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Just finished working on this earlier tonight.
Next step… get it into the game!
If you don’t know about Donut Get!, check out the teaser trailer in an earlier post. More info at Donutget.com!
We’ve just released a teaser for our upcoming game, Donut Get! Watch it in HD on Vimeo.
Developed in Flash, it’s the story of greed going out of control. A cop catching donuts falling from the sky and his life spiraling into world of trouble.
- Character design by Ricky Enriquez
- Animation by David Rodriguez — drodder.com
- Music & Sound Design by Cryptic Circuitry — myspace.com/crypticcircuitrymusic
- Game by Bryson Whiteman — sonofbryce.com
Details will emerge as we creep closer to completion. Stay tuned into this blog and donutget.com .
This is a sketch I just drew. A sketch from a scene in the world of our upcoming game Donut Get!
I’m working on some updates to Chris’ Rush Hour — here and there. Mostly jazzing it up with some supplementary artwork, just starting to tweak some level design.
Been playing a lot of PS3. Just got one in January. Gran Turismo 5 is my shit. Metal Gear Solid 4 has got a grip of me. Demon’s Souls scares the shit out of me. I’m flashing back with 3d Dot Game Heroes. And my girlfriends been rolling shit up in Katamari Forever.
It’s good to be playing more games. Good to have another perspective of gaming, from the PSX perspective.
As usual, I’m working on too many things at once. But it’s nice when I have something nice to show!
This is an animation from the revamping of Chris’ game Rush Hour. It’s been done for a while but I’ve been set on adding some new features to make it even better. Chris has resurrected his programming role on this game and I’m glad because I had a hard time trying to figure out how his code worked. haha.
After we finish this, I’ll be focusing once more on the Donut game. And hopefully not much else.
“Behold! A Massive Overhaul!” – Bryson, the Mighty
Tonight I finished an update to our blog theme. The new theme follows Sokay.net’s color scheme and design more closely — it’s bothered me that they looked similar but different. I like the direction it’s going and I’ll continue to revise the design sporadically.
Indiecade’s this weekend! Although Chris and I didn’t get our entries accepted, it was disappointing that they didn’t even bother to give feedback on our games — they basically said “we got too many entries. if you’re lucky, you’ll get feedback”. I’m suspicious as to whether they even played all of the games submitted. When Chris submitted Children at Play to Indie Fund, he was given a prompt and usefull feedback from Jonathan Blow. And he didn’t even have to pay an entry fee, haha.
With the Donut Game, I’ve passed the Fight Game’s engine to David. He’s working on updating the Fight Game’s animation with his most recent updates. I’ve spent some time working on the UI and some effects for that section of the game.
(this is a work in progress, yo)
To help me ease my mind, I’ve been working on this pixel portrait between running around in circles. I’ve been getting some assistance from the Pixelation community, check out my Work in Progress thread.
That’s it for today!
Peace!
-Bryson
Artwork from the Car Segment of the game.
Work continues to progress on the Donut game. I’ve spent a great deal of the summer focusing on the Car Segment, which serves as an interactive intro. During this segment of the game, you play as the officer driving to the scene of the Great Donut Fire. You must drive through traffic, hopefully avoiding collisions with cars and civilians. The outcome of this section will be dependent on how you handle it — reckless driving will result in a ‘negative’ outcome where you don’t get to where you’re driving to.
With the Car Segment mostly wrapped up, I’ve moved on to focusing on the Fight Segment of the game, which acts as a mini-challenge within the game. David’s animating the characters for this part, the gameplay will be similar to Punch-Out!. I’m working on getting a skeleton of the game engine in place so that he can test his animation without requiring me to drop additional code in. Since this sections gameplay is so tied to the actual animation and timing, it’s important that he’s able to quickly iterate and test while animating.
The game is starting to emerge from the rubble and smoke. With every pass at detail and polish, it becomes clearer to see what the end result will be. While I chose to have the game mechanics relatively simple, I wanted to use them to play out a scenario and communicate ideas and themes from the world. This communication plays a larger role than it did in Thugjacker, where it was a bit more subtle, and is more integrated into the world than LUV Tank where it was much more blatant and abstract.
