#I don't do a lot of sprite animations as they can be time consuming but I made an exception for this piece for one reason

[stardestroyer81]

Y'all wanna watch Star TV?

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of Pizza Tower is the TV HUD element, which shows our portly paisano's reactions to pretty much everything that happens to him in-game (For better or for worse), and given that I've drawn myself in the game's style, I wanted to attempt making a HUD TV for myself on top of practicing Pizza Tower's trademark wiggly lineart animation! 💙🍕✨

[genopaint]

Week 19 of the Daily Dragon Challenge! Been having a busy May! Which isn't always a bad thing I suppose. But I've been slowing down on my Daily Dragon Duties. Gotta pick it up!!

As always you can follow me on twitter where they’re posted daily

And read more info on each of them below the cut

Daily Dragon #126 - Hothead

Happy 40th anniversary TMNT!! I've been wanting do draw Hothead, or just some TMNT dragon, for a bit now. Soooo, why not take advantage of the anniversary, right?

This is my own design inspired by a few different sources, mainly the action figure and tournament fighters' boxart and his in game sprite. There's a LOT more TMNT dragons than I think you realize, so dont be surprised if I do another one later

Daily Dragon #127 - Marci Midas

This dragon's main interests are: Gold, Golden things, looking richer than everyone else, and ignoring you. Maybe if you ask reeeeaaally nicely and give her presents she'll look in your general direction,

Saw all the really good gold week posts and the idea of like, a dragon that hordes gold wearing a golden bikini came to my mind so I thought I'd try making her. I'm not 100% satisfied with how it came out but I think the concept is hot enough, and she's already finish so- yeah

Anyway happy (late) gold week I suppose, I may try to do other clothing challenge dragons in the future but we'll see how I feel cause I have a hard time keeping up with all of them and I keep wanting to draw the Axel girls in them instead

Daily Dragon #128 - Mirage Wyrm

Those who are lost in large deserts and tundras, when stricken with exhaustion and dehydration, often see Mirage Wyrms approach them. Although they are strange 2D specters, they are physical manifestations and WILL consume you if you're weak

Daily Dragon #129 - Dojo Kanojo Cho

Missed yesterday's dragon and I feel like the perfect dragon for a late day is our boy Dojo! I feel like I don't talk about it nearly enough but I LOVE Xiaolin Showdown so much it's unreal. Don't be surprised if I do another dragon from it

tear down the false idol

Daily Dragon #130 - Naten Shellie Shieldheart

This character was a ton of fun to work on and I'm glad people trust me enough with non-animal characters to design their humanoid ocs lol Thanks for letting me include them in the challenge!

Daily Dragon #131 - Raptor Wyvern

These predators can tear through the air at incredibly high speeds, using their massive claws, they can strike at prey quick and swoops them up before the poor animal even realized what happened

Daily Dragon #132 - Huggogon

Large, kind, and fluffy dragons who just love love! They're very affectionate, love hugging, and are kind to everyone they encounter. Similar to Capybaras, they seemingly have no natural enemies

Quick redraw of a dragon I did at FWA LAST year. Figured it was the perfect chance to reboot them for this challenge! I also love the other two so dont be surprised if they get a redo eventually too

[trubbishrubbish]

Happy Last Day of 2023. Here's a long overdue update over how I have been.

As you recall, Jabberwock Genocide Part 2 was uploaded 3 weeks ago. And the only thing I did this whole month of December after Part 2 was uploaded was that I went to Canada to climb a huge mountain and confront my other self because it’s cheaper than going to therapy.

Just kidding, I just worked on more Jabberwock Genocide, nothing else.

This is a positive as I have made so much forward progress in the animation and the upcoming part 3 that you guys won’t have to wait 9 months for more Genocide Jack fun time. However, there is a cost to just working on Jabberwock Genocide, one that I’m currently struggling to find a way to deal with.

Basically, all my free time, focus and thinking has been dedicated to Jabberwock Genocide, but other stuff I do and create I have left to the dust.

My output in making Genocide Jack posts has just stopped.

I keep neglecting to share updates to my Sho Shrine. I am still getting new stuff for it but I have not yet organized it and taken picture of it.

I have barely played any new games. The last game I have beaten that is new was Super Mario Bros Wonder. I loved that game, but I had a hard time sitting down to play it for long sessions as I wanted to work on Jabberwock Genocide.

And tragically, I have really neglected interacting with my online friends. This I feel the most guilty of as I have no excuse for it. I know there are friends I used to talk to a lot before that I have now stopped engaging with for a really long time. If you are one of those people I just to say that I am sorry for ghosting you. I still consider you a friend I don't want our friendship to slowly die out due to lack of communication on my end.

This is my struggle. I love making Jabberwock Genocide. It’s honestly the most enriching thing I am currently doing in my life. I’m creating a story with my favorite character, Genocide Jack. I’m developing my skill as a sprite animator. I’m constantly thinking about how to create a particular scene with the limited resources I have. I get a real kick of joy when I am creating a scene and suddenly an idea comes to mind that I love and I put it in the animation.

I feel so satisfied when the ideas I have for a scene that I see in my head are transmitted into actual animation on my editor. More often then not, what I make in the final product is better than what I imagine in my head. Every single line, every single detail, every single joke, it all feels so amazing to craft them into a video.

It’s crazy to think that just a few months ago, I was at a low point in the animation where all of my motivation was drained and I struggled to make progress for weeks. But now, I feel so freaking happy and elated just thinking about the animation. Heck, even doing really tedious tasks like making every single sprite jump a little is still enjoyable to me. I’ve been working on this project since August 2022. I never expected this to be what is now when I first started writing down ideas. But I am happy the project did turn into this, because I really, truly enjoy working on this.

