Hello everyone! My name is Eleanor and it has been my privilege to embark on the wonderful, yet terrifying task of translating the thoughts and ideas of many talented minds into the visual plane.
That is to say, I make the concept art for Greywater. I first started work on the designs for the landscape and general imagery of Greywater drawing influence both from the traditional Steampunk/Victorian aesthetic, as well as etchings and illustrations for children's books. Â
Because my initial drawings were rather positively received by the team, I decided to carry the same influences forward for my current task: the characters who inhabit Old Town (although the Tinkerer does have something of an Alpine sea-captain vibe going on).
The general process for my work is fairly straightforward: I produce loose sketches for the character or subject, and the rest of the team provides feedback which goes into revising and honing the appearance of the subject for future sketches, until we reach a consensus for the final drawings.
Without further ado, I present to you a sampling of my work:
The Machinist (to whom Tavish is apprenticed)
The Doctor
The Tinkerer
Oldtown Greywater (Residential)
The Tinkerer's House
A Rough Map of Oldtown
The Heart of Oldtown as seen from above (rough draft)
Hey everybody, this is Chris, I create the music and sound effects for Greywater.
Iâve put together a video for you with a brief look at how I create the music that will accompany your game experience. Todayâs track is the theme for our protagonist, Tavish. In the video, I gloss over a few things for the sake of brevity, but I think itâs a pretty good overview of how a track like this is put together.
Listen to the full track:
If you have any questions or feedback, let us know here or tweet us at TeamSweepy!
Hey everybody! Today I'd like to tell you a little bit about what we've been working on, and what's coming down the pipe in the near future.
Firstly, there's the two things I'm super excited about: Concept art, and music posts.Â
Concept Art
Our concept artist Eleanor has already finished a lot of internal sketches for the team, but right now she's working on a few special pieces just for you (in color and everything). They should begin to give you a better picture of the world and characters of Greywater who have thus far only been represented by pixel-y goodness.  Here's a sneak peek at some of my favorite of the early Doctor sketches.Â
Music
Chris, our composer, has been working for a while now on a video tour through his compositional processâfrom the rough outline of a track to the finished piece. I don't mean to jynx it, but it should be ready soon. If you're good, we may even include some additional finished tracks when he posts it. Both this and the concept art post shouldn't be too far on the horizon. To tide you over, here's a peek at an experiment in ambient: the Sewer theme!Â
Heartland Alpha 2.0: Public Release
There are only a few big bugs which need to be squashed before the next version of the playable alpha gets released into the wildâone being the in-game behavior of our friend the Clockwork Worm. Also, I think that whole Tavish swinging an invisible wrench thing still needs addressing.
Once those are dealt with, we'll post the build for all to play, and look forward to your feedback. Generally speaking, version 2.0 includes a number of fixes and improvements over the first, and adds a few systems, such as NPC dialogue and quests.
Multiplay-what? (More Like Multi-Butt)
When I first started outlining the gameplay experience I wanted for Greywater, I flirted a lot with the idea of a cooperative multiplayer mode, with a second character to help Tavish through his journey. This character's efforts would be acknowledged, but they wouldn't stand in the way of the original singleplayer narrative (sort of like how Legend of Mana handled it).
Multiplayer isn't something I was ever sure was going to happen, because there's a lot in the game that needs to happen first. However, Ziga (a member of our Prograrmy) has been fooling around with networking, and apparently having reasonable success. With that in mind, multi-player is neither confirmed nor off the table, but the idea is one we'll continue to weigh carefully as we move forward. If we do, we'll likely support between two and four players in a single game.
That's it for now, but we'll try to update a little more often. As always, we'd love to hear from you and your friends. Bug us on twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or wherever. See you next time!
So now we've committed to another alpha soon, we want to talk about the Expo that is basically responsible for this project existing at all.
This was our second (and last) year attending. It was also the second year of it (HGE) even existing. The competition is only open to high-school and university students, and now only half of us meet that criterion.Â
The expo was a bit larger than last year, with a little over 100 people competing. It's still hosted and primarily organized by the University of Tulsa, but this time they got some additional help (and judges) from other nearby universities.
Dr. Roger Mailler, the event chair and originator.
We had a lot more people from farther out this year, and a handful of local companies came out as well, like Goldfire Studios and Bonozo. They weren't competing.
