Long Time no see.
Amy’s Escape has had a lot of work done through the years and it deserves a master post with all of it. but might as well talk about the new rendering tech and the direction the game took in the past years.
First and foremost the game is in 3D now, but we were only going to do that if we could reach a cell shading look that matched the game’s concept art. and that we did, this is the tech.
We’re inspired in games like Genshin impact, and wolf among us, but our tech is supposed to match Fernando’s concept art, our director. One thing we do have that Genshin doesn’t is shaped light on the character, as genshin is mostly directional, light and shadows are VERY important in horror games.
Also we have a model DESIGNED for all the facial expressions. Hopefully next post isn’t about tech and just show what we’ve done but we have a lot of tech done in the past half a decade.
Bottom line we tried and got a look that matches the 2D art and we succeeded.
check my site https://www.studiohighground.com/
A heartless doll finds her self in a familiar attic.
Global Game Jam 2020
We created an adventure game/Visual Novel engine on top of Unity. It was a collaborative from it’s inception we wanted to make something about fixing one-self, and the idea of using memories and a doll worked. Created under 48 hours in the Ciespal Lab site January 2020.
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Direction, Character design, Programming, dialog
Fernando Holguin ( @fern_hw ) http://fernhw.com/portfolio/
Environment art, painting, color coordination
Cristopher Páez ( @creativcs )
Item art, CG art
Juan Carlos Cobos ( @juankamikaze )
Dialog assistance, final presentation
Ronnie Nieto
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Play Here: (Link)
Source code: (Link)
check my site https://www.studiohighground.com/
Programmer Reel 2020.
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I’ve always and I mean always been a Programmer first, I can draw, which combined with programming makes me a tech artist! Unity, Proprietary engines, C#, C++, Technical Art, User Tools, and some Physics engineering.
check my site https://www.studiohighground.com/
My making of the game I made during 2020 Game Jam. This year I and 3 people built a small Escape the Room/Visual Novel Hybrid thing.
Play Here: https://t.co/1cPgmxWyuU?amp=1
studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
When the camera in a game is done well everything feels just right, everything just flows. It’s the reason why Journey, why Inside, why Mario Kart 8, and just about every Nintendo game feels just as if anyone could play them.
Knowing how to deal with the eye not only helps you make your game more accessible but it also makes it easier to follow in the most hectic of moments.
From: PlayDead’s INSIDE
My goal: Is to explain how to design the game around the eye’s limitations and create experiences that are more comfortable for our users. I will start with the simple yet effective concept of Eye-Tracing.
An example:
From: Mad Max Fury Road
Follow the red circle: We can immediately read where the motorcycle is between shots and we see the barrel on the shotgun, each shot takes less than a second, yet we read every beat, and that’s because the eye is directed so well here.
Eye tracing is an editing technique used to direct where the eyes of a viewer will be across several shots, in other words it’s strategically moving the eyes of your player to a specific point in the screen and using it in different fun ways.
Create an environment in which you know which part of the frame your player is most likely to be looking at, this can be performed a number of ways but I wont get in the details of composition, color theory, photography or animation. I will only talk about the eyes.
Now, how does something from cinema world, a world where everything is scripted, and there’s a cut every 5 seconds or so apply to an interactive medium? Well the answer is simple it does so in a completely different way.
I will jump back and forth between games and movies but this is a game focused article.
What does the player see? What do you as a creator want them to see?
Do those 2 align? Can they?
Eyes have a 5 degree central vision, this is where we read books, if our target moves outside of the near-peripheral section of our eyesight the eyes will have to change positions.
TVs tend to hang in the mid peripheral, it feels as if it covers the whole vision but it really doesn’t. Close one eye and make a frame with your hands observe how much your monitor or your TV takes of your vision space.
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My rules are:
The screen is a flat surface, not a window to another world.
The key word here is Planar space! This is the basis of eye tracing, and designing moving media in a way that is easy to read for people. Even 3D movies need to compose in planar space.
Maintaining the focus in a slowly moving point in planar space makes it easier on the eyes because your eyes have to move way less.
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Even when there’s nothing to be seen, the eyes should be directed to a point on the screen.
From:Mario Kart 8
In hectic game-play, having one direct point to return to is imperative as it gives the eyes a simple point to return to as they jump from object to object during the action.
In games like Mario Kart the player doesn’t have to worry where the character is, but where the obstacles are.
