We are finally back from the Global Game Jam and we’d like to produdly present the result of our 48 hour effort: Semblante.

Before I start, a brief clarification. “Semblante” is a portuguese word that means “visage”. A good reason for the choice of this particular name was because it is a phonetically pleasing word (when spoken in native portuguese at least) the other reasons are pretty much subjective and we leave to each one his own to think about it or not.

The game is still a little incomplete as of now, even if it has a beginning and an end, as we need to work out some of the mechanics, asset implementations and general level design. Semblante is also quite simple, you control Jung inside its own mind as it searches for its own identity (represented as a mask) while avoiding the shadows that lurks within. The metaphor is obvious and I will not linger on it anymore.

The mechanics are pretty simple. Jung has 4 mechanics. It can move, jump, shine and scream. To shine, the character needs to stay in light spots to charge its body. Jung glows for a limited amount of time and while it is glowing, shadows are repelled by it. Jung can also use its remaining glow to scream and attract shadows to itself. We have a lot of bugs to work out still but the core mechanics are all there.

The guys at PUCPR jam site (we are at the right, with “uniforms”)

Aside from the game itself and talking about the Jam itself. It was a pleasing (and exhausting) experience to participate on a Global Game Jam. The extra hands were crucial for the game to come into fruition. In the name of the team I’d like to thank, Flor, Santo, Paulo and Rossato for their effort and dedication during the Jam. We also want to thank Bruno Campagnolo for organizing the Jam Site and the free sodas and sfihas. We’d like to do it again next year!

Here we are, Adugans and friend developers, at Global Game Jam.

We had a hard time defining the game concept. That happened not because we found it hard to fit a game concept to the theme proposed, but because we always have a creative boom and we end up having so much options that it’s difficult to pick up one way to go.

Even so, our sub-teams managed to make substantial advances. Game design defined the game mechanics and challange pallet; having the game concept the screenwriting team could work out the plot and main character; graphics develped some tilesets, props, and some animations fo the main character and enemies.

The prototype is almost with all mechanics and features implemented. By the time it’s all done, game design will start composing the level design.

Considering it all, we have a nice optmistic feel!

Later on we’ll talk more about the game itself.
Stay tuned! =)

So, Global Game Jam is this weekend and Aduge will this time join the party! We are very excited about it, specially because Curitiba is as of right now the biggest Jam Site on the southern hemisphere and we’d like to meet and exchange experiences with all the people that will be there.

Also this weekend Aduge will be a bigger and baddier team as we will be adding muscle to our team. Adding to our usual lineup of six developers we will have the collaboration of other 5 people:

Daniel Rossato

A friend of Vermonde and fellow programmer. A graduated Electric Engineer, Rossato has also some hidden skills that are revealed when he sits in front of a piano. Rossato already helped us on Tsar Project with some nifty pathfinder algorithms and now will return working with Aduge at the Global Game Jam.

Gabriel “Florzinha” Jacobi

Our fellow ex-junior entrepreneur and colleague at the Graphic Design course at Federal University of Parana. Flor, as we call him, is a comic book and cinema aficionado, that enjoy his games from time to time. He will lend his skills in scriptwriting and graphic design. He will also be an asset with his more-critical-than-the-norm approach to things.

Paulo “Lies” Faria
http://www.myspace.com/andalucia

An ex-Adugan, Paulo Lies left Aduge to fully dedicate himself to his band, Andalucia. A skilled musician and composer, Lies will be a great asset to creating great music to accompany our game. He is also a competent programmer and knows a thing or two about game design.

EDIT: Paulo had another things to do on the weekend and didn’t attended the event.

Paulo “Pixel” Reinehr

http://www.pixeljoint.com/p/3182.htm

We call him Pixel because he is very good at pixel art, but it doesn’t stop here. Paulo is a jack-of-all trades, knowing his way into various other aspects of game development. He will help us at the GGJ with his expertise in the art department mostly. Paulo is another fellow student at UFPR and already worked with Aduge before on a old project, being a great help with his pixel art.

Pedro “Santo” Medeiros
http://thelectricafe.blogspot.com

A ex-colleague of Pirin at Melies‘s traditional character sculpture course in Sao Paulo. Santo is a prodigal illustrator and a graduate in Digital Design at Anhembi Morumbi. He is leaving Brazil soon to attend at Gnomon school to further improve his already impressive skills as an artist.

With these additions we will be going full speed ahead to the Jam. Expect updates during the weekend and the results next week! See ya guys!

Hello and happy new year!

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!

Hello again!
Bruno already told you in the last update, I’ve just finished the character concepts arts. I’ve done around 100 concepts since the start of the project, and I think that, having finished the entire set, it’s a good time to start telling you the making of those characterss, back from the first week of April 2009.

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!

Hello again!

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!