But… That’s the problem. I enjoy working on Jabberwock Genocide so much that any other hobbies, I find less fun. I rewrote my brain to dedicate huge parts of it to think about Jabberwock Genocide. I’m fully being this attached to a project like this isn’t healthy. I should be consuming different media and doing other activities and talking to my friends. I know this but I find it difficult to summon the energy to do it.

I’m still trying to find a good balance between working on the project and doing other leisure activities that I enjoy doing. I’m going to make this a goal for 2024, it might take me a while to find that balance but I will try to. Hopefully when I do, I can slowly rekindle friendships that I have abandoned.

That’s what I wanted to say. Thank you for taking the time to read this. See you in 2024.

[just-a-carrot]

Yo yo yo Carrot.

I did do research on character design a bit ago. I was just wondering if there were any specific tips/things you kept in mind while designing any of your characters. I have a general idea of where I'm heading but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. No need to push yourself though.

(Orlam has a white shirt because he's basic :). It's perfect character design. )

hhhhh... i can try 💦

behind the cut because this got long

i think the problem is i never have any specific things in mind. for the life of me i can't even think back to how i came up with any of the characters i've ever come up with. usually they are like a mish-mash inspiration of various ideas tumbling around in my head, often influenced heavily by sheer vibes and/or music i'm listening to and/or media i've consumed or images i've seen

for me i think the biggest thing i've noticed is that i develop characters incredibly slowly lol. like i have a really hard time jumping into a new story with new characters that i haven't spent a long time thinking about (i.e., literal years). they all start from like a small random kernel of an idea or inspiration and then they grow and develop as the rest of the story starts slowly turning into random scenes into my mind, and i continue to learn new things about the characters even while actively writing (i think i've said before but some of the biggest themes and plot points in OW that feel like core parts of the story i didn't even come up with until i was actively in the midst of writing it, like, post writing arc 1 and even arc 2; arc 4 in particular like i had not planned 80% of what happened in that arc until i was writing it laksjdfa)

and i feel like a big part of this is because i'm actually really bad at designing/developing characters at the drop of a hat and can only figure them out through long periods of thinking and writing

2018 vs 2023

2018 vs 2023

i first drew the OW characters in 2018, but i'd had the idea for the general story (arc 1) even before that. from what i can remember when trying to come up with what they'd look like, i would try to think about their vibes from their role in the story. iggy is somewhat soft, awkward, and anxious, so i guess my mind developed a somewhat nerdy disalarming look for him with kinda muted colors (we don't talk about the fact that his shirt/overshirt combo makes no sense laksdjfads). orlam i knew i wanted a kinda scraggly little guy with greasy hair (sooper sekrit never-before-heard!ow lore: i actually did originally design him with a ponytail but it changed to a rattail while working on arc 1)

i'm quite bad when it comes to fashion design in general so i often come up with fairly plain-looking outfits. but some of the things i like playing around with the most are things like height dynamics and color variety (i always try to use a diverse range of hair colors for instance, as i feel like it's one of the big things that can instantly differentiate characters in a group)

you can see this in easter too i guess:

admittedly with easter it was a bit different in that tho i had some mental images in my head of generally what i wanted the chars to look like, some of the details and choices got limited because i had to use a sprite generator someone had made to create the sprites for the game (because it was an RPG maker game and i wasn't good/still am not good at creating animated sprites). so their final designs were a bit of a mix between my original ideas and my ideas translated into sprite generator options, hence some of the... odd design choices lakjdfsd

going back even further to characters i designed for other stuff like novels and stories, though my art style was different back then i feel like a lot of the same types of design choices can perhaps be seen LOL:

also please enjoy this old old old old OLD carrot!art from 2005 of three chars i created as a child that i thought were the coolest things ever...

i feel like i've lost the plot here a little bit LKAJDSFLKADSF

though i guess this is simply because i can't really explain what my head does when it comes up with characters. i don't have any sort of formal training in character or game design. i do have an art degree but that was more formal stuff (and i was often told that my personal cartoon-esque style of artwork and the stuff i drew in my sketchbooks was Not Creative). so i don't really have any set sort of guidelines or rules or even strategies that i use for coming up with characters. they tend to just kinda form over time in my mind according to my own aesthetics???? like i create characters that i would like to write and draw. i create groups of characters because i really really like group dynamics. i create characters with varying heights and body types and vibes. i create lots of short loud-mouth snarky asshole characters ldkajfsldkadlfafLDJFADFAD

if you have any more specific-type questions i can try to answer them but i think this might be the best i can do for just talking about my general mindset for characters... 💦

[shionorimaru]

tagged by: @krocodilf , my beloved bestie <3 ilyyy

Three Ships: 1. kaneson (they're the reason why i start liking spurs) / 2. there's many ships that im thinking about but i only imagine them as close friends... / 3. (it's a tennis ship i don't feel too comfortable sharing publicly, sorry ;;; i can tell you in dms if you want!)

Last Song: INTERNET OVERDOSE - Aiobahn feat. KOTOKO , i like the game, i like eurobeat, i like the song

Last Movie: King Richard , i watched it with one of my friends on twitter, last time I went in a cinema I watched a BTS concert with 4DX effects, it's pretty cool

Currently Reading: my lecture notes about SQL, debating whether i want to finish my classwork before i sleep cause i don't feel like doing anything rn

book-wise, Idol, Burning by Rin Usami got me thinking a lot about my habits as a fan, i find the protagonist really relatable, how she supports her idol/oshi, how her life starts to fall apart when the person who's given her hope and power to go on in her life becomes involved in controversies

im someone who does rely on my faves a lot for my mental health and my motivation to keep living on, and reading this just makes me feel, damn this book is so relatable to the point i am scared of myself, am i too obsessed over my faves? i need to start living for myself more, but i don't know what i want in my life, my life goals are all oriented towards others, not me, and im scared of what would i become if something bad happens

Currently watching: some music MVs on youtube

i have to catch up with all the new anime series, but i need timeeee

Currently Consuming: air cause it's 3am and i don't feel like eating rn, ate some fried squid + seaweed tempura chips and had a can of sprite as a snack sometime ago

Currently Craving: fried chicken and cheesecake

[chaoticcrustacean]

So... 2022's almost over. What have I done this year? I mean, not too much, I don't think, especially in terms of art. Don't think I've made many actual proper pieces of art, really. More just sketches and character designs. But in terms of gamedev, I've made a few games on the game design course I'm doing that I'm pretty proud of!

