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Showing some games again this week at the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk!
SOKAY PLAY 4
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY, 2012
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT
During the Downtown LA Art Walk
@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit#334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013
Showing some games again this week at the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk!
SOKAY PLAY 3
THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2012
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT
During the Downtown LA Art Walk
@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit#334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013
Earlier this month we showed Thugjacker and LUV Tank at a gallery space during the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, once again.
Here’s a walkthrough from out last show…
This time I managed to set up the night before.
A Sokay Play flyer in the Urban Noodle window.
Some peeps checkin out LUV Tank. We used our projector this time since we got a feel for how the setup would be.
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.
Here are some NPCs from the Sokay Donut game I’ve been working on for forever. These characters are designed by our character designer Ricky Enriquez. I spent a couple days converting the game to AS3 in late May. Since then I’ve been polishing some things and working on getting the NPCs in it. I’ve been concentrating a bit too much on the presentation of the game and have returned to focusing on the gameplay, since it’s still not fully there yet. Right now I’m working on finding the fun, but it’s looking great so far.
This is a background concept I sketched out for a new project we started, a game that Chris is programming. It’s a Western so it’s gonna be a lotta fun.
Beyond this stuff I’ve been reworking the blog — I added the little video jukebox in the top right corner. I’m revising some of the other Sokay sites, experimenting with new ideas. I’m working with David Rodriguez on a more elaborate Luvtank.com as well.
Read on to see what’s been inspring me lately…
