Lost Oxide – Post Mortem

Time to wrap it up with a little summary of my weekend and my entry; Lost Oxide. I’ll give ya’ll a little feel of the whole development process below.

First i can explain the setting and the foundational concept! The theme was “Tiny World”. After some hours of brainstorming, i ended up with this:

• – You control a surrealistic character which resides inside a blood cell
• – Within each blood cell of our body, there is a tiny litte world
• – These worlds vary in size (different levels)
• – Blood cells real function is to deliver oxygen around the body. So..
• – The character in the game’s function is to gather the oxygen bubbles within a blood cell, so that the blood cell can successfully do its job.

1

The first thing i did was to actually make the animations for the character. This was an odd choice of priority, but i just recently borrowed an animation book (The animators survival kit), and thought i’d attempt to make my first animation a good one!

Heres the initial sketch. I thought the character turned out to look like a rabbit – which was not intentional.

I gave the character a facelift and added some lights out of his belly/eyes. Here is the finished version!

2

As previously posted, i started with paper design. Here is an image of the initial sketch of the level!

3

Then i mapped the level out in the lovely tool, Construct 2. This is purely for collision, and the red blocks are static hazards! Before i started on the art, i tweaked the controls and the foundational gameplay in this environment.

4

Then i had to start thinking about the art. I thought about my theme and setting, and made a “mood board”. These turned out to be the colors i used, sort of my palette.

5

The first thing i did was to create the base layer, which would appear to be the walls, floors and roofs. It was all put together with a few sprites, and some additional detail sprites.

6

The next thing i wanted to add was the background elements. This consist of 3 layers, all parallax. They were tweaked to have different parallax values, so that they moved a bit differnetly on each layer.

7

Next thing i did was to start experimenting with lights and lighting. I have never done anything like this before, so this was a lot of trial and error. The concept is very simple – white sprites on a black layer, which is then masked out. Some of the light sprites is static and some has a few frames of animation, making it appear more dynamic.

8

In the end it turned out quite nice – visually. I wish i spent more time tweaking the controls, the movement, everything gameplay related. The level itself seemed fine, but the various hazards in the level was sort of a “last-minute-slap-on”, thus making its placement far from optimal.

Thanks for all the warm comments on my entry page, i greatly appreciate it. If you like what i do, check out my start-up indie company’s website as well!

–##Sidetrack Games website##–

–##Lost Oxide entry page##–