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!!!

After a long era of post starve, we have fresh news that just came out of the oven! And smells like cherry!
We are eager to say that Aduge is now an official supporter of N Design 2010, the National Conference of Design Students from Brazil, which will happen from 11 to 18 july in Curitiba, Paraná.

N Design is an event that brings together design students from all over Brazil to discuss topics related to design, generally speaking. This year the event’s theme will be “Immersion”, proposing to have more in depth discussions as well as the participants enjoyment of the event, caring about the continuity of the activities after it. The main activity format will be the “Divings”, workshops from students for students about something related to design (or not).

You may ask yourself what does it have to do with us, huh? We’re doing some interesting things for this event. It’s a very special package filled with:

· The MegaDiving, that is a series of divings with the theme “game developing”. It’ll be five days with activities about concepting, game design, graphics, audio and project management focused on small team game development. Our intention is to spread the indie word, looking forward to stimulate people to take part of the indie movement.

· An exposition about Art Games on which we’ll expose ten games that can convey the concept of games as an art form, so that more people can get to know about it. We had not yet decided what games will be there, but we’ll have a post about it later on.

· The organization of a gaming space on the Event’s Living Center. Thanks to the coordinator of the Positivo University’s Game Course, Rafael Dubiela, who is also assisting 4 adugans with their graduation projects and helping us make the exposition possible.

· Run the project management system of the event. This item may seem kindda funny and needs a further explanation. Two adugans (Ingrid and Marcel) and Florzinha (which helped Aduge on the Global Game Jam) joined CONDe (N Design Organization Committee) to manage the N 2010 project. They became part of CONDe family, ended up proposing the exposition and the MegaDiving, to then make this support formal so that all of Aduge’s effort towards N could be grouped in one place. Apparently with only an indirect link with a game developer, Project Management is a well esteemed area of Marcel, one of Aduge’s business differentiation and a subject that we put a lot of effort on our graduation.

We at Aduge are very pleased with the opportunities that are arousing through N Design! If you are a Brazilian design student don’t miss this event! (and if you are not, you should consider tenderly visiting us for this nice conference =)

If you want to know more about N Design, access ndesign.org.br (portuguese only).

More info about our work coming soon!

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!

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!

As promised, today I’ll present a more complete review of what we’ve seen in Rio during the SBGames. Yesterday we had our weekly meeting and basically discussed about the Symposium. Undoubtedly the most important aspect of our participation in the event was the networking we did there: game industry consultants, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC), publishers incubating programs, fellow developers, students and researchers. Secondly we agreed that the panels, as Bruno said three days ago, were the highlights of the event. Two of them, on Game Development Education and Governmental Policies, promoted some good discussion, but sadly also highlighted some misconceptions that are still deeply stuck in the minds of many in the Brazilian Game Industry and Educational System. Some of these include: the belief that is by trying to do the “Next Halo” – as put by Jason Della Rocca – that new developers will prevail, that there is no opportunity in remaining independent and in small business, that games should be viewed as simple entertainment industry goodies, that the artistic aspect of a game is limited to it’s visual aesthetics, that sound design is something alien to game development, that Game Design has more affinities to Product Design than with Chess, and so on. But don’t worry, as a coin has two faces there’s always the bright side. We discovered that the MinC has a very interesting opinion of Games and their artistic value, found some small developers and starter teams with some nice ideas and made some good acquaintances. Jason’s keynote was a very interesting and provoking exposition. Talking about the trends and the innovative cycles that permeates our industry, Jason urged the Brazilian developers to ignore the mainstream box (big budget, big teams, blockbuster AAA titles) and look for other ventures (indie, casual, advergames, etc.) to flourish. We hope that those wise words will be heard by the Brazilian developers.

