We’re deep into production on Lava Blade, our combat-centric platformer game with procedural content generation, and I thought I’d take a break to share some of the early art concepts.
Lars, the main character
The first thing I wanted to do is nail down the look of the main character, Lars. My thinking was that once we were happy with how he looked, it’d be easier to visualize the rest of the world around him.
First I did a rough pass on the general style, proportions, and colors (#1). This was intended to be a quick sanity check. Next I went back and better defined his shapes and detailing (#2). In #3, I added shading, highlights, and dark inner lines. I liked the way this one “popped” but I felt like it took away from his detailing, so in #4 I introduced more interior colors to replace the black. Lastly, I added hair highlights, glossier metal, and additional shading.
I’m pretty happy with how Lars turned out, though I’ll probably make yet another pass (maybe to add some detail to his hands). As you can see below, I also experimented with some different styles. I wanted to see if something wonderful might accidentally happen, and make sure we were in the right place between cute and combat-ready.
The ogre
We’re thinking that an ogre will have a pivotal role in teaching people how to play Lava Blade. In the beginning of the game, perhaps an ogre will kidnap someone (or do something else naughty), and you’ve got to chase him down, learning the game mechanics along the way.
However, I wanted him to remain relatively faceless (note the hair covering his eyes) since he wouldn’t be a recurring character, like the main villain. I like to jump on inspiration when it hits, and I happened to be near some graph paper when it did, so I sketched him out quickly on paper before doing a digital version. Doing this in repetition is great for practice, and even though I didn’t use the sketch, I think it helped the final product.
Since the art style was already defined by Lars, I didn’t need to experiment with the ogre as much. Instead, I could simply sketch him out and render him, as seen below.
More to come
Did you see the teaser on Twitter (try clicking the characters!). We’ll be putting some more scenes up there as we develop the game. Stay tuned!
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In case you missed it, we launched Lunch Bug last week! It’s available to play right now on Pokki, the Chrome Web Store and the open web. It supports modern browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as well as mobile browsers such as Mobile Safari and the Android browser.
We’re pleased that the feedback has been overall very positive, but as always, there are improvements that can be made. I think the biggest issue with the game right now is the tutorial. In the first five levels of the game, players must go through mandatory modals and step-by-step instructions on how to play. Additionally, the tutorial first sets the expectation that there will be an “OK” button to press, but then the very next step changes the focus to the game board, confusing many players.
In version 1.20.16, I’ve added the ability to skip the tutorial, as well as an animated hand image to indicate when users are asked to interact with the board instead of a button. These simple changes should help make the game both easier for new players to understand and less frustrating for returning players.
What’s next?
Players like the very helpful Vincent Scheib have suggested that the tutorial may introduce too much too quickly, and I definitely agree. Believe it or not, the live version of the tutorial is the fifth (or so) iteration! The early versions of the tutorial were really unintuitive, so we’ve come a long way. But I’d like to do at least one more from-scratch approach to the tutorial, this time focusing on transparency, simplicity, and smaller steps.
We’ve also talked a lot about adding new pieces and levels to the game. However, it might be a while before I can work on Lunch Bug, as Geoff and I are now in fulltime production mode for our next game Lava Blade. We’ve got a working prototype and Joshua Morse has already done a bunch of really amazing songs. More to come!
Lostcast is our podcast about HTML5 games. In episode 20, we discuss the much buzzed-about OUYA, Onslaught! Arena on Brass Monkey, and the launch of our new game Lunch Bug.
Download Lostcast episode 20 (51:53, 40MB)
Show notes
Thanks for listening! And be sure to check out Lunch Bug!
Play Lunch Bug now!
Today Geoff and I are very excited to announce our first major game in almost 2 years, Lunch Bug, a free-to-play, strategy puzzle game built using HTML5.
Lunch Bug is available to play now on Pokki, the Chrome We…
We’re getting geared up to launch our new game Lunch Bug, so we’ve (finally) been testing the game more thoroughly in browsers other than Google Chrome. In the process, it looks like I may have found a few audio bugs in Firefox.
There seem to be two bugs. The first bug is that Firefox throws the canplay and canplaythrough events twice when an audio file loads (they should only be thrown once). I could only reproduce this on Mac OS X.
Second, Firefox appears to fire the canplay and canplaythrough events when an audio instance’s currentTime property is set. This is unexpected behavior and doesn’t happen in other browsers. When talking with Geoff, it came up that there could be a case where this behavior might make sense: for example if currentTime was set to a value past what has loaded so far, perhaps currentTime could tell listeners that it cannot play.
However this behavior doesn’t seem intentional, as it doesn’t happen in other browsers and isn’t mentioned (at least to my knowledge) in the W3C specification.
Show me the demonstration!
The ridiculously large button above links to the demo where you can try out the bugs for yourself, and I put the source code on GitHub.
By taking the time to create a concise demonstration, my hope is to make it easier for other developers to either help me figure out the confusion on my end, or if these are indeed bugs in Firefox, to ease the process of getting those fixed. On that note I’ve created two tickets using Mozilla’s bug tracker:
What do you think? Was the demonstration easy to follow? Do these bugs look legitimate? If so, do you know any Mozilla engineers?
Lostcast is our podcast about HTML5 games. In episode 19, we answer a reader email question (thanks Jarrod!), talk about our upcoming game Lunch Bug and our extra upcoming game Lava Blade. Good times were had by… both.
Download Lostcast episode 19 (39:47, MB)
Show notes
Thanks for listening! We love getting questions and comments, so please email us if you have any.
