So without further due, here is the logo for it and some combat screenshots.

Keep in mind though, the backgrounds need some work still! No time for everything!

So, here they are, in full glory, the first peak into the combats in Hajime.

Take care!

Marco

I know it makes us be very dedicated, very interested and makes us give all we have to what we do.
I’ve asked Vlad some times already “when can we start showing the game?”. He always passes the ball back to me by replying “its not done yet, but you should be able to judge what you can and can’t show”. He doesn’t say it that way specifically, he’s not as eloquent as me, but I read between the lines.

But I fear I have shot my self on the foot so-to-speak.

By posting very basic and relation-less images on the blog, I’m showing 10% of what I want to show, and you are getting 10% of what you need to make a proper appreciation of whatever it is I post. So, I’m afraid I come across as the irritating kid at school that had a gameboy and wouldn’t let anyone play, or kept the ball to him self whenever he didn’t like how the game was going (wait, I think I did that…) but anyway, the guy that everyone thinks is arrogant. Thus the title of the post. “Will I stop it?” Well you can’t really answer. If I asked “Should I stop it?” then you would have a say.

But the answer to the original question is NO. I will not stop it.

In fact, I will risk a bit more. I’ll show a bit more stuff, that you can fully appreciate and give comments like some of you have in previous posts. I can’t believe a set of screenshots can risk a project. If anything it can help it grow. And obviously it won’t give you access to the amout of artwork and code that we developed for it.

If this is a thing for the “big” games why can’t it be for the flash games as well? Teasing, promoting, saying it will be done in… whenever, saying its state of the art… mouse clicking, I don’t know, but I’m sure you get a feeling for what I’m saying.

ANYWAY, I’m showing it off what me and Pedro (the new coder) have been busy with in the past couple of months.

and some of the cast:

You can probably guess this game is based on that delicious turnbased strategy game – Advance Wars.

All the characters are 3D, as well as some buildings in the map, and they all animate and have their little death and pain and shooting animations and we’ve insisted in putting a bit of comedy and fun in it, which we hope you will enjoy once it comes out.

As for Pedro, how has been leading the coding on this game, all I can say is that I have beaten and have been beat by the game’s AI, so… it all evens out and it feels rather good. The game is still in development and we are dealing with the small things now. The minimap is an example as you can see we are still struggling with it.

Hope this one has been more insightfull and we’d love to hear your comments!

Marco

Even though he’s sitting at his desk with a mild case of flu, he’s still determined to get this game released as soon as possible.

I hope he gets better soon, and I’m sure you do too. That said, I’ll add that these images go along with some other that have been scattered around our blog in the past weeks. So, bring out the Sherlock Holmes in you and try to make out what it is!

Talk soon,

Marco

Here’s just a little teaser.

We appologize that we can’t show more, but soon enough we’ll have more info!
sit tight!

Marco

The unit is made up of a body, a set of legs and the weapon. Reason for this is that the weapon should rotate independently from the body and the legs are just a 10 frames animation. The body was created in 3D and animated to rotate in order to have a realistic depiction of the lighting on the unit, to make it the same as the structures. as the unit rotates the rotating body moves along the frames to match the frame to the rotation, while the legs are a movieclip being rotated.

The other element on display there is the the structure being slightly damaged and we used smoke to illustrate that. Dents will be added later. The smoke is done with on 16×16 particle being scaled rotated and having the color and transparency changed.

Hope you like the little sneak peek inside the backstages of some of the art in M:A:D.

The destroyed cities are part of the game by the way… we just won’t tell you what for, that’s how evil we are, muwahahahahah!

Images courtesy of Marco, general bla bla bla courtesy of Vlad!

See you all soon…

Sharing a simple screenshot we took some days ago showing buildings, units and the first version of the GUI.

All feedback is welcome and see you soon!

Marco

Me and Vlad decided to show you our current project. We don’t know how it will evolve (read previous post) but since we like what we see we decided to share it with you and get some feedback.

It’s the first time we are disclosing any info about a yet to release game publicly, so this is kind of a new experience for us.

Game name is Mechs and Drones: Annihilation or M:A:D for short. It’s a real time strategy game and we have been around it for sometime now but in the middle of contracts and even Atomik Kaos 2, it only got the deserved attention in the last couple of weeks.

When I posted about conceptual design, I was talking about M:A:D. Right now we have all structure and unit micro AI working along with path finding. Enemy AI is the current step.

Here’s a huge logo pic, more pics (and screenshots I heard) later on.

See you soon for more M:A:D stuff!

For a new in-house project we are working on at VGS, I had to design a series of buildings that represent different features of the game. Without revealing much of the game itself, I’m going to try and explain the reasons behind the final images that came out of this arduous yet very satisfying and motivational conceptual design process.

