Thursday, March 20, 2014

New project

We haven't had much ready yet but still keep making ideas for new games. Now we have something new to show.

We made Flappy Skimmer Ride with Construct 2 and it seemed to be a good way to make simple games. I wanted to make an iOS-game and Gamesalad seems to be better to that.

Skimmer game was inspired by Space Quest I but we had some other ideas too. Old 8 bit Nintendo had a game called Kid Icarus. It had it's idea from Creek mythology. I like scifi so I replaced wings with rockets. And there it was. Rocket Ikaros. It will be different type of game but that's how the idea came up.

And of course I first designed logo for it. I work in advertising agency and sometimes logo is what we have to start with. Colors were inspired by Kid Icarus too.


I also made some artwork for protagonist. It still needs some work. Different colors maybe? Hands look funny too.


Rocket Ikaros will be simple game but it has small story too. And unlikely many more games these days I wan't to have it end if played long enough. I'd like to have kind of relaxed atmosphere to game. Like Elton Johns Rocket man. But let's see what composer can do. He's quite busy at the moment.

There's already playable version but it's ugly and and needs lots of work. But I have a good feeling about this.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Pixen - pixel art editor for mac

We took part to itch.io:s Flappy Jam and I needed pixel art editor for making graphics. Matt Rajcas Pixen is a good choice.

I had some experience with Pixen earlier but now I needed to download it again. I found out that Pixen is now paid app in mac App Store. But I was more than happy to pay for it. Making apps is not easy job and developers need money too. Often I see people complaining about paid apps but if you need it you buy it. Under 10 euros is not much for a productivity app.


Pixens interface is very simple and classic

Pixen has all the basic drawing tools, layers and even tools for animating. It supports also full screen mode, pinch zoom on the touchpad and Wacom tablets. You can set different tools to both mouse buttons. Only feature I sometimes miss is type tool.

Making pixel art is fun. It is like playing with Lego's. They never look realistic but you can still make awesome stuff. It also reminds me of Dr. Halo - program we used when we were kids. I think it came with Genius Mouse. With Dr. Halo we made lots of graphics for Space Quest inspired game. It had also some animation tools so we also made few simple animations of protagonist mostly just walking around. Back then we had also our first game made. It was called Death Boxing and I drew graphics with Dr. Halo.

I'll think I'll be spending more time with Pixen in near future. After Flappy Jam I got new idea for a game and I need to start sketching. I'll get back to that when I have something to show.