The hill : Post-mortem & Art dump

ITS A LONG POST SORRY !

Okay, I never did this thing before, But I though this could be interesting for other devs (sorry for the low level english ! Not my main language)

My entry

• A little pitch

This is the little story of this guy named Martyn, and his lost love Emilia…The rest well, I tried to tell a story, but it still is a bit abstract so you can make your own interpretation !

• Technical stuff

I worked on this for about 20-25hrs, I had to go to work Monday, I Almooost made it to the 48H deadline but, well, that’s life

I use Unity 3 (free), I love unity because it so easy to place your art, make your level, assign scripts, but some things were just painful, I’ll get to that later >< And all the art was done on photoshop

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What Went Wrong ! :(

• I didn’t managed my time well enough to get the time to do sound & music, and that was SO bad for game, especially since it could have played such a big role in the mood of the game
• The Gameplay : I focused first on the story, and then tried to make a game out of it…Bad idea, I just wasn’t inspired enough to find something really nice to play (But I my goal wasn’t to make a “Fun” game
• Animations : I began to do frame by frame animation for the character, but with the style I went, and just seeing how much time a single sprite took me to do, I just scrapped this idea,
• CutScenes : not the cutscene themselves, but the time it took to make them, I didn’t plan how to make them, and I ended up doing incredibly fastidious things with the animation editor in unity, and that was painful

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What Went Right ! :)

• The ART ! I was really happy with it, I never do characters, they really give me a hard time, but I quite liked the main characters I came up with (Emilia & Martyn, oh and while I’m at it, I called the character Martyn because Martyn – n = Marty, which is close to Martyr, yeah yeah, i’m a genius)
• Bugs ! Or the lack of bugs :) Well there are always bugs, but the last 3 games I made in the past LD all had bugs (Especially LD24, it was really painful see harsh comments about how your game is shitty and buggy, and deep inside you, you know its true, and then you go sit in a corner, and cry.)
• The mood & storytelling ! I guess that went well (I hope so) by reading the very nice comments some people left, I’m really happy that it may have, even slightly touched people, my fear was that it was going to feel ridiculous to the point of being funny

When I look at what went right, I realize it’s almost only artistic stuff, and I know what I really need to work : Gameplay, level design, game design, all that stuff GAME related, I want to make games not just animated paintings.

The thing is I know I can do some nice art (Even there is still so much things I would love to learn more (animation, characters, etc), and I may have took the “easy” path by making a game heavily supported by its art, and I almost forgot to talk about music…I started learned music 5 or 6 month ago, I’m doing well, (Slowly but surely :)) And I’m learning music just because I want to make music for my games…And I failed to that :/So next time : Less art, More music and More GAMEPLAY

That’s it, it’s not really in-depth or whatever, I’m not a good writer. But writing this little post mortem thingy made me learn some stuff about myself, I really encourage you to do it !

To finish I’d like to showcase some art, since I was really happy with it, and show some sketches ‘n stuff

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Me Showing off some art

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Sketches

Once I had the theme I made some doodle on paper, and I already knew I didn’t want to do the classic bad guy, but something with more depth (Or maybe I just like to hurt my characters, and kill them)

the fist doodle on paper, you can see alredy some concept for the beast, the hill setting

I made more doodle in photoshp detailing some stuff (If was going somewhere with the beast form design, and I already quite like the martyn human design)

First thing I made was rocks because I like making those, and its pretty easy and fast to do

And I imported them directly into unity & made a quick comp of the scene with them (and of course the rocks didn’t move for the rest of the development….)

and I made some props and a shitty background that was supposed to be a placeholder

polished the rocks sprites (I like flowers yes xD)

So that gave me something like this at this point

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Next I knew I had to start working on some character art, so I made the most important one : Martyn in beast form,

and it turned out very well ! here’s a little step by step

then I made Emilia’s ghost, and it turned out very very well too (I was on fire that night! )

Martyn’s human form

Peasant…those damn peasants, they gave me so much trouble and they look sooooo bad :/

I liked the corpse though, they really gave more impact to the game (And seeing them dead made me happy mwahaha)

And finally, I wanted to tell the story with one little picture, there’s the base doodle on paper(left), and the “clean” version on photoshop (right, without the paper texture in the game)

and for the fun, the FIRST thing I doodle after the theme, don’t ask me why, seriously…xD

Thanks you Ludum dare, can’t wait ’til next time ! 😀