Overview
We also made some new friends and go to see some old ones.
Brief plug for friends of TeamSweepy:
Website, Twitter - BitForge Studios
Behance - Bublitz Design
Twitter - HipTurtle
Twitter - DiabolicM21
We mostly met these people through HGE and they all brought some really cool stuff. Most of it is accessible online, so you should go access it. Its rad.
Friends!
A lot of people came out and played our game, and a lot of them had very nice things to say about it.
The event was pretty tremendously exhausting. The first day we had to struggle through with little/no sleep and man the table and explain the game and concept and everything to people and judges for like 8 hours. The first day was by far the hardest and the sleep deprivation eventually turned into a weird sort of mania. It was a lot of fun, but probably not the best for our collective health.
The second day we still had to man the table but only for like 5 hours.
The competition brought out a lot of interesting stuff, including a surprising number of controller and/or oculus rift controlled games. Those were super neat.
We weren't sure how we would fare against some of the slicker small games and cool Oculus Rift stuff, but we ended up with 3 awards - First Place Game Showcase (Judges Choice), First Place Game Showcase (People's Choice), Best of Show in the Art Gallery Show.
We won't get to compete again, but we will definitely attend future events, and hopefully next year will be even bigger.
Heartland Gaming Expo Alpha We Still Exist I Promise Extraordinaire
First order of business - Sorry! The last handful of months have been really crazy, so if we didn't respond to anyone or were generally boring and lacking in updates, that's why. Two of us graduated from university, two of us graduated from highschool, and an indeterminate number of us have moved to new houses/apartments/cities.
It's been weird.
But everything is settling down, and we wanted to share a little of what has been going on. We've got a lot to talk about because we haven't posted for ages, so we'll split it up into multiple posts. This one's all about the future of the alpha. Later we'll have an Expo recap and a handful of video or image posts.
Some time last century we posted about how we'd be going to the Heartland Gaming Expo. Well we did, and we had a lot of fun and some good even came out of it. The run up to HGE was pretty rough. As with last year we met at about noon and worked until 10 AM the next day.
With occasional floor-naps.
But we made a small proof-of-concept town level connected to a small dungeon level with the early beginnings of a quest and dialogue system.
Note: the Tinker looks a bit like Tavish right now, this is not multiplayer.Â
And Tavish sort of shows the weapon he is holding while walking!
We're pretty pleased with what we have, but there's a bit of work to do before we're really happy enough with it to release as Alpha v2. There are a handful of little graphical quirks and silly inefficiencies we'd like to stomp out before releasing it into the wild.
We also added some new and more interesting weapons, including my favorite weapon ever.
I'm always afraid to make predictions about when we'll finish things, but the build we have now we're pretty pleased with. After a little code cleanup and a round or two of internal testing, we want to get this out the door. There's not really a lot to do because I didn't make a lot of stupid 4 AM decisions like last year. So we're expecting the more major bugs to be squished sometime around the end of summer, when we will almost definitely release a build for Mac, Linux, and PC.
A brief history of HGE -
We went with our pre-alpha version of the game to Heartland last year before anyone cared about who we were. We did well and a few people were interested in keeping track of our progress, which actually spurred the creation of our Tumblr and Twitter.
We've put in a lot more work since then, and we'll be going again this year. If you live near Tulsa, Oklahoma, you should definitely come and visit us on Saturday (when our game is being shown) any time between 9:30 AM and 5 PM.
In general though, you should just show up. Heartland is pretty rad, hosted by the University of Tulsa to encourage and showcase student game development. There are full-game and game art/design/scoring showcases, with college and university teams presenting Saturday and highschool teams presenting Sunday. This is its second year ever (except for a trial before that that doesn't really count), and the more support it gets the better.
http://heartlandgamingexpo.com/
http://www.heartlandgamingexpo.com/attending.html
Today was Greywater Development Day for the team members that live here in Tulsa. We all met up early in the day and worked until too late at night.
The next character, our Vagrant/Thief guy, is 99% done and we should be able to wrap him up tomorrow.
We've also made a lot of progress in getting stucture-tiles created, which means that, soon, there should be a building of some kind in addition to dungeons!
And the LibGDX switchover is nearly done. If all goes as planned tomorrow, it should be done by Monday, and then ready to re-upload for a public alpha part 2 at the end of March. No promises on that one, but we hope.
