Mr Fitch and the Glitchy Witch

Hi, I’m James Spence, a hobbyist games developer from Scotland. Please join me on a journey to develop a quirky indie game from scratch.

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This is the run cycle all put together.  I think it worked out not too bad.  I didn’t use all of the images I drew because it made it jerkier.  It also seemed to work better when I kept her head in the exact same position in each frame.

Although I think I could get something up and running (no pun intended) with this animation I don’t think this will be the final artwork.  I would like the character to have more than one costume throughout the game (something I learned making comics is that you can add a lot of life to a story by having the character change outfit mid-way through).  

However as a proof of concept I’m happy enough.

The next variation will be drawn larger and will be just a template of the figure herself, so that I can use it as a layer with different outfits sitting on the layer above, allowing me to simply draw the outfits without having to re-draw the Glitchy Witch each time.

I really need to settle on a name for the Glitchy Witch.

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Images for a hand drawn run cycle.

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This is as far as I took the rigged character in Unity.  Basically, I didn’t really care for the end result. It had a ragdoll or paper puppet look. It reminded me of 70s kids animations like Pigeon Street, King Rollo or Ivor the Engine. The next attempt will be to hand draw the animations.

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This is a basic design in order to try out Unity’s 2d character animator. The image you are looking at is actually made up of 17 separate parts which can be placed on a rig (a kind of skeleton that keeps parts in the right places) and repositioned. The version on the left was the first attempt, the second was resaved in a way that would be easier to rig (I also darkened the outlines to make it look better when shrunk down.

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My first few experiments with the Unity games engine focussed on 3d games.  I also learned about the MakeHuman open source character designer and the Mixamo character animator.

This video represents a couple of weekends worth of work going through tutorials and playing about with MakeHuman, Mixamo and Blender (3d open source tool).  Even before I made the model all black, she looked quite generic.  If I’m going to be investing months of work into a game I want it to look at least unique.  I don’t know how to do that using a character designer like MakeHuman.  I don’t have the budget to invest in a paid character design tool.

I have reached the conclusion that to make a 3d game would take considerably more resources than I have at my disposal.  I’m, basically, knocking this game together in evenings and at weekends on top of a busy job. I don’t have time to learn Unity and also another 3d tool. Learning Unity will be challenging enough.

Over the years I have taught myself the basics of comics and cartooning using photoshop.  It seems obvious to me now that the game must be hand-drawn.

3d was an interesting experiment and gave me an understanding of how Unity uses animations and scripts.  However 3d is a route I won’t be continuing to explore.

[mrfitchandtheglitchywitch]

Getting Started

My first step in my game journey was to download and install Unity. Easy. 

...or it would have been if my computer weren’t from 2006. In fairness, it only just fell outside the minimum specification to run Unity, but nonetheless, I won’t be developing my game on that old machine.  That left me with two options:

1. Get my grubby hands on a shiny new computer.

2. Use my wife’s old laptop (luckily not as old as the desktop machine).

Since I didn’t have the reserves to upgrade to a new desktop, I chose option 2. Tiff’s cool with it, which gets me up and running at least.

I downloaded Unity and to my great joy, it works. Game on.

Over the past few weekends I’ve been working through tutorials, taking notes and playing about with the system.

Below are links to some fantastic videos I’ve worked through.

How to make a Video Game in Unity - BASICS (E01)

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Game Idea

Mr Fitch and the Glitchy Witch will be a character-driven, quirky game.  So far I don’t really know much about how the game element will play - but I know the basic storyline will be about a Witch whose spells regularly fail her, and her bad attitude cat Mr Fitch.  

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A Game?  But Why?

I’d like to kick off this blog by saying a few things about this project and my expectations.  

I’m a forty-two year old Scotsman, with a lovely wife, seven year old son and a sixteen year old cat.  I work full-time, but not in a games company and not as a computer programmer.  I’m just a humble hobbyist with a dream.

Throughout my life I have enjoyed that giddy feeling of falling in love with a game, thinking about it at every opportunity.  In the eighties, I truly loved those basic, endlessly playable Sinclair ZX Spectrum classics like Chuckie Egg, Sabre Wulf and Dizzy.  By the nineties, I started to see the potential of games expand, finding myself engrossed by story-driven adventures like Police Quest or the Colonel’s Bequest, though I also couldn’t resist SNES classics Mario World and Mariokart. In the noughties, World of Warcraft dominated more of my life than it probably should have, and now, with a PS4 at my disposal, there are more phenomenal games than ever before.  My favourite games of this generation include Nier Automata, Overwatch, the Last Guardian, Need for Speed Rivals and all the Tomb Raider games.

A year and a half ago my wife gave me a game called Inside for PS4.  If you’ve not played this game, I highly recommend it.  Not only was it exceptionally enjoyable to play, the mere existence of this game set my mind racing.  Not only was this game made by a small team, but they used an Open Source games engine, Unity, to build it.  Since this game entered my life I have sought out other indie games and began learning more about Unity.  I started to jot down ideas and notes in a little green book and now, I want to try and put together a small game.

I’ve dabbled in a few creative pursuits over the years, namely comics, comedy writing and illustration.

Dr Sheep and the Aardvark was a webcomic which posted online between 2007 and 2009.  Silly Beggar, my comedy book of real-life nonsense begging letters, was published by Aurora Metro in 2009.  My space webcomic Girls in Space ran from 2010 and, after my son was born, I wrote and illustrated the Children’s story Roddy Jones and the Bones he Owns under the pen name Thomas Beetle. I paint and draw pin-up girls.  

My goal with this game is to make the whole thing by myself, to fully understand how it all fits together.  I plan to draw from my experience of writing and illustration as well as my love of engaging video games.  I thought it might be a good discipline to document my progress in a blog and, so, here we are.

I don’t expect to make a ‘triple A’ title, but I also don’t want to make something the likes of which I’ve seen a million times before.  I want a game with characters you’ll care about, a fun gameplay mechanic and a chance for me to learn and develop my skills.

If you’ve followed my previous work as a writer and illustrator, you can expect the same blend of saucy silliness that seems to flow into all my creative pursuits.

Let the games begin...!

[mrfitchandtheglitchywitch]

Let’s Make a Game

Hello.  I’m James.

Please join me on my quest to make a video game.