The Drawing Board

Press, and Play Tests

2009-04-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

Welcome welcome, to another inside look at Inkman: The Game That Almost Is!! We've been hard at work for the past two weeks, all in preparation for the BRCC Arts Fest on April 24th. We are showcasing the game to whoever decides to show up for our ten minute presentation. Look for a another post in the coming week with full coverage of the unveiling accompanied by a video of the presentation and gameplay video.

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This past week, Chris Meyer from GameVortex stopped by the our unofficial development studio and got a sneak preview of the game.

"At first glance, their game, Ink Man, appears to be something taken straight out of a kid's drawing book, and that's exactly the style these students are going for with their simple, yet challenging platformer."

Read the rest of the story here:

Students Redefine Retro

The PR department of the college also stopped in and got a quick look at the game. We've been receiving good impressions all around.

It seems we are also up on News 4 Gamers. Click and comment!

http://www.n4g.com/News-316938.aspx

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We learned a good bit from the play testing that both Chris and our friend Renee did, mainly about the GUI (graphic user interface). Originally we had the GUI placed at the very top-left of the screen but that proved a little troublesome for our play testers. Luckily we are able to edit things on the fly.

Our programmer dropped the GUI down to the bottom of the screen which improved the intuitiveness of the controls. Moving the cursor down half a screen is a lot quicker and flows better than one that required the awkward movement of going all the way across the screen.

Top-left placement = Fail

YAY!

Renee stopped in about a week ago with cookies and juice (!!!) and dead set on playing the game. Who are we to turn down free, home made cookies? We love Renee not only for the snacks but for the immeasurable input she gave us. With her help we were able to get some of the bugs visible and then fixed, including a frustrating one with the trampolines. The player was able to place a trampoline beneath Inkman mid-jump and with a well timed jump the player could essentially Metroid bomb jump across the level. Bugs are bad, real bad.

We've also been getting some useful feedback from our friends and our PR/Marketing guy, Brad Ramey. The level progression has changed to allow for more replayability and we were able to work in some fun mechanics that fit so well we were shocked we hadn't thought of it sooner. (i.e. Running away from a rampaging Dinosaur!)

Again, thank you Renee. You and your cookies rock.

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Now a special treat from our Audio developer: an orginal song from the game. (It's one of my favorites. )

Download it.

Interestingly enough the song was inspired by another indie game Tonematrix. Its highly addicting and equaly brilliant.

See you in a week! (With videos yay!)

Doodeling: Part 2

2009-04-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

For the next look into our development process I would like to touch on the beginning of some of our game mechanic concepts.

Once we figured out our core concept (drag and drop objects into the level) we needed to figure out some object scaling. Doing this helped us tremendously both in art and in setting standards for all of our objects. Getting down sizes and dimensions early on allowed us to get things rolling fairly quickly.

Keep in mind that these images are just early concepts and some of the ideas have been scraped as of the current stages in development.

Rough concepts for object scaling.

Figuring out jump heights and such.

We also needed to figure out how to drop objects onto the level. Our first idea was to have the objects placed only within a certain area around Inkman. However this was changed once our programmer figured out mouse and drag-n-drop code.

Early drag-n-drop idea.

Now for our first video showcasing the early stages of the GUI and the drag/drop mechanic.

Hope you enjoyed the post and keep checking back for more updates!

Garrett Breaux, Lead Designer/Manager

Follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/GBreaux

Doodeling: Part 1

2009-03-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

The first concept for our poster art.

The first two weeks of class (we only meet in person four hours a week) were spent hammering out details and gameplay mechanics. The white board was filled with ideas unintelligible to the untrained eye.

Our first concept consisted of a bionic pig with a snot fueled rifle in place of his right arm. Bionic Bacon we dubbed it. However, as we started to think of mechanics and concepts for the game we realized most of us had no artistic talent and those who did had no idea how to implement anything into a game.

Bionic Bacon in spectacular concept form.

Starting to flesh out some mechanics.

* * * *

The most obvious direction for us to go at that point was one of least artistic requirements (this proved troublesome later in development, more on that in the future). Thus the idea of setting a game in a child's notebook was brought to life. When we stumbled across that idea everything started to fall into place. Our first core concepts was to have the player character be a stick man sketch who navigated around a world done fully in crayons. Ideas were flying in from every direction.

