starting tomorrow. #strategicplanning

· Dec 18 2:55PM: before xmas there will be some more news and a special gift for you! see ya!

I guess it sums it all for now.

Excelsior.

Hello boys and girls!

It is a joyfull surpriese to discover a increasing number of Brazilian submissions to the 13th Indie Game Festival!  In these few days since the announcement of the full list of entries we ware able to spot no less than 10 games from Brazil!

The first one is easy, our own revisited expressiveness experiment Semblante. Next is our godchildren Studio MiniBoss‘  lovely/grim and adventurous Talbot’s Odyssey. The third known name for us in the list was Cargo Delivery, a beautiful and puzzling physics/logistics game by the Cats in the Sky. The last one already know to us was the cute and iPaddy Jules: Unboxing the World by the Sulistas.
The others we just found after a deeper look in the list and, unfortunately, I did’t got the chance to take a better look on them. Thus, I’m still not be able to write one of those savvy tag lines! But here they are: Ranch Wars by Bacon Studios, TriLinea ReAct by Tendi, Nature’s Protector Remix by FACENS, Lumaki and Freekscape – Escape from Hell both by Kidguru Studios and Bugs: Lights and Shadows by Aleph Games.

That’s it for now, hope I’ll write again soon with more intelligence on all the games! By now I suggest you take a look on them!

Indies, unite!

I’m very glad to announce that Tsar Project is now officially  in production!

The next Tsar Update Bruno will lay more details in every department’s work, but for now I’ll give you a shot from the studio and some information on my work:

In the background our beautiful 64sq ft pinning board, full of references and WIPs, including beta versions of the game’s map, sound design equalization and chord maps, plot drafts and else. It is a greatly useful feature for a creative studio, indeed.

Those in the foreground are little models I’ve done recently of two types of guards we’ll have in the Kremlin, they’re made of platicine, and still WIP, but are already useful in finding the right angle for their sprites.

Behind them you can (NOT) see three models of our protagonist, in whom my work is focused now, primarily in doing his basic movements animations and sprites.

Last but not least there is the Tsar Project logo!!! We have decided to use the same principle of the studio’s visual ID in our in development projects, so the typography is the same Cedilha Script and the logo in a brush stroke monogram of Tsar (actually, Царь).

Type to you later, and have a nice week!

Ok, ok, I know we already are in the third week of the year, it so happens that, as usual, we were very busy since the 10th when we returned from our brief break. After more than half our studio went to Argentina, have our headquarters at Azuri Building reordered and having reviewed the next Tsar Project milestones, it was about time to write again here!

I decided to start 2010 continuing my presentation of the Tsar Project’s character design. The last phase I’ve showed in my last post was the creation of a generic character that defined the game’s general visual aesthetics.

After this I started designing other characters using this chosen style. After drawing more guards, some adaptations were made and I started to focus on a very important aspect of Tsar Project’s character design: designing different groups of characters by their silhouettes.

The silhouette is one of the most recognizable aspect of a character and the shape can say a lot about function, abilities and even the personality of a character. I started with the guards that were categorized into different functions by the Game Design and after that this was extended to all characters of the game.

Beyond the useful function of identification these different silhouettes became an important visual feature to convey the vision that our protagonist has of the people, animals and creatures that inhabit the Moscow Kremlin.

This concept was further improved, as all things seen or heard in the game will be filtered by the subjective perception of the protagonist. When the time comes, we will speak more about it.

In a future post I will further explain the character design development. See you soon!

At that stage of the project we’re working in the Tsar Project for a month, basically developing the idea, researching and searching for plots that would express our goals. And then came the question: how to translate all this visually?

To answer this I’ve first worked in the characters graphic style. Interestingly, after those 8 months, and all the researches I’ve done along with Ingrid for our graduation project, we’ve developed a methodology of creating visual worlds focused exactly in the characters style.

Some of our first references were illustrations by Vladmir Semenov

This creative process started with the selection of a character that could be both generic enough so it won’t need many individual features and could carry as many cultural and contextual elements as possible. A soldier was a natural choice at the time: we’ll have plenty of them in the Kremlin and they seemed the more neutral characters in the cast. Upon that, Muscovy armors and arms from the period were some of our major visual references in the beginning of the project.

Set the character, a Muscovy soldier wearing a heavy armor  and wielding a spear-axe, I’ve done a set of sketches during the first two weeks of April. What I had in mind was to see all the possibilities, from realism to pure geometric abstraction, from childish cartoons to the complex frenchphonic comics. The result was the next image, that we now call the Father of all Tsar Art. He’s a hand drawn lad 2 and a half inches high, made of indian ink and markers.

