*collapses*

the credits are in my scraps.

I am now going to go collapse into bed, 27hrs now!  I can technically still go on and work but my ears and my back says no.  Saying that, I was up for 3 days straight in my first year, then performed in an evening concert on the 3rd day. That was an interesting day XD

ED Preview

 DUN DUN DUUUUUN.

The last pic is filled with potential for a gag gallery.  Now to animate ...

Yay for Yu filled with moar angst.

My ears hurt D:

But I think I'm on schedule ... o_O. At least the magazine cutscene is done hooray!

- Teaser Trailer cutscene
- Odd bit of artwork here and there
- Odd bit of music/sound design here and there
- 5000 word essay.

Reckon I can get it done in the next two days?

I recommend watching with headphones.

Enjoy!

concepty stuff

first of all.. bar scene after the crash;


any thing else needed adding? there wasnt much stuff to wreck in the room lol.

And I neatened up the magazine illustrations a bit, but its still b&w since there isnt time to add colour..

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

http://www.aksysgames.com/999/pages/demo

DS demo played here, seriously good VN/puzzle game!! Now, get back to work Jade. XD

More Yu Sprite designs

WARNING: Large file size!

Here be some expressions using the 'Normal1' base, and I think I'll do some more expressions using 'Normal2' base which is one of my original sketches.

Mike already knows this but I'll explain the animation process here.  After our initial deadline 'scare' I've decided to scrap the frame by frame animation like how it's done in Phoenix Wright for now.  While it'll be nice to actually have a slightly more sophisticated animation, I'd rather get the majority of the work done to a good quality standard.  Perhaps Yu will be the most 'animated' character compared to the rest as he will have two different 'bases' for his expressions - who knows!  We can always add and fine tune any details if people are still up for making a full version after I hand this dissertation in!

I'm really motivated to release a full version too - I'm still getting a good amount of positive responses on dA and countless people has asked whether there will be a full ver and when it'll be out etc. etc. etc! I don't really wanna disappoint those people either ;)

Anyway think I'll have an early night (lol it's 5:30am) as the plumber is coming round in the morning to fix the bathroom tap and I'm apparently going to a dance workshop Jane Austen style for some Bathonian festival later in the afternoon so I maybe dead for the rest of the day.  If anything text of give me a call if anything.

Sprite designs

Well, finally got round to it.  I have to say...this style is looking pretty bad-ass!

With coloured scarf which I'm really liking the idea of.  Maybe all the other characters can also have one item of clothing that is textured and coloured?

Obviously this one looks a bit weird using a CU bg but with the other normal bg it should be ok. It looks mighty swell - though I may just make the outlines a bit thicker.

 ... I really love the idea of the single coloured item...O_O

Special Banksy styled edition XD I shall start doing Yu's other expressions as well as the other characters now.  This is getting pretty exciting :D :D :D (Also cheers for Errol for his company and feedback too! ^_^)

Squiggle effect may live!

Mostly for Mike but I'll post it up here so that there's a record of it.

I've been offered to collab with someone on dA - he's an AS3 programmer and said that he can do all the programming while I do the story and artwork - I declined ofc but it's incredibly useful to be in contact with another programmer (WOO).

Anyway, I asked him whether he could figure out the code John Su's squiggle effect and he has! I'll copy pasta his comment:

Ok, I have figured it out. The squiggle effect is created with a MovieClip called "Sketcher". It takes a still image and creates multiple versions of it, by applying a Perlin noise filter with a ColorFilter effect. The result is an array containing the many images. Then the program uses another MovieClip (they should write all this using CLASSES instead) that takes this array and plays it back by copying the frames to the screen in sequence using a bitmap copy pixel operation. This whole thing could be probably written down *much* simpler and using reusable AS3 classes. When you look at this code, it becomes clear it was never meant to be reused anywhere else... >___<

Either way, I believe if we can get this effect working it'll still make a nice overall effect for my persona-esque animations XD

If we can figure out how to get this working I'll add this guy to the credits (I think I will anyway because he actually took the time to look at it and give some feedback).  Anyway, what do you think?

...

IT'S ALIIIVEEEEEE.

HW Opening is nearly complete...

Hungry Whispers OP-beta-2

Heyhey...the sound works ;DDDDDD

To finish:
- Visual animation
- Volume slider/mute buttons

;DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Yu animation keyframes

God I need more practice with my tablet. Part of the idea of me buying a new tablet was to speed up the process of drawing but it's been so long since since I've actually used one its being quite awkward. Anyway with that in mind I present the key frames for Yuey's animations. Not all of the poses are presented here (most notably the phone poses and I think one or two other poses).