Originally I made some quick sprites for Vlad to work on his first tests. just placeholders. He was rather quick to let out a big fat “MEH” when he saw the two little structures.

After some discussion the structures we have are:

A central, a couple of factories, a lab, a workshop, a metalworks building, a radar and a repair building.

The only one that resides on “inspiration” is the central, which was the first to be designed and drawn out on paper, modeled and detailed.

The concept was “something that is set on its own center and has supports to keep it there”. That pushed me to a tripod concept.  And while you can certainly allow inspiration to let you come up with this, a logical approach will likely yield similar results. Write down stuff that has a center and supports. “Tripod” will quickly come up.

These were originally sketched in flash, because I can use a movieclip with its mirrored instance next to it. I draw and it updates.

All the other buildings that followed were in a way… doodled on the “paper”. I really was hoping for inspiration to help me out. But no!
The only thing I kept was the fact that I wanted them to have very distinct silhouettes for readability. I want the player to be able to look at them and automatically see what structures they are.

In some specific cases, like the radar, I gave it a bit of a satellite dish look. For the lab I had different sections and both the workshop and metal works were just mere doodles, trying to find a shape that I liked. And that’s where I failed, because I already had a shape I liked. The Central’s shape.

So I trusted my judgment and modeled it and rendered it. I also liked the original repair building so I went with it as well. They came out as good as I hoped and I stuck with them. The problem was the other buildings

So, not satisfied and at a dead end, I showed them to a couple of friends and they said “Cool! looks very alienish and very distinct from each other”. So, one of the parts was done – differentiation. Now for the second part – making them look not alien, but robotic.

And one thing I think that robots would believe is “if something works, stick to it”. And that’s what I did. I chose a couple of shapes I liked from the Central building, and used them to replicate the original layouts.

The lab was now 3 “departments” instead of 4. The workshop was no longer a smoothed building but more of a office building structure to it, with a big outer area for whatever tests that need to be done (and also to convey a square area for the  whole building). The factories have long warehouse areas to create the sense of big work areas. The metal works has a central area that creates a connection between two big furnaces.

While modeling them, I still messed around with the designs, to make them more interesting and have more readability as iconic shapes. Here they are, compared to the previous designs so you can see how much artistic liberty I took while modeling them.

So as you can see the central’s got a two color scheme to match the rest of the buildings, as I felt they needed a base color and a “team” color. The metal works was rotated 45º to create a diamond area instead of a square one and now has a big chimney for the furnace and a dome area for the metal to pour in. The workshop is very close to the previous design and has a court yard, much like the repair. The laboratory’s departments where scaled differently just for extra visual interest and the radar was put a bit more in par with the overall designs. Both factories have a big dome like area to suggest the “brain” of the building and then a smaller warehouse or storage area. They were also rotated the same amount of degrees but in opposite directions, to suggest that even though they are both factories, they generate different things.

Here are the very final desings :

The central building lost one of the elements that looked like a wrench that was put on the repair building. Looking like a wrench actually works better on the repair building.
there was also added some detail to the workshop building to suggest a garage entrance, exhausts on the roof and some pipes, for air circulation.

This is the process that was involved in creating the original central, from concept to finished.

I hope this was an interesting read. The final result pleases me and Vlad, or at least he says so, and I chose to trust him.
Stay tuned on the blog for more interesting stuff that comes out of the VGS’s incubator!

Naughty Pixel

Some years ago, while I was still in design school, I had this project in which I had to create the logo and all the stationary for my future company. I remember thinking I would like to do Web Design and Multimedia stuff. At that point the “naughty pixel” was born.

This logo featured a winking smiley face, tilted. The idea was to give it a friendly “come and play” look.

Years later, VGS was born and while struggling to find the perfect image to represent our vision, we knew we needed a character.

Tests with Vlad's toon

“Vortix” was the name of a character Ricardo was always drawing on any random piece of paper. The idea of a devilish character was appealing, but once reduced to smaller sizes the features and fur were lost, turning it into a blob with eyes. That’s when the naughty pixel was rescued from a dusty desk drawer and brought back to life.

Our first logos

The corners where rounded to remove the harshness of the sharp outline, the wink was removed to make the face clearer and the nose removed for simplicity. This left us with a friendly face but all it did was smile. A couple of months after we settled on the new not-so-naughty-anymore pixel we gave it a small face-lift to help him stand out a bit more as a real thing, instead of just a shape. By adding the tongue we gave it a certain “determination” or “defiance” to it that, while keeping the smile, makes it look like the little pixel is really focused on playing. We also un-tilted it for better use in smaller formats such as icons and avatars.

Final tests and logos

We’re pretty happy with the result!