Day 72: FATCTV Livestream Tonight!

Howaya everybody,

Join us this New Year’s Eve on the CHIBBY CHANNEL for the Fat C TV New Year‘s Eve Special streaming LIVE from Amsterdam on YouTube.

Expect the best in underground culture and a review of the year with performance, music, film and animation, interviews, poetry and song, Talking Theatre, Animation, Games and Comics – the whole lot ! There will also be an interview filmed at the Storkinators studio and live chat with some of the team members.

From the comfort of a screen near you, ring in the New Year in the company of friends as we bring you the Fat C TV New Year’s Eve Special on The CHIBBY CHANNEL streaming Live on YouTube.

Join this livestream from 21:00 CET on New Year’s Eve at http://www.youtube.com/thefatc or http://chibbychannel.com/

We Are Friend

Day 71: Bits and Bobs

We're slowly reaching the end of production as the assignments on our Trello trickle into the "Done" folder. Chances are pretty good that we get back to school, realize we've overlooked something really important and have a panic at the end (as so often happens with game production) but hey-ho. Its part of the job ;P

Molly and Erik went over all the voice acting deciding if any takes had to be redone. While doing so they noticed there was a sequence that could do with a bit of extra art. NOW all the extra art is done...We hope.

Art-wise, mainly User Interface stuff (such as menus) has to be done now. We made a bit of a start but we'll have to make sure everything is good together when we get back to the office next week.

Day 70: Extra Art is All Done!

Before the Christmas holiday we made a sheet of illustrations we were considering adding to the game if we had the time to make them. Today, the last of them were finished! We just need to see now if we have the time to implement them into the actual game. :X

Day 69: Boxing Day

Tomorrow its full steam ahead but there is one more day of freedom.

We do have something to post though. One of the presents Molly (writer/artist) got for Christmas was "The People's Almanac presents the Book of Lists 1977". An odd present for sure but an interesting source of facts from a bygone era without internet. One of the lists is "11 Prominent Coffee Drinkers", which has Johann Sebastian Bach at the top.

"Bach wrote Coffee Cantata, a humorous one-act operetta about a stern father's attempt to check his daughter's indulgence in the coffee habit. From the Cantata: " Betty: "Dear father, don't be so strict! If I can't have my little demitasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just like a dried-up piece of roast goat!""""

Betty must be a programmer. :P

Day 68: Merry Merry Merry Christmas!

Day 66 & 67: Immediately Late

Told you we'd have trouble with the blog! Yesterday was a shaky start to our Christmas work period thanks to banks losing checks and computers blue screening but we manged to do some work and are back on track today. Hurray!

We're not going to work tomorrow (our families miss us) but there will still be a blog entry. Be sure to check it out tomorrow. ;) 

Merry Christmas! We hope you all get your last-minute Christmas shopping done today. :)

Day 65: School's Out

Today was the last day before our college shuts for Christmas. The next two weeks we're all working from home. Hopefully we ought to still be able to post blog updates despite this. There will probably the the odd day with no updates seeing that it's Christmas and all.

We hope to get all the assets implemented over the next two weeks so we can use the rest of our time getting ready for launch, the school showcase and polish things up in the game.

Speaking of the showcase, a message to all our Dutch readers. Storkinators will be showcased on the 16th of January at our college. You are more than welcome to pop by and say hi!

In the HKU Creative Design Studios, students, teachers and researchers collaborate intensively on designing games, interaction, media and music.

Date: Thursday 16 January 2014
Time: 16:00 - 20:00
Location: HKU in Hilversum, Oude Amersfoortseweg 131, 1212 AA Hilversum

For more information about SHOWCASE and the pther projects at our college, check our website: www.hku.nl/showcase

Day 64: Interview Time!

Today the team was interviewed for FatCTV's New Year's Special. We talked a bit about Storkinators and the Dutch Game Industry.