Colour Dash (Small platformer game level)

For this project I was tasked with making a platformer game that incorporates colour into its game mechanics somehow, and I think I did a fairly good job. I did spend a bit too long making certain mechanics work, and some things didn't quite turn out how I'd planned, but overall I think this little project turned out pretty well!

Hand of the Spider

For this project I wanted to make a game that was less reflex-focused and fast paced than my previous projects. I'd also been playing a lot of Slay the Spire at the time of making this, so I decided to make a deckbuilder. Turns out that's a lot harder than I'd thought, and it took a while to get all of the mechanics working, not to mention making all of the animations for every single enemy. Realized why I generally work in pixel art—animation, especially at higher resolutions, is time consuming and difficult and I don't entirely enjoy it. Still, that was a learning experience, and now I know to avoid doing lots of animations in future projects. Altogether, I think this game turned out pretty well, especially given how complex making it turned out to be.

Unity

Other Stuff

Outside of college, I also tried out a few other game engines, not making any finished games in them but just trying to figure out how they work and how to make games in them.

I found this site called MicroStudio which I decided to try to make a small game in. Compared to Construct 3 and GameMaker Studio which I'm used to, this engine is a little more complicated in some aspects, as I had to actually tell it to draw every sprite on the screen, and there wasn't built-in 'objects' for all the characters, so I had to create these objects in the code. It was a bit more complicated than I was used to, but I think I sort of got the hang of it, even if I didn't finish the project (mostly due to running out of ideas for enemies and wave formations and stuff.) It also made the concept of coding in pico-8, which I think is similar in a lot of these regards, a lot less intimidating, and I experimented with that a little more. Again, I didn't actually finish anything though.

I also made a tiny little 'game' in Bitsy, which I did finish, though I'm pretty sure I made it at like 2am when I was like super tired so I'm not sure how good it is? Still, it's something.

As well as this, I decided to take part in a game jam! Due to laptop troubles I didn't end up having as much time to work on it as I'd wanted to, but I still decided to work on it and finish it. It's not much, but it's nice to finish a project, however small. I think next year I'll try to take part in at least one game jam, as I think it can be a worthwhile experience.

Don't think too much else has happened this year. Developed my characters some more, fleshed out their personalities, though I don't really have much to show that just yet. Maybe in the future I'll make some small games with some of my characters.

Oh shit its past midnight, better wrap this up uhh, happy new year everyone! I hope the new year is great for you all!

[daily-fantasy-ideas]

Here be that year in review thing, ill do an actual reflection on the past year when its actually 2022 but in the mean time enjoy looking at some stuff!

I posted 195 times in 2021

191 posts created (98%)

4 posts reblogged (2%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 0.0 posts.

I added 1,702 tags in 2021

#fantasy writing - 187 posts

#writing ideas - 183 posts

#writing - 182 posts

#writing tips - 177 posts

#fantasy setting - 176 posts

#fantasy - 170 posts

#writing fantasy - 170 posts

#writing advice - 162 posts

#writers - 158 posts

#write - 137 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#this post brought to you by me remebering all the fiction i consumed as a kid that involved characters getting dipped in vats of super goop

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

You know what's a neat idea to put in your fantasy thing?

Have weird variations animals who live outside of where they normally should live.

Like an octopus that lives in the jungle crawling up and swinging through trees.

Perhaps an owl that's got big legs that runs over land only jumping instead of flying.

Maybe a wolf that hunts for fish by dashing around underwater.

Or maybe like a fish that can just like launch itself through the air with such an intense force that it can essentially fly.

126 notes • Posted 2021-09-19 20:17:45 GMT

#4

CW/ Death

Here's a neat idea for you to put in you fantasy writing.

Why not have those folklore-y creatures that'd probably be classified as some kind of fairy, nypmh, or sprite experience death with what's effectively roguelite video game mechanics.

So instead of dying when a big rock falls on one of them, they simply dissipate into a burst of bright glow-y ethereal fog.

Then later they can reform in some place with a lot of spiritual mystic power that's engulfed by a deep lingering mist, emerging from wherever beams of light are shinning into it.

But there's got to be some cost to this, so any material possessions are left with where they 'died' and also whatever things they've learned and skills they've gained are set back by to an earlier lesser state.

And to add a further tinge of tragedy, whatever memories of the people they met the things they've done and those they might have befriended have been made hazy, blurry, and all around harder to recall.

Or you could have them just be really annoyed after losing a particularly fancy sword that they just know they're absolutely not gonna find another of with ease.

170 notes • Posted 2021-09-20 19:18:16 GMT

#3

Give your characters like a weird secondary hobby that their not the best at, and it sorta doesn't fit with the rest of their personality but they enjoy it nevertheless.

Also because fantasy, give em some magic hobbies, like growing and shaping crystals into statues of funny little dudes, or making enchanted jewellery, or casting useless spells that just make some pretty looking shapes.

254 notes • Posted 2021-11-05 21:07:28 GMT

#2

Why not give your characters some noticeable but very minor odd physical habits

For example, a character could have habit of closing their right eye in response to engaging in certain physical activities and exertions such as stretching, yawning, dramatically posing or getting hit. You don't even have to give a reason for them doing it, just have it be something they do for some reason.

Or it could also be a social activities thing. Like maybe while talking with people or existing in a social space, a character could be fiddle with their own hands contorting them into weird shapes.

And hey it's a fantasy setting right? So why not have a magic character cast very small low powered spells in their hands while tapping their feet when their not doing or having to focus on anything else.