The next step was choosing a direction to go and explore it deeper, testing other characters in the same style. I’ve done that with another soldier, lighter and faster, and with a nobleman. A very synthesized style turn to coherent and flexible, allowing good consistency for the characters without needing too much visual complexity, just what we’re looking for.

And how the character creation continued I’ll tell you on my next post! See you soon!

As I was saying, Easy Paint Tool SAI is remarkably different of other painting software, but now let me explain it better. Among those fundamental differences is the Water brush. Unfortunately I jut can’t tell exactly what makes this brush so special, even 2 months after my first contact with it and the intensive work I’ve done in it in the last weeks. The fact is that it is simply different of any brush I’ve used in Photoshop and Painter. To give you an idea it’s similar to the Artist’s Oil brush in Corel Painter, the one, by the way, that I used most until now. But Water has an unique dynamic of use, it’s trace just flows, it can vary opacity, color and width by pen’s pressure, and it blends and changes the colors already in the canvas in a awesome way. To show you a little about this dynamics I’ll present now a simple walk through of one of the Concepts I’ve been working on, an Outside Yard of the Moscow Kremlin Palaces.

In the first step I’ve traced the plan of the two stories of buildings that would be done, I’ve used just the Water brush with Noise at this point.

After that I’ve started the illustration proper. It was done using some layers, as it would be useful have the concept being modular and flexible, being able to represent both outside and inside areas. One of the main goes of this concept was to map tilesets, the pieces of patters and textures that can be applied on surfaces, making easier to cover big areas. In this case it happened specially in the ground, the roofs and in stonewalls, where the tiles where used in a much more loose way then normally it’s done, not having geometric precise limits and normally leaving gaps that I would fill manually. I’m considering using this same loose system in the final graphics of the game.

Now to SAI’s high point, in my opinion: lighting. It has some features of layer blending that are really amazing. The one that caught my attention in the first glance was Lumi&Shade, great to create both projected light and enlightened objects. As the name suggests, it blends luminance and hue, helping in creating nice lighting effects. Another essential is PassTrought, that is applied to layer groups and allows each layer’s blending mode to interact with the layers outside the group. It’s quite important to allow the layers being properly organized.

So, at the end of 3 weeks of work (during which I’ve been creating 3 other background concepts, helping Bruno and Ingrid create the character’s color test vector files and already doing some of those color tests myself), the result of the Outside Yard is this:

Now I’ve gotta go, my trial period with SAI is running out and I must go buy it to continue my work. Incidentally, one more good thing about it: a single license costs just 50 dollars.

See you soon!

In this last fortnight the Design Guys have written a little about the level design of the Tsar Project. As Beto said, today I’ll show something of the translation of the architecture researches we’ve done and the level design created in the background concept arts. And even more, I’ll talk about a really great software we’re using, the japanese Easy Paint Tool SAI.

So, it all started with 17th century maps like this one above (a crop of a dutch map published in 1662 that covers the area between Beklemishevskaya and Nikolskaya Towers of the Moscow Kremlin). Those maps show us the Kremlin just after the start of the Romanov Era, when it past for several changes. The exact period in which we focused our researches for the Tsar Project is considerably blurred by time, we’ve had a hard time in finding what we needed to start the reconstruction of the palaces proper. It was then, and continues to be, a great luck and reason of happiness to us, to count with the collaboration of Julia Tarabarina, a historian of russian architecture and editor of the Russian Architectural News Agency.

With the proper orientation we’re able to continue the development of the level design, according to the architecture of the 16th century buildings, and start creating those schematic maps Beto told you about. The next step was then to translate plans, references and level design into concept arts. The point here was to create imagery that would both communicate the mood of the game and be a preview of the different types of tiles, textures and lightning effects that we would use later on the project.

And then SAI came up. A good friend of Aduge, a fish from the design college called Okazaki, presented me this tiny software (it’s installer being smaller than 3Mb) that is tremendously useful. As the name emphatically tells, Easy Paint Tool SAI is a user-friendly digital painting software. What the name doesn’t say is that, despite the minute size of the software and of it’s Tokyo based development team, Systemax’s SAI is, imo, far more precise and powerful than Adobe’s Photoshop and stratospherically more intuitive and fluid to use and configure than Corel’s Painter.

To be continued…