Y1W3 (nana nana nana nana nana nana nana nana) Batmaaaaaan! + Footsteps GameJam game poster
Leonie’s small blog island says hullo! (:
In this post: Footsteps Game progress, doodles, lecturing myself and a bit of Art Camping.
(Who remembers the old Batman theme?)
Let’s go! Journal Time.
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| It turns out I’m actually Batman. (Hah!) Jokes aside, I’m not even a fan. Just did this quick doodle for fun and because he’s cool. Tagline is How It Should Have Ended‘s. |
Year 1, Week 3 (28th Jan to 4th Feb)
- PV festivals: we submitted into another two! More figuring out what else is feasible to enter. Still don’t think we could enter much more as it’s costly.
- PV illustration: nitpicking stage; refining it more. Vector-ising some more elements and type.
- Footsteps Game poster: Game is not ready at the time of posting yet! But I did a poster to tease you blog readers first! Will post this poster on social media when the game’s ready. Took a while for me to come up with this tagline (also in the description of the site).
A game where you start off blind due to the darkness. I don’t have colour printer access so I resolved to do it via delivery…just 10 copies is what I could afford and probably need.
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| Hoping my hand writing’s not too bad. Woo, hand drawn graphic design aside from the concentric circles. |
Footsteps Game Title Screen from Leonie Yue on Vimeo.
And hey! Here’s my game title screen in it’s full length and quality (in-game it’s not as clear as we wanted to keep it small in file size). It’s just some weirdly done parallax slow animation so nothing exciting or flashy here.
Ooh! I finally got to play through version 2 of Footsteps thanks to the tremendous hard work of Jimmy/James Heazlewood! Playtesting of all kinds and suggestions were given and I can’t wait to share it for others to officially play when it’s ready. James is wonderfully determined to iron out and polish the game jam game and has exceeded my expectations.
SPOILER TEXT (Highlight when game is out and you’ve played it if you’re bothered coming back here haha): Personally, after playing version 2, the game was an atmospheric, exploratory kind of game with the potential of further puzzles and levels. If it ever does develop further past the basic first level, then a story needs to be formulated properly.
I got to make more basic graphics for the game; we’re not aiming for any of the Game Jam awards (it’s too late and the supposed original upload wasn’t playable anyway) but we’re keen for people to play it at the playtesting event! (:
- Train adventuuures/”Meet up thing” doodles:
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| Long train ride to the meet up so train adventuuures time! Ah it was Chinese New Year too. Everything’s wonky as I didn’t work with perspective guides; I just drew what I saw. So distorted. |
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| Got there real early so I started drawing the building opposite the venue outside. Then during the meet up I started to draw people deep in conversation (as I said I would, last year when the last meet up happened). There was one meetup gentleman who wondered whether I was doing interviews on my sketchpad. I told him I was drawing people and that didn’t draw him and then he backed away with a “You’re very honest”. Haha I creeped him out! Should I be more vague next time? Ehhh nah. I won’t show my sketchbook if there is a next time though. |
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| A meetup person and two train passengers. |
- Arm strain; it’s not as bad? Left arm strain is still there; I’m getting better but very slowly.
- NAC Ideation: Sorting out my old moodboard files…so much! I discovered heaps of things I didn’t know I’ve horded! Whoa!
- Untitled001: further development for one of the final designs! Design is pretty much set; but there’s two other designs I have to keep working on while melting under another almost 40 degrees Celsius heatwave. Then I only needed to finalise my second finished design which is the most time consuming. Can’t show anything yet but I haven’t been able to do the concepting process properly.
- NAC session: critique and chat
- NAC week 8: Figures Am so behind on the camp! Ack! Need to do moreee. Always. Must do them in the next week as Footsteps, PV and Untitled001 got in the way.
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| Many quick rough gestures; 30 seconds each or less |
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| Figure Painting and drawing studies. I need to do more of these as I got a long way to go. I’m very torn between lines (faster for me) versus painting (more fleshed out but tiresome for the arm). Those heels look horribly painful. |
Other Adventures:
- Car Mechanic Simulator 2014 (snippet): Colourful car parts; glad I’m not a mechanic as it looks terribly complex as expected. Boring as a game though.
- Frozen: Wonderfully entertaining, beautiful and fast paced. Not as good as Tangled but the giant guy with a family in the sauna was most amusing and I actually got a bit teary eyed at the brilliant climax. The songs were mostly amazing and catchy and the animation was incredible. Don’t mind watching it again!. (:
Olaf could be designed better as many have said, but as a character, he’s alright. There were some re-skins notable from the Tangled 3D models but then the story; in this case, the relationship and contrast between the sisters is really the main focus for me. I can relate to this movie incredibly. And many others could too.
- Yakuza 4 (watching): A Japanese Doc Brown and his time machine, throwing office tables, super chainsaw dodge, clown guards with green afros, blow up dolls suddenly shoved onto you and creepy dating training. Then there was alcohol presented like an ad, “Dart Tutorial Guy”, the player getting the drunk state, Lily earned her money and leaves after the implication that she’s a serial killer, Hana is better again but she had enough of Akiyama and his ignorance of her feelings so she quits, the Karaoke tattooed boss with minions pretending to like his singing, the “Feel the Heat” quick time events and Majima (apparently the Japanese Yakuza Joker with an eye patch)? Akiyama’s chapter then ends. Whoa. This crazy long game.