278 notes • Posted 2021-10-10 18:27:05 GMT

#1

Have a character who comes from a place with very mild and not particularly flavourful food eat something that's super intense in flavour before having them then collapse from all the taste assuming that they have just been poisoned.

As an example maybe the sweetest thing a character has ever had is a little honey stirred in warm water or maybe an apple or pear, then imagine them having a super sweet highly sugar saturated soft drink and proceeding the spit most of it out and yelling "What the hell is this poisonous nectar you've had me consume" before collapsing on the floor and looking absolutely haggard.

441 notes • Posted 2021-11-06 23:12:03 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[alice-in-idol-land]

Hi! I'm sorry if this is an odd request, but I've been trying to get into making icons myself, and some of the things I want icons of don't have a clean transparent version already. I know the basics of making an image transparent, but sometimes the gap in anime characters' hair is so small that there's no way I can make it clean without zooming in and erasing by hand. It's really time-consuming and annoying. Do you have any tips or advice? Thank you!

Not odd at all - in fact, this is probably my least favorite thing about editing overall, so I try not to do it a lot (*cough* make everything glow *cough*) but! I think I can provide some general advice.

My best advice is to be patient. Sometimes you’ll just have to put up with all the small pixels and be annoyed with the process, but if it gives you the image you want, there’s nothing else you can do. What also might help is enlarging your image. This makes all the pixels easier to see, so you can erase things and then shrink it back down when you need to. For enlarging images cleanly, I usually use waifu2x, but a lot of editing programs are good with just their in-editor transform function. This next is a bit strange, but I find it works sometimes. If you duplicate your layer, then erase the part you want to keep, you’ll be left with just the background. Select those pixels and erase off your other layer and voila! Same effect with a slightly different process. The best time to use this would be when the sprite you want has a lot of solid colors, or when the background is super complicated and you can’t select most of it at once. If you can’t get rid of all the pixels and you don’t want to, pick a color similar to the original background for your icon. Often it’s white, so you’ll see me make things glow lots;; You can also use it as an excuse to add effects, like a border or anything else you like! If there’s a particularly bad spot, you can cover it up! Go wild, they’re your icons!! This suggestion isn’t as helpful for making pngs in general but like;; It’s still something to consider.

And that’s my advice! Keep in mind I do all this for fun and it’s mostly just stuff I’ve tried doing when I struggle with png-ing, but;; I hope it helps you at least a little anon! Good luck;; ♡

[invertedfate]

why can't people just be grateful that this AU exists and that you put a lot of heart and work into it, considering you do this just for fun and don't get paid at all? jeez, there's no need to compare these two AUs and act like storyshift is "superior" or something. Every AU is different and I, for one, really appreciate the amount of work you put into it. I don't mind how long these updates take, so long as I know that they're still coming :) xoxo luv u (btw happy anniversary!!)

Thanks for your understanding and support! Honestly, this is a common mindset across all fandoms. The thing is, creative works are time consuming. Quick to read, yes, but hell to produce. Case in point? The average IF work session typically consists of me working several days - a week straight with few breaks on top of my retail job. The reason I dropped the animated talksprites is because they double the amount of time it takes to produce a single part. I honestly believe that this contributed greatly to the delay in Snowdin’s conclusion, aside from the new content I added.But I was able to put together this part in... oh, two, three days? Mind you, I had done a TON of prep work on Fort Aquarius with 441 beforehand, including six custom battle sprites and some mapping. By cutting the animated talksprites, I no longer have to save panels twice just to make the gifs and can save animations for cool stuff like Alphys’ weapon summoning. The comparisons to Storyshift are unsurprising, but Voltra is a dear friend of mine, and we both respect and admire each other’s workflows. As you said, this is a hobby rather than a paying job, and I’d like to avoid burnout, which is what’s slowed down my work on Antipode (my KH fic).But well said, and thanks for the anniversary wishes, too! I’ll continue to do my best to make IF something special. :)

[silentcoder]