The show will be broadcast live on YouTube on New Year's Eve from 10 till the countdown to midnight and beyond (Holland Timezone). It will be broadcast on Fay Heady's channel, check out the following link: http://www.youtube.com/user/fayheady

We'll post a reminder when the broadcast is closer. ;)

In other news: We've begun working on art from previous scenes to bump up the content of Storkinators. It's really interesting and (dare I say) nostalgic to go back to these old scenes we worked on  few moths ago and expand on them.

Day 63: Hang in there

Hello There,
After a nice celebration the half of the Team took a nice little brake.
But still work is moving on and here is today's illustration.

Day 62: End Year Presentation

Our end year presentation went extremely well. They gave us a very good, even though the highest mark they can give is good. :P

Thanks again to everyone who filled in our questionnaire, the data collected was very useful to our presentation and backing up our arguments.

We figured out our planning for the next (roughly) 4 weeks before we want to release the game. Things are going to be tight but we ought to be able to finish it.

For now, let's party. :D

Nathan and Erik wanted to be in the picture too so using our amazing Photoshop skills, it shall be so.

Day 61: The Storks Have Come To Life!

And they're doing our work for us. NOOOO!

Just kidding, ha ha. We got put these masks together for the showcase. You can't see or breath while wearing them but they ought to turn some heads. ;P

Day 60: A Little Bit About the Sound Design

For a game with a lot of emphasis on sound, we haven't spoken a lot about it. A word from our very own composer and sound designer Tim Bijnen:

The music starts with a 'muzak' kind of feeling since there is not too much happening in the intro. When the protagonists start their journey the music start to play a bigger role. In the beginning of the journey I wanted to use theme created by the composers. You can hear Bach's cello suite no.1, Beethoven's fur elise, and Mozart's 40th symphony. The music at the storks base is based on a atonal theme that I've written myself. When they reach Egypt I used the most commonly know Egyptian scale, and in the last scene I once again used the storks theme for the spaceship, and the composers' themes when the story is finished.

The audio programming had to change since there were some timing issues.

When first entering an area, an audio track starts playing containing music, sound effects and dialogue. When that's finished an other audio track starts looping containing background noise. Now the player has to make a decision. When the decision is made a new audio track takes over, again containing music, sound effects and dialogue. Whenever there is a puzzle that has to be solved, a separate audio track containing music and some times sound effects start playing, and the dialogue is separated in an other audio track. 

Most of the sound effects I made or recorded myself. Other come from freesound or classmates. 

for example
- I've synthesized wind using white noise an filtering
- the caiman sample is my cat in combination with a sink
- the sound of the automated doors in the base are a combination of a automatic screwdriver and sound that my 3 months old son made

Day 59: Thanks for all the Feedback!

Thank you everyone who took the time to play our demo and/or fill in our survey! Positive or negative, your feedback is greatly appreciated and allows us insight into how we can make our game even better! :) If you haven't played or filled in the survey yet, we hope you'll consider doing so, it is very useful to us.

Some people asked us about the game's platform. Although we are aiming for Android, we hope to release the game for other platforms in future if we can find a means of funding. Chances are pretty high it will end up available for PC and/or Mac at the same time or soon after the Android release so there's still hope for all you non-phone people. ;)

Next week Tuesday is our End Year Presentation. We want to have the second Chapter done for that and progress is going swimmingly. Because we'll be working from home over Christmas we're making more effort to communicate with one another and that's definitely paying off.

Next week Friday is the deadline for all the art for the final chapter finished and we'll probably be done early. Here are some examples:

We don't want to post too many images from the final chapter on the blog so as not to spoil the ending. This means there won't be too much art uploaded over the next few weeks, sorry. :B

Day 58: Illustration Time-Lapse

Doing things a little different today. Instead of just showing you our art work, today you get to see it being made!

This video is a time-lapse of one of the illustrations made today. It took roughly 2 hours real time and has been shortened to around 6 minutes. The music is all clips from the game. Enjoy!