Hey everybody! Weâve been quiet for a while, and thatâs mainly because weâve been working on a lot of behind-the-scenes elements which arenât really showcase-able.Â
Weâve also expanded the team significantly, as per earlier announcements. Jeremy has transformed his one-man programming show into a veritable Prograrmy by bringing on a host of dudes from around the world: thereâs James from the distant land of Oklahoma, Â Robin from the Netherlands, and a guy named Ziga from Slovenia, which I was only vaguely aware was a real place. We also brought on a new pixel artist named Blake, and an amazing concept artist named Eleanor who lives in the Canary Islands. Chirp. As you can imagine, our weekly meeting schedule has become exceedingly complex.
If youâre looking to get involved, weâre still willing to take on another one or two pixel artists, as aside from coding, creating art assets is probably the most time-consuming of our tasks.
General Happenings
Despite some growing pains (and scheduling pains), weâre really excited about the direction of our plus-sized team. Production is in full swing for the Heartland Gaming Expo at the end of Marchâwell, at least the art and programming teams. *twiddles thumbs* Weâre hoping to cram in some delicious content to distinguish our submission to Heartland from that of yesteryear. Be forewarned and fore-excited that weâll be making available our re-invigorated game build from Heartland 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Concept Art (New!)
The daily adventures of our newest department have involved reconciling my many pages of world notes with the laws of physics, and general art know-how (both subjects for which my understanding is poor) to give definitive shape to the playable game areas. Weâve also begun generating early concept art for Act 1 (Oldtown), and the characters who inhabit it.Â
Things are progressing nicely, and weâre really happy with how the concepts are coming out. Weâll start uploading some of the more polished pieces for you to stare at as they become available.
Programming
The transition to LibGDX is going extremely well. Old systems are being overhauled, and before long weâll actually be implementing new features for a change (*gasp*), starting with a basic system for quests and NPC interaction. As the code switchover reaches completion, we turn towards our next milestone: fleshing out the basic systems and features of Act 1.
Bugs that have finally been squashed include:
Pathfinding - Formerly the most  resource-expensive and problematic issue of the Alpha, pathfinding has been totally reworked in a way that will allow for a smarter AI that works quicker than before.
Resolution Support - Some issues including resulting from non-standard resolutions have been completely resolved.
LibGDX quirks - some weird  quirks in map rendering and image-scaling.
Pixel Art
Blakeâs contributions to the team have allowed us to push forward with the spriting, and work is underway on our very first townsperson. Production is in full gear for the Heartland Gaming expo!
Notable pixel-chievements:
All of Tavishâs core animations are finished (except for different death animations) and some of the directional animations have been overhauled to eliminate horse-head syndrome.
The Vagrantâs (our second enemy) animations are approaching completion
Work has begun on city tiles, including structure walls with some arches and bricks
Music
OMG you guys, Tavishâs theme. Tavishâs gorramâ theme! ItâsâŚwell, youâll see soon enough. Suffice it to say: Son, we are very appoint.
Plot
Iâve shifted focus away from the overall script to work on fleshing out the constituent quests and components of Act 1. Iâm pretty pleased with how things are turning out. Since I canât really show you any of my work, I wonât fault you for assuming Iâm a compulsive liar who has no actual writing skills, litters, and doesnât bother to signal while driving my moose to work on Degoba.
Lately we've been throwing around the idea of making 3D models because hand-drawing the same frame in eight different directions sucks. One of the problems with that is that using a 3D modeling program would give us a very different aesthetic than the hard-edge pixel look we've been using thus far. Ben, our writer, found a program that looked like a promising solution: it creates voxels, three-dimensional pixels, that you can basically paint on as if using a regular 2D editor. The model looks just like pixel art. It's pretty neat.
I started it up and tried to get the workflow figured out. It was a bit confusing at first, but within about an hour I had it down. Actually creating a model, though, was a bit harder.
For my first attempt, I basically took Tavish's south and west standing assets and attempted to extrapolate from it. The problem with that was that Tavish was already drawn from an isometric view point, so drawing a 3D model ended up distorting him. The other problem with that was that it took me about two hours to draw a quarter of his head, so I scrapped that.
Oh my god it's so bad
So I started over from scratch, setting out to make a non-isometrically based Tavish-head model. I started with a sphere shape so I didn't have to draw quite as much by hand. You can so tell in the early stages.