Lilly's Adventures in Toyland. Watching my 3 and a half year old daughter taking her first steps in gaming, I've been observing what she struggles with. I feel there is a real gap for games that are playable by children not yet old enough to read, but beyond the simple activities in gcompris's earlier levels. More-over I'm a big fan of the idea of learning without knowing it - rather than setting out to teach a specific skill, I like the idea of learning things just by playing. And if there is a skill worth learning from gaming, more than anything else, it's simply how to solve puzzles. I've spent the past several days working on the idea in my head, and it's time to write it down. So I have an idea for a game like that. Specifically designed with the idea that my daughter could play it, mostly on her own. Much of the design then, is dictated by the requirements thus imposed, but there is also an original idea. Rather than drawn graphics, I want to use stop-motion sprites created from her own toys. This could be time-consuming but it isn't exceptionally hard to do, just photograph the toys in various pozes (to the extent they are posable) in front of a solid green background that's easy to edit out. You don't need highly complicated animations after all. A simple two or three frame animation in each direction suffices for "walking". Core design ideas: - I think a semi-side-scrolling platformer like the original Super Mario Bros is the easiest to learn - but Mario (and games like SuperTux) are still too complex, some things need to be reduced to fit a 3-year old's abilities. - No jumping. Nothing time-based. The game should be slow, and not require fully developed spatial reasoning to play. It shouldn't rely on fast reflexes either. So all screens must be walkable, and the challenge should come from puzzles that are more about simple reasoning skills than speed. - Controls should be simple. I think controller support is a must, but even then it should consider that the players have small hands which struggle to reach the triggers and top buttons. So a very simple scheme - movement on the left joystick. Actions on the 4 buttons (keyboard variants can be done - I'm not sure if keyboard + mouse is worthwhile, it's too reliant on fine motor skills that aren't quite there yet). Vertical movement should use ladders and slides, concept a three-year-old are already familiar with from the playground. - Only four basic actions. For my game, I'm thinking spells. And you start with just one - more can be added over time as the child gets familiar with the idea. So a simple magical game, in a world of realistic looking toys - on a simple 2-d platform. It's not a nightmare to code, and the work can instead go to the art and level design. - Child-friendly content. Combat, if any, should be on the "My little pony" level of violence only. Instead of a spell to set an enemy on fire, I'd rather have spell to simply turn him into a harmless creature like a mouse, with some implication that the spell is temporary and will wear off sometime after safely leaving the area. While I subscribe to the theory that good fairy tales should teach children that monsters can be killed there is plenty of other ways to learn that, there should be space also to just have fun and learn to solve puzzles and maybe learn that not all monsters HAVE to be killed to be defeated. An equally important lesson. - Backgrounds should reflect the regions the current set of characters derive from. Some of my African landscapes for levels using her animal-toysets, thus teaching (very subtly) a simple bit of geography and the idea that different creatures live in different places. That said, there should be no shortage of fantasy here. This is learning through play - and I think imagination is far too important at that age to focus on realism beyond the scenes based on what is already real. - Everything that is written must also be voiced (I'll need help here), including the opening menu etc. It must be navigatable by children who do not yet know how to read. - A rock solid set of editing tools to allow parents to easily add new levels, and a way to share those levels so that everybody can benefit. This would also allow the game to be much bigger than I could do on my own, and I could ask Caryn to help make some levels. - These tools should give full access to the pre-existing assets and sprites, as well as an easy way to import your own. So level design should be possible without knowing how to do green-screen stock-motion animation, but those who do, should be able to add new creatures. - This rather rules out things like gamemaker or rpgmaker simply because they are too complex. While that is great if you want to create your own game for older audiences, it is overwhelming to a three-year old. - I've set out to create games before, and never finished them because it was too much work on a busy working parent's schedule so on this one I'm setting out also to make the work-load manageable, partly by making as much as possible creation accessible to other people. On the other hand I have successfully finished a game as well (tappytux long ago), and part of why it worked was that it's major additional content could be crowdsourced - there were wordlists in dozens of languages at it's height - and the coding was written in such a way that, once the engine was completed, only bugfixes and optimization was needed - new additions did not require new code. That's a design imperitive now i think (it also helped that, at the time, this was done as part of my job and on company time) - Code should be available however, so parents who can code can make modifications, improvements and customizations for their own kids unique needs, and be freely share-able afterwards. The code will be GPL'd however. While I understand this is unpopular in the gaming community, I want everybody to benefit from every improvement. I am happy to put the artwork under a more liberal MIT license and use MIT-licenses art from other people. - I want the game accessible to as wide an audience as possible, so I intend to use a donation/pay-what-you-want model, which means you can get it for free if you don't have money available. A bit of money from those who can make it would be great but I'm not doing this to make money, I'm doing it to create something for my child. And, in the humble-bundle approach, half of any income recieved will go to a children's charity. - As she ages, more advanced versions introducing new skill requirements would be cool to add. So that a 5-year-old would be able to enjoy their own adventure, which is challenging on their level. These could be level-packs, or require a more advanced engine. That's something for the future. I'm sure more ideas will come out as I start working on the game. But these are the thoughts currently in my head. I wanted to write them down, and get feedback from fellow coders, parents and friends to expand on this before I start writing code and taking a whole lot of pictures of toys :P I'll incorporate the ideas I like (and consider how many likes a comment gets as votes for the idea) and then start working on the actual code. PS. I will gladly accept volunteers who wish to help with any part of this. If you're hoping to get rich it's the wrong project, I don't know if it will make anything, but if it does, I'll share the income fairly with any contibutors. PPS. Please feel free to share this post to any groups where you feel the audience would be interested and able to provide useful feedback or possible collaborators.

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[symbianosgames]

[In this classic March 1998 postmortem reprinted from sister publication Game Developer magazine, Ensemble Studios reveals the story behind seminal PC real-time strategy game Age Of Empires.]

I had an experience in a local computer store recently that caused me to burst out laughing. I had stopped to self-indulgently admire the top-ten PC games display when I overheard the following exchange between two young men:

"What do you think about this one, Age of Empires?" wondered the first.

His companion shot back, “Aww, the Borg at Microsoft just combined Warcraft and Civilization to cash in on these kind of games.”

Always eager to boost our sales, I took this opportunity to tell the young men how AoE wasn’t the creative product of a giant corporation, but of a small group of talented people living right in their own backyard.

For us, Age of Empires was not only a game of epic proportions, it was an epic journey for a small band of people determined to turn an idea into a real game company. Along the way, we laughed, we cried, we consumed pizza and caffeine, and we learned a great deal about making games.

Designing the Past Perfect

Obviously, Age of Empires didn’t start out looking like the final product. Despite some accusations, Dawn of Man (AoE’s original title) wasn’t created to be a Warcraft II clone. (In fact, Warcraft II wasn’t released until after AoE’s development was well underway).

Instead, the final design was evolved and refined over time, with a few significant design events along the way. One of the best things I think you can have in a game company is a staff that plays a lot of different games.

This was true of our staff at Ensemble, and was helped in no small part by programmer Tim Deen’s habit of buying and actually playing almost every new PC game as it came out. It was Tim who brought Warcraft II to the attention of the rest of the Ensemble staff. At that time, many of AoE’s game elements, such as resource management, empire building, and technology research, were taking clear shape.

However, we didn’t really know what to do about combat. Warcraft II was a splash of cold water in the face, waking us up to how much fun real-time combat could be. Several times a week, the staff would stay late to play multiplayer Warcraft. These impromptu events continued until AoE reached the point in development when it became more fun to play than Warcraft.

Another major shift occurred a little over halfway through development, when the designers were looking at AoE’s localization plans. They realized that AoE would be sold in Asia, but didn’t include a single culture from that region.