Day 57: Finally the Web Demo - What a Happy Day

Hello Folks,

Finally here it is the web demo and a little survey because your opinion matters!

Click the flowing link --> Demo Storkinators

(The game requires the Unity Web Player to run. It might take a while to load so please be patient.)

And we would like to invite you to the Survey Storkinators

Have fun playing!!!

Day 56: Goodies! :D

The voice acting was completed this weekend! We will still probably redo some lines but we are theoretically done. That's good enough for us. :P

Our demo should be online by the end of today, so come on back tomorrow to play it! :D We would really appreciate feedback too so we have some data for our project documentation.

In other news, look at the swag Annika's parents brought for us from Germany. Heavenly...P:

Next week Tuesday is our End Year Assessment. We have to make documentation, a presentation and we want to finish up chapter 2 so our teachers can play a new part of the game. They already played the demo we're posting tomorrow.

Day 55: Quote of the Day

Here is the quote of the day in the studio today:

Molly: Damir, did you get my annoying email?

Damir: Which one?

Day 54: Happy Sinterklaas! (+ Mozart's Death Day)

Today Sinterklaas: Holland's equivalent to Christmas for our international readers.

Saint Nikolaas' helpers put bad children in bags and take them away. Remind you of anyone?

Enjoy your pepernoten, taaitaai and chocolate letters today!

EDIT: On top of merry ol' Sinterklaas, its also Mozart's death-day today. He either died a slow death from illness that he suffered in his later life or, rumor has it, was murdered by his rival Antonio Salieri. Either way, rest in peace Mozart!

Day 53: SVN is Back

Phew!

Here's some art to celebrate.

Day 52: GLITTER

We finally got the interface working today! Now the game indicates that something can be interacted with clearly and unintrusively. (Its even better when its moving, the glitter floats around and the glow pulsates)

Our shiny new interface!

We have been struggling with a few things, such as making it clear that something can be tapped without invading or breaking the visuals in the game. We also had trouble with the colour. We couldn't make the glow white because it can blend into the background. We tried tinting it with colour but it looked pretty unappealing.

An earlier attempt at the Interface

We started looking at other games and trying to come up with a solution. Artist/Lead Annika suggested Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which uses a glitter effect in some areas to denote an intractable object. Glitter just feels good, ya know? It reminds you of Christmas and 90s-rific stickers.

The issue of colour is also solved thanks to Lego Marvel Super Heroes. Some functions the game are given a white aura but with a light blue tint around the edges. This solves the issue of the white blending into the background. The blue colour is also quite appealing to the eye.

Note the flames coming from Iron Man's boots

In other news, the colour storyboard for the final chapter is almost done and work has already begun on illustrations.

We also began work on the last two character designs: Two Chinese Teenagers.

Day 51: Big Ol' Meeting

Today the team dedicated the morning to going over what has to be done and made a detailed plan of what we're going to do with our last chunk of time. Our end year presentation is in two weeks (luckily its before the game's deadline) and we have to squeeze it in alongside production. Our grade is determined more by our presentation and documentation rather than our end product annoyingly enough so we can't just brush over it.

We went over our last chapter and made a storyboard to go alongside it. The chapter is pretty huge, it might actually be the most involved part of the entire game. We had to cut a few parts sadly, otherwise we'd never be done with enough time to polish the rest of the game. D:

The (uncut) Storyboard for the China Chapter

One of the requirements for promotional material at college is a trailer but we requested to show a demo instead. Our deadline is the 10th of December (about a week from today) so we will finally have it online by then. Sorry to keep you waiting world! Work has begun tying up the loose ends of the demo.

We thought about extra scenes we can add to the game to pick up the visual slack during the more narrative-driven parts of the game. There aren't too many of them but we'll have to wait two weeks after we finish the art for China. That should start being posted on the blog tomorrow by the way.

Extra Art we can make if we have time

On top of that, the final storyboard for China, a new title screen and a user interface are in the works. PHEW! Busy day.