Other remarkable pieces of the Symposium were the Indie Game Festival and the VideoGame Art Exhibition. Despite the short time we had to appreciate all the material in them, both seem to be great initiatives and had some good material to present. The sad part is the huge disparity of the contents. The Art Exhibition presented some concept arts and visual assets with artsy aesthetics (although in general the final assets tend to completely destroy the most beautiful and experimental concepts trying to look “realistic”), a nice character design competition (with both good ideas and childish-awesome-super-ultra-characters) and specially good exemplars of games with artistic meaning, such as the indies Passage, Gravitation and I Wish I Were The Moon. On the other hand, the games in the Indie Festival, as we were able to percieve them, lacked in general the deeper meaning and potential to transform a player through reflection and/or more experimental mechanics that are among the key features of many indie games done around the world. Many of the games in the Indie Festival had more garage-made-like, low budget features, and a clear desire to be a mainstream game, instead of focusing on innovative and experimental ideas, creative freedom or meaningful experiences. Once again we spot the evilness of the “Next Halo” Syndrome, even small teams tend to believe that the best way to go is, with a team of less than 20 people and a small budget, try to do something that will compete with EA, Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard. So, remember Jason’s words and let’s start thinking out of the box or, even better, show us that there’s already more than meets the eye in the Brazilian industry. As I said in the first lines of the post, the greatest treasure of the Symposyum was networking, and people we met in this and the past SBGames give us hope that the second option is true. Some of them are our friend Guilherme Xavier and his team from Donsoft, the developers of the great winner of the Festival, the promising Capoeira Legends.

So, creative minds, bold designers, indie developers from Brazil, we call you all, we ask you to show yourselves!

So you heard that in 2016 we’ll have the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Pretty cool, uh? But 2016 remains a year far far away by now. For what that matters, the next big thing in Rio is SBGames 2009, between October’s 8th and 10th. The Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment is in it’s 8th edition and this time will focus in the so called Convergence issue.

I’ve been in the last edition, Belo Horizonte 2008, and the event turned out to be much more interesting than I’ve anticipated. A good surprise indeed. So this time all the Adugans are going, and the expectations are considerably high. Aduge will be flying to Rio this week and we hope to send you some news from the new Olympic city soon.

Wanderer above the Mists - Caspar David Friedrich

So, we said we have a new project. We even posted a production update of it. But… we still didn’t present it properly did we? Well, let’s correct that. Presenting: Tsar Project.

Most people upon contact with a new game simply ask “what kind of game is this?” and are satisfied by the fairly superficial answer. Simply put, Aduge’s current project is a challenging stealth game set on XVI century Russia. We could go on and on about the game’s mechanics and features, but this wouldn’t present Tsar Project more than it’s outermost layer. To most players this would do, but the target audience of our studio isn’t most players. When it comes to Aduge’s projects the more correct question we’d like to hear is “what is this game about?”. This type of question let us explain why Tsar Project is a challenging stealth game set on XVI century Russia which is the heart of the “problem”, so to speak.

Now, getting finally to the point of this post: Tsar Project as a game is about aloneness and patience. It’s not just a story about aloneness and patience, it’s a game about these concepts. This means that the game itself through it’s mechanics and challenges deals with these concepts.

Aloneness not in the sense of loneliness, but in the sense of distancing an individual from a group, up to the point he becomes a complete outsider. In Tsar’s case, the player will be immersed on the main character’s mind which is alien to the universe of the game itself, hence the feeling of aloneness. Other supernatural traits of this main character contribute to the distancing and the feel of aloneness, but the nature of these traits we leave to another opportunity.

This is a game about waiting and that is what makes it difficult in the first place. The more reckless or hasteful the player is, the more mistakes he will eventually make and this will compromise his/her task. It’s a true stealth game, where active push and aggressive behaviors end up biting the player’s hand in the long run. Waiting, contemplating, looking for patterns, reading behaviors, these are actions that rewards the player more than his skill at pressing buttons at the right time.

That being said, this is only the conceptual guide that drives the game development and design. But that is not the “right” meaning of Tsar Project and we still encourage players to play and interpret the game the way they want to. See you next post!

As the new fortnight beings we’re overlooking the administrative aspects of the studio and will go back to the Kremlin works tomorrow. And so those are the news from the last few days.

See you shortly!