We held a company-wide meeting and decided to add early Asian civilizations to the early European, African, and Middle-Eastern tribes that we’d already developed. Though the addition would create more work for the artists and designers, the enhanced appeal that the game would have in Asia would make this a profitable decision.

All of these changes occurred because the game’s designers weren’t afraid of taking design input from the rest of the staff. Making a game that everyone would be proud of and would want to play was something that got more than just lip service at Ensemble. Perhaps the best example of this core value is the Wonder, the penultimate building that a player can build and use to win the game.

In early 1997, AoE was great for slugfests, but everyone felt that the game play needed to offer something more. Numerous ideas were tried and rejected. Then Mark Terrano, our communications programmer, hit upon the idea of building an “Armageddon Clock” that would force players to drop what they’re doing and respond to the new challenge. AoE is chock full of little ideas and touches that were thought up by the artists and programmers. This participation tangibly increased the sense of ownership and pride that we all took in the game.

One of things that is truly underappreciated about the designer’s job is play balancing. The designers spent months and months adjusting costs, strength, speed, and many other statistics in an effort to create a game that was fun to play and yet didn’t offer any loopholes or cheats.

At this point, I realized that Tim Deen was truly a gamer’s gamer. During development, if any of the various iterations of AoE’s design opened up a way for one player to take advantage of another player and thus make the game one-dimensional, Tim would find it.

And when we didn’t believe his assessments, he would promptly show us by using the loophole to kick our butts at the game. For the better part of a year, play balancing was a prominent task, and it paid off in giving AoE more staying power and better game play than many others in the recent crop of real-time strategy games.

Blazing the Multiplayer Path

Multiplayer support was an integral part of the early design, and AoE was structured in such a way that most of the game could not differentiate between human and computer players. When DirectX first came out, it appeared that DirectPlay would be the best choice for providing communications over the widest variety of connection types.

To support a high number of moving units, we went with a modified game synchronous model, where the entire game is simultaneously run on all machines. Only moves, changes, and commands are communicated to other machines. This approach has the advantage of minimizing the amount of data that has to be sent.

The unanticipated danger of using this model is that it can generate a condition where the game on one machine becomes out of sync with the game on other machines. This caused some very hard-to-reproduce bugs with AoE.

Load metering, the process of determining how much bandwidth the game updates required, was done before the computer AI was completed, and was based on the data flow model taken from human players. As a result, we initially missed the fact that computer players would sometimes issue large numbers of commands in quick bursts.

We did, however, address this oversight with the first patch. An area where AoE’s communications worked out better than expected was the game’s ability to dynamically adapt to latency. A sliding window delays the actual game time when a command takes effect, so that all players receive the command and do not have to pause before executing it.

The problem of handling players who have dropped from a game presented Mark Terrano with difficult challenges. Since drops are unpredictable, usually there is no way to know what happened. The problem could be the game logic, Winsock, the physical connection, or the ISP, and could exist on either the sender’s or receiver’s side. Getting the game to handle drops by anyone at anytime required a great deal of work.

One of the lessons learned from the multiplayer experience was to make full use of communications testing tools, such as automated logs and checksums. Also, we discovered that creating a simple communications data flow simulator program could provide great benefits and isolate the communications code from the rest of the game.

DirectPlay also turned out to be problematical. Difficult-to-reproduce bugs, quirky behavior, and poor documentation made the going more difficult. Guaranteed packet delivery for IPX was one of the more notable examples. At the CGDC, Microsoft promised to deliver this feature with DirectX 5 and even included in the beta.

However, when DirectX was actually released, this feature was nowhere to be found. The cost of that one missing item was the extra time we had to spend writing our own guaranteed delivery system and a bad packet generator program with which to test it.

Painting the Scene

All of the 2D sprites in AoE began life as 3D models. Age of Empires contains 20MB of in-game sprite graphics. Even though all of the displays are 2D, we decided early on that all of the graphics in the game would be taken from 3D models. We used 3D Studio and 3D Studio MAX for art production.

Because 3D rendering is so time-consuming, each artist was issued two machines each, both usually 200MHz Pentium Pros with 128MB of RAM, which at the time was better equipment than the programmers were using. The objects in the game were created as 3D models that had anywhere from a couple thousand to 100,000 polygons. The models were then textured, animated, and rendered out to a .FLC (Autodesk Animator) file with a fixed 256-color palette.

So far, the process I’ve described is identical to that of many other games. At this point, however, the artists added another time-consuming step. The .FLC files were handed off to a 2D specialist, who took the animation apart frame by frame and “cleaned up” each image with Photoshop.

The clean-up process involved sharpening detail and smoothing the edges of the irregular shapes. Since most of the sprites in AoE had screen dimensions of only 20 to 100 pixels in each direction, the visual quality improvement that we realized was significant. When AoE was shown at the 1997 E3, the artists received numerous compliments on their work from their peers at other companies.

The choice to go with 3D models for the in-game objects provided benefits for other art needs, as they were readily available for use in the static background scenes that appear on the menu, status screens, and the various cinematics. The cinematics, including the three-minute opener, were a fulltime project unto themselves.

The 256-color palette (actually 236) used in AoE was something of a problem. The palette was chosen and set in stone at the very beginning of the project, before most of the models and textures had been created. As a result, it turned out that some portions of the color spectrum, such as browns for wood textures, had too few available colors to get the best visual quality.

The palette wasn’t revised during the development process because that would have required rerendering and touching up every image in the game ‘ far too expensive time-wise. On the other hand, the palette did have a wide and balanced range of colors, which contributed to the overall bright and cheerful look of the game’s graphics. If we do another 8-bit color game, we’ll generate the palette at a point further along in the development process.

Going for Speed

Performance is an issue for all but the simplest of games, and it certainly was for AoE. When I joined Ensemble, the game was still in an early form and slow. The two biggest problems were the graphics engine (which was just plain slow) and various update procedures, which produced occasional pauses of up to a second in game play.

