When I was walking around GDC, I happened to bump into a number of interesting developers and fell into lots of interesting conversations. Using limited foresight, I was able to record a few of them for the podcast.
First up is an interview with the development team behind “Call of Booty 3.”
Featuring the voices of Noel Berry, Matt Thorson, Tom Rab, Chevy Ray Johnston, Kert Gartner and Tom Sennett.
Matt Thorson (Jumper, Ogmo Editor) and I have been working on a new 2D game engine. We’re planning on using it for our projects, if all goes well.
We started the project on March 14. Two weeks later, the engine already runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and has three WIP editors for levels and animations.
One of the cool things about the engine is that it’s open source. (under the MIT license)
I’ve put together a video to share some of the early tests we’ve been making with the engine:
For more info on Monocle and links to the source, check out monoclepowered.org
P.S. For some reason I uploaded a video that plays the same content twice. Oops!
Some people have been asking how much this engine has to do with Marian. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk more about that soon.
GDC was a energetic, exciting and exhausting experience as always, but this time I was travelling with the Bit Collective crew from Winnipeg. They’re a great group of guys and we had a lot of fun meeting a ton of new indies and presenting the Winnitron at the New Media Manitoba booth in the Expo hall. Kert Gartner captured timelapses of our trip; this first one really captures the frantic energy and time compression that we experienced at GDC:
New Marian Postcards
Right before we left to GDC, Ashley put together three scenes of brand new Marian art that we could use for postcards. Ordering the cards turned out to be stressful, and I ended up going with an American company and shipping the finished postcards to Derek Yu’s house in SF. The results were worth it -- the cards are printed on nice thick stock and they’re glossy on the game artwork side.
The Marian postcards we handed out at the Winnitron/Manitoba booth
Based on how many cards we had left, I think we handed out over 200 of them at GDC. We have some leftover that we’re putting up for sale on the IA store. We’re almost out of two of the three types, so if you’re interested -- get in there now. I can also sign your cards if you specify that! Unfortunately Ashley can’t sign them because she’s nowhere near Winnipeg. (although we may be getting some Ashley signed goods up in the future)
Let’s take a look at these new postcards…
This one you may have seen before, but the composition is a bit different and you can now see that more is going on here. This area appears fairly early in the game.
Ashley uses a pretty neat and time consuming method to create her game art, that involves first sketching on paper, scanning those in and eventually coloring in Photoshop. For a new and in-depth explanation of her process, check out the new post in Ashley’s art corner.
Feedback
Through GDC and various forum discussions around the internet, we’ve been collecting feedback on the new art. Most of it has been positive, but we’ve received some useful critiques and some confusing negative feedback as well. We’d like to try to understand what some of this negative feedback is about so that we can fine tune the look of the game while we’re still able to be flexible in that area.
If you’d like to help us out with this, please let us know which of these postcards looks best and tell us why in the comments. The more detailed and precise you can be with your feedback, the more useful it will be to us.
Which postcard do you find most appealing? Please give us the details in the comments. Thanks!
Loading ...
We want the game to look as good as possible, but we also want it to have a unique style. I really like working with Ashley because she has her own vision for the game that meshes with and expands on my own.
We appreciate any and all feedback you may decide to give us on our journey to complete “Marian.”
Loading ...