Lego-afro-anime-eyes Tavish
Chubby Tavish
Not-amused Tavish
Serious-but-so-unintimidating Tavish
After about three to four hours I managed to get something respectable.
We're not entirely sure right now where we're going with this modeling software, but we think we might be able to use it to correct some weird things in our current sprites and as a basis for new humanoid characters down the line.
We mentioned a while back that after the alpha was released, we'd be looking to expand the team so that we could begin make work on the project move much more quickly. Well, the alpha's out and we're putting out the official call!
If the following sounds like you or someone you know, send us an email at [email protected] or hit us up on twitter!
As a pixel or concept artist, you would be responsible for bringing characters and environments to life. As a storyboard artist, you would be transforming written cutscenes and story events to a visual medium.
Programmer
We're looking for someone versed in Java (Libgdx is a plus) to assist our lead programmer in bringing game systems to life. That means working on just about all of the game systems (crafting, inventory, AI, the game engine, etc.) The game engine is coded in Java, but we are in the process of switching to Libgdx in order to add support for Mac OSX. Youâll be working out of Github, with game assets available via Dropbox.
Sound DesignerÂ
As a sound designer, you would be putting together all of the game's sound effects (everything from footsteps and hitting things with a wrench, to UI responses and ability noises).
Team Sweepy & The Labor of Love
We are a small team (3 artists, a composer, a programmer, and a writer) developing the game as a hobby project. While this is (for now) a profitless affair, we do intend to launch a Kickstarter campaign when the project is farther along to help support the team.
Until then we canât compensate you monetarily, however we will validate you emotionally by shipping you a spiffy team T-Shirt and buttons, and by featuring your work in the game.
Expectations
We are fairly transparent about our development process, and youâre welcome to use your work on the project in your portfolio (though weâll ask that you avoid releasing spoilers into the wild).
We donât expect a full-time commitment, but we do ask that you contribute on a semi-weekly basis, and stay in contact. The team holds weekly audio meetings over Skype where the departments update each other on progress, and discuss issues, ideas, and internet memes.
Contact us!
If you're any of the above and you're interested in being a part of team Sweepy, get in touch with us! If you do something else, but still think we'd benefit from your talents, drop us a line!Â
Whether we ring in the new year by gorging ourselves on turkey or ham, top ramen or fancy feast, it's nice to step back from the holiday fervor and take a moment to appreciate what life is really about: Videogames.
Today we at Team Sweepy salute you, the gamer. From the deepest basements to highest penthouse, may your magnificent neckbeard forever billow in the wind, and your diet coke never run dry.
Whether you celebrate Christmas or Kwanza, Life Day or Black History Month, remember that you are basically a living, breathing, sack of meat (piloted by yet another slab of meat), and you should rock on.
And so on this most festive of days, we wish you tidings of joy and high DPS. Happy holidays from Team Sweepy! Even the ones that are already over.
So, while the build is far from bug free, we want to release it now. This is similar to the build we brought to Heartland and GCCG, though its meant to run on other machines better, and some of the more extreme bugs have been removed.
So, without further delay - Here is the download link. And alternate download link. It only works on PC, and it meant to be played at any 16:9 resolution, but don't let that stop you, bugs are fun!
One very important note:
When you run the game, a little box will pop up, inviting you to save a log file. This is stuff about how the game performs on your machine, along with information like the current version of Java on your machine. This information is really useful to us, so please create those and send them to us at [email protected]. The game will work if you opt out. The logs aren't magic, if you open them with any text editor, you can see the info yourself and verify that we aren't stealing personal data.
This release is made of weird little quirks, and it won't be updated for some time as we're making the switch to libGDX soon to support Macs. But we wanted to let people have a crack at the pre-alpha tech demo we've built any ways and maybe learn something from that testing.
Bugs
Things that were super non-intuitive
General Complaints
Your system specsÂ
Feedback in general
All that information can be sent to our Gmail -Â [email protected].
There are a few bugs we know about already, like these:
Clicking dead enemies to loot is super imprecise
If more than like 5 watchmen try to chase you at once, the game hiccups pretty hard
Very rarely, Tavish and Watchmen resurrect.
On 16:10 resolutions, stuff is visible beneath the HUD.