SVN is still down by the way... :'(

Day 50: Uh-Oh!

Our SVN, the system we're using to share files with each other (Basically Dropbox but different), has stopped working. It won't add or receive files. This is a big hang up as it means we can't show you any of the work we made today (The person typing this is at home and can't access the new files made today). Hopefully this will be resolved quickly! Its not the end of the world but it is a pain in the butt. :(

Day 49: The Final Piece of the Puzzle

After much headache and a few days of work, the final puzzle in Storkinators has been designed! Its being kept purposefully vague in this picture because we don't want to spoil it for you. ;)

The scripts has also been typed up. Usually there are small tweaks all the way up to it being recorded so it isn't "finished" per-say, but we're going to go ahead and say its finished. Yes! Hi-five, internet!

Day 48: It's-a-me!

Charles Martinet (the voice actor for Nintendo's Mario) came to our college and gave a lecture today. He also gave us at Storkinators this fabulous message:

Day 47: A-Maze-ing

We began work on a scene set in Egypt in which the composers must escape from a dungeon inhabited by a monster.

How will our heroes get out of this one? D:

Day 46: Art Art Art Art

Not too many developments at the moment. We worked on implementing our assets into the game and talked a bit about our planning. The demo is taking longer than expected to get online because we want to make sure everything is polished and as perfect as we can muster. Also, our protagonists' voice actor Erik is going to come visit the office on Wednesday and check out our digs. We'll inevitably post pictures that day.

MORE ART YEAH. We're working through Egypt as quickly as possible because there are some pretty tricky scenes coming up.

Day 45: Business as Usual...

Fridays are always the laziest days for blogs, sorry about that. We're just always pooped by the end of the week...

We thought a bit more about how to apply our feedback. We've added an interactive element between chapters and are thinking about adding some other possible things we can do to spice up the game.

Also, art.

The past three weeks have just flown by. We're getting closer and closer to our deadline and there's still so much we want to include in the game. Bach's expression just sums up how we feel about that:

It'll get done, not too much worry about that. We just want everyone to love our game-baby as much as we do!

Day 44: Playtesting Results & Egypt Art

We went over the play-test results with our team and project coordinator today. In general, the game was well received, so that's a relief! We still have to write a full report but here are the general points and possible additions (translated from Dutch notes):

- More (inter) action: things you can tap/interact with while listening to the story.

- More motion: things that move give the game more life. 

- More clarity as to when you can tap something: Better glow? Enlarge interactive objects? 

- Pause during the waterfall scene breaks the flow: fix the audio for the game flow’s sake. 

- Tapping is more natural than swiping: we need a tutorial at the beginning & introduction of the characters.

- In the jungle maze people want to be able to tap the objects they find: for example a glow around an object can help. Make it clear that you can do something with the object. 

- At the building the raft scene: Not clear that the objects have to be moved from one square than the other. Testers drag objects to the center and don’t experiment with different boat types. 

- More Illustrations 

- More tasks and puzzles 

- Was unclear which character is which at the start 

- Subtitles where suggested, make them an option?

The kids left some fan art for us behind on the white board! :D

Today we also cracked on with the art for the Egypt scene. Here are some examples:

Day 43: Playtesting Today

As mentioned yesterday, we don't have much to report today because the team is separated. Tomorrow we'll meet at the office and talk about the playtest.

A notable development though is that we tried out the game on a phone and it runs just fine. We were worried there would be a lot of tweaking involved but it runs the same as if it were on a tablet. Yeah!

Day 42: Egypt Art

Tomorrow we're finally play-testing. Chances are there probably won't be a blog entry because we'll be all split up. We'll try to post something though.

We're more or less prepared, kind of a late day at the office getting everything done last-minute exactly the way you're not supposed to. ;P

As promised, here's our cover art for the game:

Also, some additional illustrations worked on today. Both are works in progress.