Fire With Fire Interview: Fund This Game

If you haven't seen yet, Fund This Game recently interviewed Theory (creator and lead developer of Fire With Fire). Give it a look if you're curious about how all of this came about and some of the ideology behind its conception: http://fundthisgame.com/boredom-cure-fire-and-lots-of-it/

And the Kickstarter for Fire With Fire is just getting, well... started! It's not too late to make a pledge. The forums are also up and running, so don't hesitate to sign up if you have ideas you want to share!

The Only Certainty: Debris

What's a space faring adventure without random space junk?

For the moment, the top and bottom sprites don't do much other than serve as impassable objects for the player to go around in the levels. The middle one is a replacement for the monitors we had been using earlier; you can scan them (or what's left of them...) and they'll relay a certain message, sometimes with instructions about game controls or opening the way to a new System for you to visit.

If you're wondering what exactly it was that laid waste to these things, hopefully we can let the story do the talking...

The Only Certainty: Nebula Fog

When the player passes through a nebula it obscures everything on screen except for a small radius around your ship. You can see a prototype version of how the darkening effect looks in the current build here:

So the other half of my job for this was to animate the process of moving from a non-nebula state to a darkened, foggy state onscreen.

The first thing was to plan out how the screen would look while darkening and how quickly. Some testing of different versions below:

4 frame fade in/out:

8 frame fade:

1 second fade:

The 3rd type looked way too slow and the ship collides with a nebula pretty quickly, so we decided somewhere between 5 and 10 frames would be best. With the timing down I could add a little polish.

There's also a subtle animation for after the screen is obscured while traversing through a nebula. As a result we have a fading in, then the obscuring fog, and a fade out that occurs when passing over one of these hazards:

The Only Certainty: Nebula Tileset

Another tileset, been a while since I've done one of these.

Basically thick areas of starforming regions placed around levels. The idea was to create an environmental obstacle like fog that would impair your range of vision when you collided with it, so I made the nebula tiles somewhat dark and hazy looking. There are 9 basic tiles (North, East, West, South, Center, plus the ordinal directions) but some have slightly modified duplicates in order to line up with other tiles seamlessly. The biggest challenge was getting the different parts to connect together, but here are a few examples of the shapes that can be made with the tiles and I think we can manage a fairly good variety of shapes with what we have for the moment.

Fire With Fire: Kickstarter Campaign Go!

Theory and I started working together on this game from the ground up nearly a year ago. After a lot of work, revisions, and self-reflection, I'm happy to announce that Fire With Fire is now live on Kickstarter! Head on over to our page to read (and see) about it if you don't know about our game yet.

Even if you can't pledge at the moment, just spreading the word to anyone who might be interested in a cross platform, multiplayer mobile tower defense game would be a huge help. We're going to do everything we can to bring this game to as many people as humanly possible.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about anything, feel free to shoot us an e-mail as always.

The Only Certainty: Deep Space

Next step I've been working on recently is a backdrop for the levels in the game. The game is predominantly set in space, so for the most part they will look like this, mostly dark and dotted with stars. The above is the old version we'd stuck in just to have something to use.

Here's the updated version below:

Much less pixelated and it tiles seamlessly. We'll be setting the player, enemies, objects, UI, and all of the other important stuff over this.

Also, just for fun I messed around with what an animated version would look like.

I was watching A Trip to the Moon (1902) for ideas and was reminded of how there's a kind of flickering you see in really old films. I don't know, it might be too distracting in regular gameplay, but I would love to incorporate some kind of effect like this in the game's menus or especially the story cutscenes.

The Only Certainty: Scanner Animation

I feel like I've worked on this more than anything else for this game. Oh well, they say iteration is a good thing!

When we first started working on TOC we knew we wanted the player to have a way of interacting with the environment, and the scanner idea was born. At first it was a simple ray that shot straight forward.

But eventually we decided to scrap it for something else. It had a pretty narrow range and forced you to be really precise with your aim. What if you wanted to scan several objects at once? So we tried something a little different with the pulse version.

But in the end this didn't feel right either, and scanning too many objects at once caused its own problems. We wanted a Scanner that had a deliberate direction in which to aim, but with more range than the original beam. So we tried something that fanned outward.

This one was much closer to what we were going for, so after a little refinement we have the current result:

The basic motion is almost unchanged from the 3rd version but it moves a little more smoothly and doesn't take as long to get to the fanning out motion. Works great in the current build we have so far so hopefully this is the one we can use from here on out.

The Only Certainty: Player Ship Sprite Design

We're making some more headway into our science fiction survival adventure, The Only Certainty, so hopefully I'll be showing a lot more stuff from the game in the coming days. I've been working on polishing the ship the player will be controlling throughout the story. Remember how it looked a long time ago?

Then it changed into this placeholder:

Now we have this.

I think I've mentioned this already, but the game's aesthetics are somewhat inspired by 50s science fiction films, so those influenced some of the ideas I cycled through for the ship's overall shape. Aside from that though, I tried to look at anything with a remotely interesting silhouette, from actual shuttles to metal detectors to pepper dispensers. These are some concepts I drew up before heading into Illustrator.

One of the main challenges was keeping in mind how it would actually animate and function when considering the ship's appearance. I had to make something that would allow the wings to fan out or move in some way when the Boost animation was triggered in-game. And I needed a form that would show up well on a dark background with symmetrical lighting on either side.

Eventually decided on the moving parts--I knew that the glass dome would need reflections of stars scrolling across its surface. The rotating lights were to give the ship some life as an actual functioning machine. I considered some exhaust, but it doesn't seem like you see exhaust from space faring vehicles very often in movies... I dunno. 

This is also probably the first time I'd ever done complete animations using Illustrator.

Original version below, but it seemed a little too fast. Maybe we can use it for Boosting though...

This project's come quite a ways, but we're making serious progress--hopefully more to come soon! And of course MDNL's blog is a good way to keep track of everything that's going on if you haven't been.

Ava: Storyboard Panels

Been a while since I've showed anything from this project.

A while ago I drew up some storyboards to tell the, um... story of the game. Basically laid out as panels illustrating each scene, they'd play in the beginning of the game, and then after each level is completed.

Nothing too complex here. A girl sets out to save her boyfriend from a malevolent sorceress. It was a challenge illustrating the scenes without using any dialogue.

Started with a very messy sketch before refining each set of panels.

Beginning:

After Stage 1:

After Stage 2:

After Stage 3:

Actually got the idea for the panel layout from the opening of Kirby's Dreamland 3.

Tried out a similar fade in animation for the panels.