If we were going to sell to anything but the most cutting-edge systems, some serious optimization was in order. The story gets personal here, as I did a great deal of the work on this part of AoE.

I started by trying to get a handle on what the over 100,000 lines of C++ code did (the source would rise to over 220,000 lines before it was finished). After spending a few weeks studying what we had, I proposed a major overhaul of the graphics engine structure, including writing a major portion in assembly.

AoE’s original design team asked if the frame rate of a benchmark scenario could be raised from its current 7 - 12 fps to 20 fps. I told them yes. Inside I was sweating bullets, hoping that I could deliver that much improvement.

I couldn’t just go ahead and rip out the old graphics engine, as it would hold up everyone else, so I spent the next five months working mostly on the new engine. Along the way, I managed some incremental improvements that upped the frame rate to 10 - 14 fps, but the big breakthrough came during an all-nighter, when the last piece of the new design was put into place.

Much to my surprise, the benchmark scenario was now running at 55 fps. It was exciting to come back into the offices the next day and see the formerly sluggish animation running silky smooth. But my work was not all on the graphics engine.

I also spent a great deal of time identifying and optimizing myriad processes in the game. Since the game was real-time, many improvements involved spreading out a process over several turns rather than of stopping the game until it completed. In the end, the optimizations paid off handsomely and allowed us to raise the default resolution from 640x480 to 800x600.

A practical lesson that I learned from this experience was how much additional overhead and slowdown a game can acquire as it approaches completion. Often, early in a game project the engine will show great performance but the game’s not finished. When you replace the simple test levels with the complex final levels, add all the AI, UI, and bells and whistles, you can find a world of difference in actual performance. This was true for AoE as well. As we approached completion and all of the loose ends were tied off, many of the performance gains were traded in for new features.

Things That Worked Out (S)well

1. The Game was broken into separate engine and game components. About halfway through development, there was concern that the code base had expanded far enough beyond the initial design in some areas that every new change and addition would look like an ugly hack. Lead programmer Angelo Laudon and Tim Deen took two weeks and separated the code base into two separate sections, the general engine (Genie), and the game itself (Tribe).

The conversion was very successful and allowed the AoE programmers to retain a nicely object-oriented design. The benefit here was that it made the code much easier to modify and extend, saving the programmers a great amount of development time.

2. We made the game database driven. Thanks to the object-oriented design, almost nothing about any object in AoE is hard-coded into the program. Instead, huge tables of information describe every characteristic of every object that appears in the game. The designers used a system of over forty Paradox tables to control and shape the game. As a result, they were able to constantly update and tweak the game, and then test their changes without having to involve a programmer.

3. We stayed in close contact and working together with the publisher. I can’t say enough good things about how the close contact with our publisher, Microsoft, helped the development of AoE. By keeping them "in the loop" on our progress, they worked with us instead of against us as things happened.

The best example of how this relationship aided development is the way we handled schedule slippage. Each time something took longer than expected or new problems cropped up, we effectively communicated the delay to Microsoft.

With a clear understanding of what was happening and why, they reaffirmed their commitment to assist us in producing a quality game, whatever amount of time that would take. So instead of being panic-stricken and whacked out, we remained professional and focused on our goals.

4. We played our own game. While this may sound simple, it’s very important. Throughout the development process, every person in the company not only play tested, but played AoE with the purpose of having fun.

As a result, we were very in tune with why the game was fun, and what people were likely to get out of it. We had 20 guys who were determined not to let the game play be compromised or watered down.

5. Performance was good. Performance truly means a lot if you want your game to have broad appeal. Age of Empires can adequately run an eight-player game in 16MB of RAM on a P120 system. Contrast that with Total Annihilation, which requires 32MB and at least a 200MHz CPU for an eight-player game. Achieving this level of performance required a group effort. The programmers expended extra energy on keeping memory consumption in check and identifying bottlenecks, while the artists culled extra animation frames and reorganized the graphics to maximize free memory.

6.The company respected its employees. I have to say something about the way Ensemble Studios treated its employees and their families. It is well known that software development, especially game development, involves great sacrifices of time and can be hell on personal relationships.

Ensemble’s thoughtful management respected that by going out of their way to include families at numerous company dinners and other events, and to make them feel welcome to come by the offices at any time. Additionally, after crunching hard to meet a milestone, they would insist that employees take a couple of days off to catch up with their families. People were allowed flexible schedules if they needed them, and flowers or other tokens of appreciation were sent to the families periodically.

The result of this deliberate action by company management should be obvious; company morale and loyalty was higher than I have ever seen in fourteen years of software development. My wife loves my job as much as I do.

7. Localization really worked. From the beginning, we knew that Microsoft wanted to release AoE in six different languages, including Japanese. About halfway through development, we updated our code base to provide full localization support. This required stripping out and replacing all text references in the source code and maintaining all game text in an external resource file.

It also placed severe restrictions on how we could draw and display the text. We had to use the Windows GDI exclusively, something most games shun like the plague. It also meant that interface items such as buttons had to be sized to hold the largest possible translated form of their captions, limiting the clever things one could do with the design of the user interface.

But we buckled down and did it, following the guidelines exactly. And to our pleasant surprise, the conversion was swift and painless. We felt even better when the translators at Microsoft told us that localizing AoE was the smoothest and most pain-free project they had ever done.

The benefit to us was enormous in that we had a single executable program file that was the same for all translated versions of the game, thus avoiding the huge headache that comes with tracking bugs and releasing updates for multiple versions.

8. We worked as a team that respected all its members. A project of AoE’s size required that we all work together in close quarters for extended periods of time. One of our expressed criteria in hiring new people is that we must be able to respect each other.

This respect, complemented by the company’s actions towards its employees, fostered an excellent sense of family and team spirit among everyone. We avoided having different groups develop a sense of isolation from the project, and as a result, attitudes and spirits remained high even during the worst crunch time.