 (And I just realised Yu grows and shinks about 5 inchs between several of the keyframes, noted and will be corrected).
Opinions people! I'm not sure about all of them, but I'll keep my thoughts to myself and see what everyone else says. What I may do is draw all the animations out in the computer first just to make sure they are smooth and actually work and then ironically print them all out and trace them (I have a light box so this will be easy) and then re-scan them (I have a batch scanner so again this will be easy) just to make them look better. Unless if by that time I've got more use to the drawing with the tablet. I've started doing some painting with the tablet too. I'm gonna need a bit of practice with that too. I think I shall dedicate the whole of Thursday to that.

*Edit*
You know what fuck it, I'm just gonna draw all the keyframes from now on by hand.

Remember when I said I was going to kill you last? I LIED!

So I realised I haven't made a post here in quite some time and seeing as I've stopped been lazy and actually started doing some work I figured I'd upload it now rather then do a big update later in the week. So my main update is that I've finally got myself a graphics tablet, specifically wacom's bamboo pen (not touch, that would cost more and I really don't see any need for it) so I cant start doing some more work in the computer which basically means I can get painting and will also mean animation will become a lot easier to do too.

Anyway the first thing I have to show Is some rougth sketches for Yu's room on the train that I've done based of Jade's layout. I originally did the shot at the bottom but realised there was quite a few problems with it. Firstly it left out a lot of the details from Jade's original sketch due to the angle and also the angle itself made no sense. If we are supposed to be seeing from Yu's perspective then he must be about to jump out the window. The top drawing I think is better as it includes all the details and everything is a lot more visible. I'm not sure how striking it is though compared to the first one, so maybe it needs work but I figured that would be the general angle. I realised one of the reasons I went for the original angle was because of concern that the player wouldn't be able to click the door to leave but since we dropped that idea and simply have arrows to show where you can move it doesn't matter anymore.

This is for one of the close ups at the bar. It's actually not that great but I figured I'd post it as I want to talk about it a little bit. Rather then redrawing this I'm simply going to start painting over it and use it as a base.



http://flippinmental.deviantart.com/art/animationtest1-256557940


Did somebody say animation? I sure hope they did! As I've done one incredibly awkward looking and low fps (frames per second not first person shooter) test. I had a mini debate with myself as to weather I should bother posting this or not as I don't think it gives across very well what I want it to look like as this was done in a very sporadic way (random drawngs, scanned at different points in time and I think even drawen with different pencils). Future animations will probably be drawn straight into the computer rather then having any of that scanning mambo jumbo in the middle. Though I almost certainly will draw the key frames by hand and then scan them in as I find that so much easier.


http://flippinmental.deviantart.com/art/test2lol-256558726


Also I did a test for the wobble idea I had inspired by those korean comics. Again I'm not sure if this really gives across what it would look like but it gives a basic idea of what I was thinking.

Animations may be laggy and suck so download if its crashing or going too slow.

Things I plan to do this week;

- Start painting and finished the bar close up
- Start painting over some of Rumzi's finished objects
- Start doing animations for Yu

Blog1 is just about done !

You can see what I've done so far on my dA = http://jdwasabi.deviantart.com/art/HW-Flash-Novel-soundfx-test-254473718

Hooraids, the main bulk of it is done! Now to add the rest of the sound and add some 'pretty' animation effects.  Next up - Asset list for day2.

Squiggle art in Flash

Ok, I've done some research in the Flash programming side to get that 'squiggle' effect for the character animations without drawing extra frames for it.  I wish we could rotoscope actual people but the trouble is more than it's worth XD.

I've been flicking through JohnSu's dA again and Mike already knows this he uses the Displacement Map Filters and Perlin Noise to make that 'squiggle' effect on his artwork.  I've found some tutorials on it so I'll start looking up soon because there's quite a lot of advance coding needed for it.  I reckon once I crack it, we would be able to copy pasta the code onto all animations making it even more Hotel Dusk-y. Yay!

http://www.thetechlabs.com/tech-tutorials/flash/create-real-water-effects-with-flash-cs4-actionscript-30/

Only problem with reading the comments is that it seems to 'eat' a lot of CPU which is slightly worrying.  I'm worrying if we can just tweak the code so that it'll only affect the animation artwork for a second or something and then it'll automatically loop.  Will look more into this and possibly just ask JohnSu on dA lol.

Blog1.1 Interactive Animation

Holy cow it works.

Mike, regarding the animation for the 'text type' in game dialogue, I reckon leave it out if we chose to go with the AS3 version.  It took too long and I'm afraid I only managed to do with with AS2 and not AS3 so maybe you'll need to translate it into AS3 if we were.

SO SORRY! N00B AT AS3 XD

Hungry Whispers OP -beta-

(It's up on my dA btw)^