- Monsters University: Mike is so adorable as a tiny kid. (: Fun, entertaining, colourful movie and I still don’t like or hate Sulley. It’s a feel good movie with rich visuals.
- Meet up thing: (from the train adventuuures) Got to talk to a few more new people this time around! But it was mostly a catch up thing with Victor and Daniel though. And…so much nervous laughing from me and I tend to hang around with the few people I know else it’s too overwhelming to meet and talk with many people. Augh I’m awkward at social things. I didn’t feel too great afterwards but the meetup itself was alright. I enjoyed listening to people’s stories and how they’re going so it was good. I just need to keep working on my social skills in the meantime.
- Disaster: Day of Crisis (watching): Lisa being cool and demanding to be saved after SURGE is dealt with and making fun of the insane Ivan(?), Ray is incredibly overpowered throughout this whole game and somehow they still keep getting away.
- Got featured at AIE’s facebook page out of the blue: Uh…um…I didn’t think they’d do it because it’s been a while since graduation and so I forgot about it. Haven’t been featured online before so I can’t deny I was pleasantly surprised! Thanks for my first feature, AIE. (: And my previous blog post was retweeted and quoted by the incredibly super Giselle! Whoa! Surreal. Did it happen?! And then…life moves on haha.
- Holy Cr*p, Bears! (snippet): Salesman bears?! Sacrificing campers too. Crazy hard flash game.
- Westerado (snippet): Cool pixel art and animation, music and interesting dialogue options. That is, you can actually draw your gun at anyone (with dialogue reactions to this included). Pretty cool and open world.
- The Cave (snippet): Nothing new to me as I’ve seen my bro play it and I haven’t gotten around to playing it. The dialogue is top.
- Gravity Bone (snippet): I’ve played this already and it was an amazing experience. I just wanted to watch someone else go through the same thing haha
- I have no Mouth and I must Scream (watching): Gorrister and magical airbags. His heart is an inventory item. And apparently being nice to heavy drinkers allows you to get information out of them as long as you give them the alcohol. Win/win situation? Disclaimer that I don’t condone *heavy*, constant drinking!
- Smooth Operators: Call Centre Chaos (snippet): where you turn into a corporate monster and not see your employees as people. At least that’s what the player did anyway.
- Batman Arkham Asylum (snippet): Pretty cool beginning…but they usually start with prisons?
- Hotline Miami (snippet): So violently gorey! Whoa and mysterious reasons behind the killing sprees.
- And Yet it Moves (snippet): I have played this so seeing this tricky game again is interesting
- The Sims Medieval (snippet): throwing tomatoes and eggs and voices laughing, the player wooing ladies and fighting a female bandit. So far it seems linear and not that interesting to me.
- Cities in Motion 2 (snippet): Naming buses that you organise? Not that interesting to watch.
- Wreck It Ralph: finally gotten around to watching this; I mean, a few people were exasperated that I haven’t yet. The cameos were overhyped; but there was countless tributes and parodies to an incredible amount of games (that probably went over my head the first time).
The animation is brilliantly charming and I keep thinking King Candy = The Mad Hatter from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (same voice actor?!) It was a visually beautiful, game nerdy (I’m nerdy too) movie but I actually don’t like Penelope that much (I do like her friendship with Ralph though). Or maybe it’s just because she’s programmed to be annoying haha.
- Evoland (snippet): Ah the graphics! The old school adventure RPG vibes! I don’t even play JRPGs. Apparently it’s not that good as a game buuuuut I shall see.
- Mark of the Ninja (snippet): beautifully 2D animated stealth game.
- Tomb Raider (snippet): Seen the start of it again; very action oriented gameplay plus puzzles. Reminds me when I played the old one on the Playstation again…
- Sleeping Dogs (snippet): watched someone free roam Hong Kong with a trail of destruction behind him.
- Nidhogg (watching): Just watched someone else play resulting in many losses and deaths.
- Limbo (snippet): I’d really like to play this game someday.
- Enviro-Bear 2000 (snippet): bears driving around to collect fish, honeycombs and berries each year before hibernating. One handing driving literally.
Reflection Self Motivational Lecture for the Week
“What am I doing with my life” will keep haunting me but least I know there are countless others in the same boat; even if via the internet (ah hermit life). Hopefully we’re not lost on our own but working together to get to one place to the next! It’s an eternal journey full of failures/experiments with no concrete definition of success or destination; so just make it a happy adventure.
Don’t label yourself definitively as you’ll always keep growing.
Most importantly, you must believe in yourself no matter what others may say or what happens to you. People can say all the positive or negative things they’d like but it all comes down to you. Embrace yourself as you are and keep improving. Enjoy what you are doing.
Or that’s what many have said and that I’m telling myself anyway.
Just have to keep punching self doubt/fear in the face!
Right. There. Where the fear lies. Try to minimise the risks but embrace the failures.
Tackle it. Action a plan or something.
Yes this might be a written lecture (sad, blunt pep talk) to myself but I strive to not let this end negatively!
No way! This is here, in hopes that it boosts your morale too (in spite of my embarrassment); let’s adventuuure!
Thanks for reading & feel free to comment below! (:
Until next time, Leonie
(UUUinfinity/TripleUinfinity)
*throws a batarang and disappears into smoke*