"Let's do crayon physics with a player controlled character!"
"He can battle giant crayon dragons and fight them off with a fountain pen!"

Gathering multiple ideas is the objective of brainstorming, however to many ideas can cloud the overall vision. It's very important to keep ideas flowing in a general direction with some form of continuity otherwise you will have a hundred great ideas but only one or two that work well together.

After excitedly agreeing upon the notebook concept our level designer, Andrew Pinion, helped us visualize what the levels could look like.

Try figuring out what we were discussing. Bet you can't.

Yes that's a rabbit and yes we still want a playable version.

I'll touch more on the intracies of level design and tweaking mechanics into something usable in a later post. For now I want to touch on some of the character design.

One of the first ideas we had was to implement an Eraser boss/villain that would help with the overarching (but underdeveloped) story. Initially the game was called Inkman Vs. Dr. Doodle. Later we deiceded to drop the Dr. Doodle part as we didn't (and still don't) know how to fully implement him into the game. We wanted to focus on the core ideas and really flesh out everything we could about them. That is what helped us out the most. Getting core concepts down early in the developement cycle is by all accounts a marvelous feeling.

Inkman Vs. Dr. Doodle concept

More Dr. Doodle concept art.

Still one of my favorite concepts for Dr. Doodle.

Well hope you enjoyed this look into the early stages of our developement (granted we are only 9 weeks in). Keep up with the blog as we are going to be posting videos soon of the first tech demo unveling coming later this month.

If anyone has any question or would love to know more, please by all means leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Starting to get things working in the game. :)

Garrett Breaux, Lead Designer/Manager

Dabbling with Design

2009-03-19T17:15:00.001-07:00

Hello and welcome to the Ink Man Blog!

So...what exactly is Ink Man? It's a game designed by (us) Entertainment Technology students at Baton Rouge Community College. This is the dev blog where we'll talk about the process of making the game, as well as some design challenges and how we overcame them. But mostly, I hope this will serve as some sort of catalyst for others new to making games. It's something learned by experience, but maybe, just maybe, reading about how we played with stick figures and crayons will prove to be insightful.

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Ink Man is a game starring a stick figure living in a child's notebook, amongst lush hills of crayons and structures of pencil. Players must navigate their way through the level by "drawing" platforms, thus (in some sense) creating your way from point A to B. And that's pretty much it. We will go deeper into the gameplay and description as we progress, keeping anyone that's interested up to date. I'd like to delve into our thought process of crafting an ambitious idea and turning it into something that's actually cohesive.

Brainstorming sessions can either be productive or too productive. When we started designing Ink Man we tossed around the most random, unstructured ideas you could think of for an entire class period. (For the sake of making a point, I'll spare the Bionic War Pig part) When we started thinking more about what we could actually do stylistically, we came up with the Ink Man concept of a paper and pencil (er, ink) game done digitally. It gave us so many freedoms as to what we could come up with, which oddly enough - helped us learn what we couldn't do. Speaking metaphorically, imagine you have a room full of stuff and you can make as much of a mess as you want, but obviously, you have to clean it up afterward.

With the Ink Man idea, we thought about how we wanted the player to draw his way through the levels - It started with a mouse cursor that literally let you draw whatever you want to be used in game, then giving the character weapons, having tons of different objects to place and even the inane details like if Ink Man should be made out of erasable ink or not.

All these ideas have merit, but I think we quickly started to figure out that for the game to be fun all of this needed to be condensed. We had to actually be able to make it, and figure out how to perfect our core mechanic. The main idea is that it's okay to dream big, but think small and be able to make sense of it when it's time to put it to use.

You wouldn't write an equation and not try to simplify it, and I think the same logic applies. The game isn't about "this, this, and this", it's about "this." You can really lose track of everything at such an early stage and we'd just like to place emphasis on simplicity. More often than not, the simple answer makes the most sense and is usually more fun: Ockhams Razor. After all, it's just a game. It has to be inviting.

A preview of the art style used in the game.

Chris Pinion, Audio Programmer