Hi! I'm Joana! I make games, art, and art for games!
There has been a very big increase in games that feature animated text. It is quite useful to convey emotion and pacing in games that have no voice acting. I’ve been very interested in such a system for a long time.
So, during my summer vacation,
I decided to work on a similar system for learning purposes in my spare time. As I kept sharing my development on it, people kept asking where they could get it, so I took a little extra time to polish it and make it more usable to an end user, and made it available to the comunity at large.
LowRezJam 2016 ran for the last two weeks (with this week being the voting period), and I had the urge to participate with a very old idea!
The Summit is an action game, with some elements borrowed from survival games and RPGs. The game takes place at the summit of a mountain, where a horrible battle took place. Your company is dead, but your target is nowhere to be found. It’s up to you, the sole survivor, to brave the dangers of the summit to find her, while surviving the ferocious animals, crippling cold and natural hunger.
The animation on Princess Canary was fairly fast to make. After I rigged all the characters in engine, Frederico helped me out a bit by making Princess Canary’s running animation and Prince Cardinal’s idle and fall (I gave him a simple sketch of what I had in mind for reference).
Here are Princess Canary’s and Perilous Cunning’s animations I did. The latter ended up not being used on the jam version, but they may return on a post jam update.
One of the things I promised myself for this last Global Game Jam was that I wanted to get away from Pixel Art. I’m already doing far too many games in pixel art as it is. It’s not that I don’t like it anymore (I mean, Torn is my baby and it’s still very much pixel art, and I’ll get some updates on it soon!), I just wanted a breath of fresh air!
Another thing I wanted to try was 2D skeletal animation. I’ve been inspired for quite a while to mimic the beautiful styles of Aquaria and Vanillaware’s games Odin Sphere and Oboro Muramasa. I have tried before with Candy Gulp, but I never finished the game.
One day I’ll tackle a full 2D (non pixel) art game with skeletal animation, but for now, I got my fix with Princess Canary!
I didn’t have a lot of time to make very fancy art (being two days and all), and after the first day I realized that making the polished art I was expecting would take far too long. So I decided to take an easier approach with the tools I had at my disposal: Vector Art! I penciled the characters in a drawing notebook, took photos of them with my phone, uploaded them to my computer and worked on them on Inkscape!
It took a while to find out a style I was happy with, and in the end I went for flat colors to be able to work faster. Princess Canary ended up being a lot different from her sketch (mainly her wings and a shorter torso) because of this. Once I had a style in place, the other 2, Prince Cardinal and Perilous Cunning, were far more straight-forward.
Even so, making this type of art ended up being very costly in terms of time. Splitting the body parts and making smooth joints is by far
the hardest part, and some of them were less than perfect as a result.
We ended up not putting the Perilous Cunning in because it took me so long to make the assets. There wasn’t enough time to put it in and hook it to the rest of the game, even though I had made some animations for it already. She was supposed to be the “antagonist” on each level, singing against Princess Canary to prevent her from escaping! But we were still able to include the two most important characters to tell the story in. The Perilous Cunning will probably be back once we get around to making a version outside of the jam!
Global Game Jam #16 was just last month and I participated again, of course!
The result is Princess Canary, a rhythm game where you play as the titular character, who sings her way out of a tower before the prince has a chance to rescue her. She’s far too stubborn and strong to be at the whims of some prince!
