Journey of John Dev Blog

The dev blog for an adventure platformer game.

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Showcasing at GameScope Festival

David and I (oh yeah, David is an old friend of mine, who is now programming the game) were at the Game Scope Festival in Aalborg, Denmark. We were showcasing a pre-alpha preview of the game. We got a lot of great feedback from some lovely players! Now we are back at the office working on the game! Below you can check out some pictures from the event! Also, I would like to note, that we will be posting smaller updates on the Twitter page here: https://twitter.com/WrinkledArt

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We will be showing Journey of John at this year's Game Scope Festival on this Thursday!

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Working on character controller...

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Have been working on the UX. Inside the head of John you can enter “Memories” Quests” and “Experience” This is a little memory. Work in progress.

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Just brewed a big can of coffee, and I'm ready to start doing some level sketching. Spent some time organising the roadmap of the project on Trello today.

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Prototype gameplay

Well, I am still here. Still working on the project… Just haven’t had much time the last couple of weeks, since I have been working on another project. A project called “Project Clavus” which is an experimental digital story I directed and made together with 4 other friends, as part of my film school. You can read a little more about it on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/wrinkledartfan/posts/1294914463895099 Regarding Project John, well I am working full time on it for the moment for about 2 months. So that is really nice! Started working with a couple of coders from Nerve Damage Games, who will help to code the game. They helped me with creating the prototype of the game, which I have attached as a 2 small gifs. It is only a very rough prototype of the character controls, still very unstable and needs a lot of polishing. The legs fuck up pretty easy, but it is definitely a start! Hopefully, we will soon have much more on the game. Will keep you updated and post more stuff on the progress.

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Working on concepts.

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Welcome to the new blog

Just wanted to say that we moved from the old blog to this. The old blog was identical but on a different Tumblr account. I created a new account and copied all the posts here. Follow along :) 

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We are still working on the game. Here is an older video Ionut did when he was working on ideas work potential clouds.

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Visual style update

Hey guys, here is another little update about the game process. So me and Ionut have been working hard on concept art and ideas. Things have changed since, and we are still doing concept art testing out stuff. But attached are some pictures of really early concept/sketches and newer stuff.  We will continue working on it. Right now I am also redesigning the main character John, making him a lot more personal and bringing much more feeling and character into him. I will update you guys soon with more progress on that. Lots of more posts will be coming, so make sure to stay tuned! Thanks!

- Bertil Vorre

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This was an older video of Ionut doing some speed when he helped with some concept. 

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The very first blogpost

So this is the first post on this blog. Let me introduce you to this project! “John the Jerusalem artichoke” is an upcoming adventure platformer game. The game is about John, a small Jerusalem artichoke, who has to fight a mysterious evil that destroyed his home and kidnapped his girlfriend, Olga. He wakes up from a blackout finding out the Jerusalem Artichoke Town is trashed and looks like hell. He has to leave the town going on a dangerous journey to save his girlfriend and bring things back to normal. The story is still in development so I will make a post with more details later.

So who is making this game?

This game is released through WrinkledArt by Bertil Vorre. A little about me, I am a multi-artist and freelancer, currently studying film. I am the writer, director, and designer of “John the Jerusalem artichoke” Together with me I have my sister Clara-Amalie helping with writing the story and doing character designs. At the moment it mainly has been a one man army pretty much - but I just started to get a team together to help tell this story. Ionut Nechifor, a London-based illustrator, and concept artist have been helping out with the first concepts and ideas of the game. Ionut has been working on and off with backgrounds, assets and level design. He was a big help when kickstarting this project! I just recently got in touch with more people as well as developers to help out. More information about the crew will come along.

Besides all this practical information, what you see in the picture is a Photoshop screenshot of one of the concepts I and Ionut did to get closer to a feeling of the game. The artwork is still work in progress, but we are getting closer.

So at the moment, we are moving into prototyping in Unity and hopefully soon have something to show you guys.

That is it for now, but I will soon be back when we have more details regarding the visual style. Also, I will do some posts with early sketchbook drawings and ideas. My plan is to regularly post updates from the very start to the very end of this project. Please follow along if you find this interesting. I am so excited to start this project. My last game was developed almost 5 years ago, so it is great to be back.

Thanks a lot! - Bertil