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Update on Amy’s Escape!
Happy Halloween! Welcome to the first ever update of Amy’s Escape a horror adventure game in the lines of the point and click genre.
In this game Amy will meet 30+ unique and quirky characters that show the vile side of humanity and solve mind bending problems to escape a cursed hotel that doesn’t let it’s inhabitants die, all while not loosing yourself in the process.
twitter: @AmysEscapeGame
Game’s blog: http://blog.amysescape.com/
First official video update.
[To view in youtube https://youtu.be/BdFrEdlWHQ4]
more at studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
I’ll talk about the design of a game I made for the global game jam in under 36 hours.
We use visuals, sound, and motion. The huge difference is software has a 2 way communication, you communicate with it and it communicates back, the communication back needs to be easy to read so the user can interpret it’s surroundings.
A good silhouette, a readable character
3D Games are not safe of this. In class shooters being able to know the character just from there silhouette is VERY important.
Animation has and will always rely on strong silhouettes.
Wendy was designed to be extremely readable since she’s very tiny in the stage.
The wind machine was originally just a box that threw wind, giving it a face allowed to make it something that the player would eventually care about, a living thing that also houses the iconic elements of the game in turn making the game iconic. This is common in nintendo games, where a fairy represents the Z-Targeting in one game, a Luma represents the spinning attack in a platformer, and a water backpack represents the water mechanic.
Just for some examples, every time a character talks to you in a tutorial that’s also antromorphizing game mechanics
With <36 hours We didn’t have time for complex art so I had to design an easy to animate character for my assistant to clean up, and for me to animate.
Visual design has to be redundant, not everyone sees the same thing, we need to know where the eye is and how to move it where we want to at all times.
The game makes you place your hands on the keyboard by first making you click on the keys that you will use in-game
First stage (and only one we had time to make), the player can only move from left to right, so it will eventually hit the green button.
There’s also some environmental storytelling, the tube right above, the dead wind machines, all creating a story without words.
Game focused on keeping the characters readable and easy to tell apart from the background.
And that’s it please play this one minute prototype I created during the weekend. and remember the amount of work it takes to make a readable design.
Due to traffic here’s stuff hosted on my site.
HTML5 version:
http://fernhw.com/game_files/html5_wind_machine/
Source files:
http://fernhw.com/game_files/The_wind_machine_source_files.zip
and don’t forget.
Appeal is the most important. A character design is first and foremost a visual description, please consider that the user should know everything they need to know of a character with a glance.
more at studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
Last weekend, I joined the 2017 Global Game Jam.
The theme this year was “WAVES” so everyone in the world had 48 hours to make a “WAVES” themed game.
HTML5 version:
http://fernhw.com/game_files/html5_wind_machine/
Source files:
http://fernhw.com/game_files/The_wind_machine_source_files.zip
Our site closed the first day from 8pm to 8am so we lost 12 hours of work, and my modded laptop needs to be plugged to a video card to work so… regardless, in the remaining time we finished a small 1 stage prototype of a game called THE WIND MACHINE, a game where wind(”Waves” theme) is the main mechanic. I opted on a fairy tale aesthetic and took my apprentice to see a game made from start to finish, the aesthetic meant we could create the game quick, I could have done it solo, but I took advantage to teach my apprentice a thing or two.
I’m not a hobbyist, I do this professionally and intend to make games with precise design aesthetics, It had to be readable and easy to play, I was the only game who asked a member of the audience to join in, to show that yes, your game needs to be played by others.
I did get a “That’s it?” from a lot with people playing a game, probably because it was set up as something bigger, we did design 4 other puzzles we didn’t manage to create, but instead of having two stages I wanted to have a small cut-scene and a nice tutorial.
http://blog.fernhw.com/post/156325551951/games-are-an-artistic-form-of-communication-we
more at studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
I control the whole thing with a pack of sugar and a camera.
The 3d objects are projected over the footage.
AR Experiments I did last year and I wanted to post for a while.
more at studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
Animation studies during the weekend
I was giving my little sister some tips on animating in photoshop this came out of it.
Dev Vlog#2
2015 edit:
Second discarded “first playable” prototype engine for Amy’s Escape the first one was done in flash this one was running on the GPU but this is Adobe Air, hard to port the game from Air, so after Project Sen I decided to either make my games proprietary engines in LUA or make them in Unity.
