…and in with the new!
It’s June (and has been for a while now) which means it’s time for two more 2-week sprints on Friendship Club. For this first sprint, Sophie and I have been working on a new environment, Old Man Ricketts’ Wonky Wagon saloon. More on that from Sophie in another blog post, but let me just explain what we’ve been doing over the last few sprints.
The characters have been completely re-made for the recent builds, including improved run cycle, idle and taunt animations — no dash yet! All of which was done in a piece of vector animation software called Spine by Esoteric Software. It brought with it a bunch of awesome new things, like interpolation between frames & animations and the ability to animate with a skeleton rig, but it also presented a bunch of problems for Ashley to solve, such as mesh animation and texture quality issues. Thankfully these have been ironed out, either by regular updates to the Spine software (thanks Nate!) or Ashley’s pro coding skills.
In addition to the animations of the characters, there are things people may not necessarily pay attention to; New game menus, start screens, in-game UI (including new avatars for the corners of the screen and for the end of a round), scoring UI, rug animations, new floor tiles, modified wall tiles, a bunch of objects (some of which aren’t in the game) and different game mode assets. We have also been white boarding the Friendship Club universe in general, a lot of theory craft for game modes and art we’d like to include or that Nick and Ashley want to see.
Outside of the game, we’ve been working on two trailers, one being for Steam Greenlight, which required title card artwork, voiceovers & editing, and the other being involved with the Game Jolt header take over.
Also: we made MERCH!
T-shirts, badges/buttons, stickers and a large roller banner, for going away to events such as GEEK 2014 and Play Blackpool. Come find us if you’d like one!
We’ll be at Radius Festival in London tomorrow (Friday 20th) and at Games Brittania in Sheffield on the 28th/29th.
And finally, the Friendship Club website.
So thats what we’ve been up to for the last few weeks. In case you missed it in the latest blog update, here’s a sneak peek at The Wonky Wagon! Oooooh.
Say nice things to me personally on Twitter. Or, grab the team on Facebook, Twitter or right here on Game Jolt. :)
Tom Boot
Clockwork Cuckoo
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