New Years Update - Amy’s Escape
Game development update for adventure horror game Amy’s Escape.
Due to the way this project is built, in my free time, and me having a very hectic November and December at my full time job, as a software developer, there’s not a lot to show, I wanted to get a Christmas update in, but since Christmas was one of my few holes of time in which I could get stuff done I went full on working on the project instead for that couple of days,
I’ve been working in this project since late 2012, and I learned to draw making this project, not that I couldn’t draw before it, but I developed the skill to express what I wanted for this project in particular, I wanted a certain look and I’m fighting to get it right, so I’m glad to find that I got there somehow. I’m not much of a drawing person, and there’s still a lot of elements I haven’t achieved the look for yet, but I like this hands on approach to get something the way I want it, is the way to go for me, since don’t have much money for hiring, and not knowing anyone that could achieve this kinda Ghibli but not look was a big issue.
That first drawing is from 2012 I was 22
“ A recollection of tweets in which I post about Amy's Escape, an adventure game I've been working on for the last 4 years. mostly 2016 and 2015 since I started production late 2015, the design for the game has been 4 years. ”
More color keys, we’re almost done with these, there’s way more scenes than I thought, liking the fact we have such varied colors for the whole game
By Emmanuel Ayala (@c0mby)
I’m working on walk, and run cycles for the character of Amy, trying to get a natural stroll and walk that can be used in as many situations as possible. I work in 3d first to ensure I can rotate the walk cycle in all 8 directions without having any inconsistencies, also it is a ridiculous amount of work to make these HD walk cycles, doing them in 3d helps me ensure they will sync perfectly with the game and then I can animate in 2d on top of them.
All cycles where created with reference courtesy of my little sister.
I already worked on techniques this year to exploit the cleanliness of 3d rotoscope to add and or remove an uneasy effect, which I like, also looking into different tools to improve development speed for the project’s animation, since it will be 2d animated with a 3d background, reading constantly blogs like OLM which has some of the tools I’m using, using the studio Ghibli software Opentoonz for rasterizing which is free, and getting it all through Texture Packer which I finally purchased I license for, it’s an amazing piece of software, I made my own texture packing tool, but texture packer is a better choice now.
A tool I personally did not like at first, but a solution to all my current problems, unity has proven time and time again that it can be used in a way that satisfies me as a developer allowing me to skip whole parts of it’s interface and the speed in which you can work on it I probably gave it a month or two on Amy’s Escape this year to use the fabled thing, but in my full time job I made 2 full games on it, and 2 apps.
So I have been getting the hang of it much more than I wanted to at first. I have bit of a thing with it since it is a tool that has a weird stigma for being used by beginners to create crap that inundates the different marketplaces, unskilled people downloading full games, and just swapping assets to create unskilled unimaginative monstrosities that insult the medium, I kinda like it now.
Needless to say I’ve been filling gaps in the story, and writing backstories for characters that don’t have one, this has been 40% of the time dedicated to the project in the last 2 months
Some work in progress character expression sheet for Jenna Martina
I can’t show this stuff right now since it’s private for the game, there’s a lot of work I can’t show. so be patient, everything I work on IS part of the game the pieces align at the end.You don’t need all the pieces to see the whole picture.
Plans, and onwards to 2017!
I’m not one to plan year by year, it doesn’t work for me, I like to have broad plans in a monthly basis and weekly goals, anything other that I can’t change on the fly doesn’t work for me, what I will tell is that the project is going stronger than ever 12 more months have passed and starting tomorrow I will have 5 years working on this project.
Design wise as soon as we’re done with the color keys Emmanuel Ayala and I will go straight to designing the colors for the every character so it plays nicely with the environments in the game, and go into more detail with concept art of certain scenes and areas, I want to go into doing some light story-boarding on the different parts in the game, and work on animations and writing.
So I can’t look down on 2016 it has been a great year for this project, the best year in progress wise at-least, reminding that all this design comes from previous years, it’s all just falling together right now, and as more things fall together, it feels more complete.
[Halloween 2016 Update] - link
[Moving around pencil tests] - link
[Roof of the world Update] - link
[Constructing a nightmare Update] - link
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