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!

Yesterday was Aduge’s 3rd birthday!!!

Young! For all of you that wants to understand better what the hell is a sound designer, we found an interesting text - but portuguese only… (Portugal portuguese, btw).

We will start a brief-post-serie about what Tsar sounds will be and from where all this idea came from.
To begin with listen to Peter and the Wolf from Prokofiev (with a bonus: this version has Bowie as narrator!). It’s a composition written in 1936 at Soviet Union in which each character is represented by an instrument. More info at wikipedia, an interesting reading.

And what about Tsar? Yeah, this idea was our starting point, mix it with the game’s conceptualization and in the end each character will be represented by a different instrument!
Wtf? How can this happen?
Stay tuned, more sound updates soon!

We are proud to finally present to all our readers the protagonist of Tsar Project.

These last months we were hard at work on his personality, backstory and design to create an unforgettable and unique character that represents the deep experience we wish to create with this game. And what character would be better on a stealth game than a powerful ninja?

Shadow Crow, the deadly shadow. From the secret valleys in the heart of China, his motives to be in Moscow are completely mysterious.  Is he under the command of a powerful noble? Is he on a personal vendetta, nurtured by sleepless nights? His figure is pale and stealthy, his movements are deadly. Shadow is armed with nigh-infinite shurikens, a kusari-gama cursed by 9001 demons from the 6 Shintoist hells and sharp iron claws forged by the steel wielded by his dead enemies.

As the game progresses we will discover together what obscure secrets motivates Shadow to plunge into the cold night of Moscow, and the scars left by his painful and irredeemable past. No one can stop him, his power is maximum. The Tsar Project is the greatest opportunity to become the greatest of ninjas!

Even though our priority is the Tsar Project, we didn’t left Semblante behind. We’re sitll working on it to improve the gameplay and sharpen the game concept, looking forward to achieve a more complet experience on what’s been proposed for the game.
We just got extra motivation! =)

What must mark the beginning of production is a stage where we do not have any kind of uncertainties or doubts and can work on a “final” version of the software, without getting around different ways of doing things and without any big scope or feature changes.

The Production Planning we discussed the answers to questions that our testing and experimenting didn’t solve 100% and even the ones that testing and experimenting themselves had raised. The end result of our planning was excellent. More details… on the next chapters!

By the way, the one posting is Marcel Pace, executive producer of Tsar Project. (I rarely post here… You know, sound, music, project managing and process managing… kinda busy here, hehe! )

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!

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! =)

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!