Most of the game artwork is done and in place at this point, but there’s a lot of animation that needs to be done. I’m doing planning for the game endings now, which will play a large role in the game. The way the game plays out will determine your ending — Way of the Samurai serves as my inspiration for this aspect. I’ve been thumbnailing these endings, working them out on paper while I develop the game.
Until next time…
Peace!
-Bryson
Over the weekend I noticed a sudden surge in traffic and I noticed most of it was coming from Agame.com. Turned out they had just stolen it and added it to their frontpage on Thursday and a lotta people were playing it. It’s nice to know people are still playing it after 5 years! haha. My favorite part is still reading all of the insightful comments like “cool ima pimp nigga“and “DONT STEAL HIS BIKE“. Mostly spam here, but the Newgrounds comments are still gold to me.
Thugjacker’s been our most popular game, by far. A great deal of it has to do with it being our first game, with Ricky and I spending so much time with it. The gameplay has a stickiness that keeps people coming back — I think it’s just fun to mess around and beat guys up. These days, it’s easy to be lost on Flash portals so it’s usually hit or miss if people notice the game or not. Thugjacker usually does well but LUV Tank usually gets lost. LUV Tank only really took off on Addictinggames.com for some reason, but it’s usually the game that the not-so-hardcore gamers tell me they like the most.
Yesterday I was working on the Donut game with David. We had started talking about Thugjacker and I showed him a lot of the stuff we cut out of Thugjacker Half — David wasn’t working with us on Thugjacker. There were cinemas scenes that I didn’t have time to finish and implement. A lot of the real story. It’ll all find it’s way into the game eventually. This Donut game will give another side of the story.
So we’re done with that Indiecade submission nonsense. It served as a good goal for us, rushing toward the finish line. But in the end, it was just a checkpoint — a milestone — since there is still so much more to be done.
I’m happy that all of 3 games in the project are hooked into each other through the game scenario and most of the art assets are completed. We now have an even clearer idea of how the project is working so it makes the refinement process go much faster.
To the left are some game assets from the car game. I drew these cars in Adobe Illustrator, and made a few color variations. I’ve determined 11 variations aren’t enough so I’ll draw a few more and make additional colors to break up the visual monotony.
Since the last post, I’ve added Cryptic Circuitry’s music and sound effects to the game. It sounds great and it’s becoming more obvious what sounds are missing now. We need to take another pass at the sound now that it’s in. The sound is always the time consuming part that I spend little time at the end on. With the energy Cryptic’s putting into the sound design, I want to make sure it all works smoothly.
As far as the Sokay war with Chris Rock goes, I declare myself winning. As he is too much of a wusscake to post any news on his game. He claims his time “working on it” is much more valuable than posting on a blog. Pssh!
Here’s a bit of artwork I drew for the Donut game’s intro animation. It’s roughly animated so my man Cryptic Circuity can lay down some tunes for it while I tend to other areas of the project. My current focus right now is the top-down driving portion of the game. I should be showing bits of that part soon.
Chris has been touring Europe for the past couple weeks so don’t think the war is over. He’s just been readying the quiet before the storm. I’ve managed to gain some ground on him without having to sabotage his project, but his game was just about ready for a demo release even before he left. Regardless, both of our games are looking top-notch and I look forward to revealing more.
Peace.
Some boards from the Donut game’s intro
I’ve been hustlin’ on the Donut game. In the past month I’ve been busting out on the collision for the car segment and the intro animation for the game.
I’ve been working with the other members of the team — Ricky, David and Cyptic Circuity — to organize our tasks. Ricky’s doing most of the game’s character art and animation, primarily the Car segment and the Donut segment. David’s doing animation for a Fight segment — he did LUV Tank’s in-game animation. Cryptic Circuitry is doing the sound, as he did with Sammy Samurai.
I’ve had an idea of what I’ve wanted for the intro for the game for a long time but I had been conflicted on how I could get the story across without it being too drawn out. As an introduction to the game, I didn’t want the intro animation overshadow the game itself. I also don’t want to devote too much time to it when I have a game to make! I want something that basically says “Here’s your character. Here’s your scenario. Now play!”
I think of my games as interactive animations so I’ll continue to explore this balance. I haven’t made an animation like this in a while but I’m having fun so I may grow accustomed to it.
