Last three days
maral on 2013/09/08 16:50
of Who cares
— edited on 2013/09/08 17:03
A small note to our monsters and creatures. The first idea we got about our main character (Xoxoan) was, that it should have legs, arms and eyes. So we came with our version of a stickman, just without body, and it looked like an X letter just with eyes. And we thought, well, let's do other letters. It was very easy, so we came with O (side-moving hedgehog-like creature), I (vertical jumping monster), Q (flying rounded beast with a machine gun), C (moves like slug and spits his own eye that quickly grows again). We really liked the idea of eyes on feelers (antennas) like our hero, so we gave them to most of our monsters, and we also made single eye on an antenna as a spike thingy.
For the graphics, Martin (Bosvi) did most of the graphics in Illustrator, all stable images, then he sent it to us and Honza (jakkoli) made them move in Illustrator and Photoshop. Martin unfortunately had to leave on Thursday (he went for a holiday to Greece :) ) so he actually made it all in about 3 days, and I must say it really is awesome!
On Friday I spent an hour or two with my keyboard and put together the music. It was actually pretty easy, because space-like music is very intuitive for me, and the ideas came together very quickly (I haven't composed for a long time, so I simply took some ideas from last few months). On Saturday I managed to get the music from my keyboard and edit it slightly, and 4 background songs came to life, right on time. I also wanted to do some sound for the creatures, I even recorded 3 minutes of creeking, grumbling and growling, but I didn't have time and energy to follow through and finish it (I recorded it 3 hours before deadline).
Last day was a lot about designing levels, most of them was made by Honza (jakkoli) and one by Fanda (wary). It was a challenge, because we didn't have time to make an editor (which would be awesome), so we had to manually type all the levels, planet positions etc. Even though under pressure, I think Honza did pretty good job and designed all the levels with appropriate difficulty and with lot of cool ideas (such as micro planets or a goal outside the gravity area). Also the story was mostly written by Honza.
I must say I really enjoyed the whole week, it was hard and of course not always without bugs and long debugging, but the idea, the art work and also the vision of ready game was firing us up, so we spent really most of our time on making the game and stayed motivated the whole time.
I would like to say big thanks to all of my teammates, they did terrific job, especially with my never ending list of remarks and complaints about graphics and animations. Special thanks to Fanda (who already participated in pyweek with me before), who this time really took big part of the coding and really improved in organization, and as always exceled in physics and math formulas and functions, and really worked hard in making the game perfect.
For myself, I personaly enjoyed this pyweek the most (out of my 4 successful participations), especially thanks to the growth of our team (it was Martin's and Honza's first time). The feeling of completing a game is a reward itself!
Marek (maral)