Had tempers flared and cliques developed, I honestly don’t believe that AoE could have made it out the door in 1997.

Things That Went Wrong Or We Could Have Done Better

1. We held the beta test too late in the development cycle. A public beta test of AoE was held in August 1997, but we didn’t come near to exploiting the full potential of it. We were too close to the end of the project to make any game play changes, despite the wealth of useful feedback we received. Manuals were already set to be printed, and most of the design had been set in stone. All we could really do was fix any bugs that were found. For any future projects, we vowed to hold the beta testing earlier.

2. There was inadequate communication with the QA people at Microsoft. For most of the project, bug reporting was handled through a database and developers didn’t directly communicate with the testers. As a result many bugs wound up taking much longer to resolve, and new features went untested.

An intermediate database was simply not enough to let testers and developers know what the other was really thinking. In future projects, we would like to assign a specific tester to each programmer and have them communicate by phone every couple of days.

Near the end of development, this did happen for a couple people, and for them productivity with testing and bug resolution was drastically improved.

3. We sometimes failed to coordinate development through the leads. Yet another area where personnel communication could have improved the development was among our own teams. Each team Programming, Art, Game Design, and Sound has a lead person who is responsible for keeping track of what each member of his or her team is doing. The lead is the go-to person when someone outside has new requests for the team.

As the development of AoE progressed and the pressures rose, adherence to this system broke down as people went direct to get their needs filled quickly. We paid a price for it. People didn’t know about programming changes or new art that was added to the game, and the level of confusion rose, creating a time drain and distraction. We all had to stop at times just to figure out what was going on.

4. We failed to adequately test multi-player games with modem connections. One problem with our development environment is that it isn’t comparable to the typical end user system. During the course of development, the multiplayer portions of AoE were tested extensively.

When we played a game in the office, our fast machines, stuffed full of RAM, communicated with each other on our high-speed LAN. When we tested Internet play, our communications were handled through the company’s T1 line. One thing that we failed to realize in our testing was the fact that most players would be using dial-up modem connections to commercial Internet service providers.

And it wasn’t just us; the same situation applied to the testing labs at Microsoft. As a result, modem connection games were under-tested. Bugs that were harmless when ping times were low resulted in dropped games for users on slower Internet connections. And our high-speed network masked the fact that under certain not-so-uncommon circumstances, AoE could require 15K of network bandwidth per second -- six times what even a 56K modem can provide on the uplink side.

As a result, we were taken a bit by surprise when reports of multiplayer game problems rolled in. Though our first patch fixed this problem, the situation was unacceptable. Now, each developer has a modem and several different ISPs are used, as modem testing is a big part of our testing process.

5. Portions of development relied on products that were not delivered on time. There was a second reason that modem games were under-tested; problems with the delivery and quality of DirectPlay from Microsoft. Features that were promised, and even included in beta releases, weren’t present when the delayed final release was delivered.

Direct X 5a wasn’t available to us until a month before the game shipped. In the meantime, our communications programmer was burning the midnight oil writing the functionality that was expected but not delivered. Waiting on promised drivers and SDKs is one of the harder things that developers have to deal with; even those with Microsoft as a publisher have no control over them.

6. We did not plan for a patch. The version 1.0a patch, even though it was a success, was problematic in that as a company we had not planned for it. The general argument is that if you know you are going to need to release a patch, then you shouldn’t be shipping the game in the first place.

While one can take that stand, it’s also a fact that no game developer’s testing can match that of the first 50,000 people who buy and play the game. Your customers will do and try things that you never dreamed of, while running on hardware and drivers that you never heard of. Looking around, nearly every significant game released this year has had a patch or update released for it.

Rather than deny this reality, we would like to allocate resources and expectations in the future so that we can release any necessary updates days or weeks after our games ship, rather than months.

7. We didn’t manage “surprise” events as well as we could have. During the development period, we experienced several sudden events that caused us, as a company, to stop what we were doing. These events included the creation of a demo version of the game and materials for press coverage of AoE.

While most of the events were beneficial to the company, we weren’t very good at handling them, and they threw off our schedules. These disruptions mostly came late in development, when their impact was felt the most. One of our goals for future games is to minimize the impact of unplanned events by giving advance notice when possible and restricting them by minimizing the number of people that have to respond to them.

8. We didn’t take enough advantage of automated testing. In the final weeks of development, we set up the game to automatically play up to eight computers against each other. Additionally, a second computer containing the development platform and debugger could monitor each computer that took part. These games, while randomly generated, were logged so that if anything happened, we could reproduce the exact game over and over until we isolated the problem.

The games themselves were allowed to run at an accelerated speed and were left running overnight. This was a great success and helped us in isolating very hard to reproduce problems. Our failure was in not doing this earlier in development; it could have saved us a great deal of time and effort. All of our future production plans now include automated testing from Day One.

The Age of Empires development team. Matt Pritchard is front row, second from right.

Patching It All Up

Once AoE was shipped off to production, we threw ourselves a big party to let off some stress. It turns out we were a bit premature in our revelry. Shortly after AoE arrived on store shelves we began receiving feedback on problems with the path finding, unit AI behaviors, population limits, and multiplayer play.

Additionally, some bugs were found that a player could exploit to gain an unfair advantage in the game. Management was stirred to action at both Ensemble and Microsoft, and the decision to do a patch for AoE was made.

Although time was taken away from other projects, and it took longer than desired, the patch was a success; it vastly improved the quality of multiplayer games, fixed the bugs, and addressed the game play concerns that had been raised. And that brings the development of AoE to where it is today, which I hope is somewhere on your hard drive...

[Matt Pritchard designed the graphics engine for Age of Empires. He also worked on Age of Empires II, Age of Mythology, and BlackSite: Area 51. This article was originally published in the March 1998 issue of Game Developer magazine.]