Hunter’s Tale First Trailer

has finally arrived! Check it out and share it if you liked it!

Let’s celebrate with a few screenshots

Hunter’s Tale – backstage images from trailer editing process

Evaluating the methodologies chosen during the last months and identificating new learnings – part 2

Facing the topic of self evaluation is always hard. As I’m constantly evolving in terms of new knowledges, everything I’ve done in the past seems rather incomplete, and not just stuff from previous years, even months!

I can say that some animations look like they have been made not by a pro-animator. I forced myself to change some of them during these bug-correcting days, to optimize the final result, but some of them (and having external feedback from different point of view, from blogs to forums etc… has both helped a lot and not) there’s just not the time to fix those…It’s strange when somebody says that something’s wrong with a sprite, or an animation, or a color palette and even if it’s no something THAT big, that will make your game look bad, STILL you realized that you want to change it but that would mean to work again on loads of more stuff that would make more pieces falling down like domino, so for now you are forced to stop.

Anyway, I’m of course still happy and satysfied about my work, and most of all abou the fact that the range of people that it’s watching it so far is also excited about it.

That would not have worked without the schedule we planned for the last months. The best, clockwork gear that has made all this possible has been our self managing capacities. The new stuff to learn and learn quickly has been a lot, more than we imagined, but I think we deal pretty well with it

I’m not talking just about myself: Giuseppe (the coder) has been experimenting a lot as it’s his biggest project so far too, there were a lo of days of going crazy about tiny details. Mauro Serra, the musician, has been dealing for the first time with a more “classical” way of composing and using instruments.

As far as for myself, working with animations using both photoshop and aseprite has been succesfull. Maybe I should have used aseprite more during the animations process, but I was getting more used to the PS interface.

As far as the new stuff I find myself to work with, the clock was ticking fast, so I make quick research on how to deal with them, and in the end the final result was working, so that was my main concern.

I hope that the final work will speak more than me about the success of our group. For me, so far, it does.

Identificating new learnings and evaluating the methodologies chosen during the last months

Aug25

I will never stop saying how a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing to make Hunter’s Tale a concrete game-

It’s not just a term of learning new tools, softwares or how to animate this or that movement. This has been my first real big project, and facing all that a sentence like that means has been for me the best improvement during the last months.

See how an idea this big has evolved, how we tried to fit the schedule but ending up doing everything with the right time but not in the way we planned…

There has been a lot of changes along the way: even if the graphics always stayed the same, the design of the game has changed a lot from our first draft; in terms of level design, the evolution was from an idea of open sidescrolling world, using depth just like Casle Crashers, then we thought having a traditional sidescrolling game would have been easier ad would have allowed us to build levels just like mazes, so that there would have been hidden areas and stuff like that. It felt wrong, though, and so we changed our mind again and made it for a “middle ground”, managing a way to have an open field with hidden areas. If you’ve seen one of the lastest videos you can see by yourself that it works quite well.

As far as my part, my schedule worked pretty fine, and even if I didn’t actually followed it (it depended on the days and what the coder guy needed) as long as it took me that amount of days to finish the animations for that character, who can concern about the fact that those days were mixed up and I did something different in between? Also, I think it helped not going insane about doing the same element for too much time: for example, it took me 4 weeks to finish all the main character animation, but I didn’t work only on the character for an entire month, I changed my topic everyday. I can say that the method worked very well, as I finished all my graphic work way earlier than I though. That didn’t mean my job was ended, of course.

Another important thing I learned is how you can end up doing completely different things. As for today, I did the graphics, the inengine level design of some levels, looked around the web for sound effects, recorded in a small studio other sound effects, managed the pr for the game so that the more people possible would have heard about it, helped the musician defyning the tone of the music pieces, writtend the dialogues…and that list is still counting! In the future I will edit the trailer and I’m curious, if we will choose to o crowdfunding, to see how we will manage that eventually.

That doesn’t mean that in terms of graphic I learn nothing: as I’ve said million times, I’ve faced for the first time how to animate man, figures, how to deal with a lot of different elements in the world of pixelart, both while I was doing all those other tasks

In the end it was just like running a small studio, and that’s been he most exciting and interesting thing to do. I’m trying to get some rest too.

Hunter’s Tale screenshot saturday and some updates

Aug23

Fun thing: I’ve been actually working with Giuseppe for about one year and a half, bu we never thought of giving a name or a logo to our duo until last day. Maybe it’s because it’s SO DAMN HARD. I will skip the looong shortlist of names we were trying to use (including every single possible title of movies we liked with the pixel word on it). We thought that the pixel word would have seemed to “force” us to work with pixelart only: this is why we eventually made the logo in pixelart, but we decided to call ourselves Bad Tempered Dev. You can see the moving logo down below. It features the two of us working and freaking out because BUGS. That has been pretty much exactly like the past two weeks, bu without punches and bazookas. You still can get the point.

Following that (you see an image and 6 lines of text but has actually been 3 days), I decided it was the right time to open an official website for the game. Wix worked wuite fine wih my personal portfolio website, so why don’t use it for the game too? It’s still simple, but it’s looking nice. You can see it here (still this took me the entire day, also because my laptop decided it was the right time to broke, see the irony in that, so I was forced to use an old laptop first and then get out to bu a new one. Thank you, old notebook!) :

http://hunterstale.wix.com/game

Last but not least, these are the new screenshots freshly made for the #screenshorsaturday, showing a shop (now full working!) and an old one from the swamp level design I forgot to show and that looks awesome and very rich in terms of details.

As concerns the richness of the shot above here, I wasn’t the one that thought it was awesome: it was voted as image of the day on gamedev.net!

Thanks again for the support!

http://www.gamedev.net/page/showdown/view.html/_/francesco-segala-r47375

Hunter’s Tale – recording the voices

Aug20

Something new this time!

Some friends at Studio Panopticon in Rome helped me recording the voices sounds for main character and the village habitants. It was mainly quick sounds of words, just like “hello!” “see you around!” or stuff like for the villagers (my friends did them) and the panting, yelling and dying sound for the main character (that I actually did).

One of them got a great voice so I decided to let him narrate the prologue of the game and trailer! He’s got a very trailer-ish voice, you’ll find out when you’ll see the trailer!

These are some stills from the day. It was fun!

Hunter’s Tale – more giant animation

Aug18

or actually the part when you see what you’ve done and looks terrible, therefore you reset and start back from square one.

I animated directly with aseprite, as the movement were pretty easy (pretty much just rotations) but they needed way more frames than the creatures I am used to animate: the arm below that, for example, is made of 32 frames. It’s a process that’s much more straightworward to build with aseprite directly.

These are new studies for the giant parts:

the arm movement, finally got it right

head movements, actually I need to change them a bit

the arm when the giant is screaming:

and finally a test animation, NOW WITH SOUNDS!

Hunter’s Tale – new bugs and stuff

Aug17

experiment for the village colour palette: day, dusk, night, dawn. will we be able to make a full day/night cycle? Hope so.

New electric zapp: the old one didn’t seem to work that much :S

and finally, to vary the environment more, we decided to att fog too! this is an early test with a sample background, the final effect will look pretty much like this!