My gift to Afrika Burn 2016: Drawing your #spiritcritter

05/16/2016

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tuism

I had an absolutely magical time at AfrikaBurn 2016.

As one of the 11 guiding principles of AfrikaBurn is Gifting, everyone attending should bring along something to gift to people, free of expectations of getting something back. It could be anything - bring something, give something, a skill, objects, anything. It is your form of self-expression, as long as you gift responsibly, anything goes.

About two weeks before the burn, I decided to go. With such a short timeframe, I didn’t have a clue what to gift, and after some brainstorming, this idea came to me - I would draw people their spirit animals. But not “spirit animals” - because then most people would say “dog” or “cat” or “horse” or “lion”. I wanted to gift them their very own creature. Like a Pokemon. Like Pokemon cards!

So I guillotined a bunch of cards, doodled this board, and off I went to the burn to meet people and gift them their spirit pokemon 🙂

Cg1J6PdWMAAgZx7

The gifting experience was simply incredible. I didn’t do nearly as many cards as I wanted to at the burn, I VASTLY underestimated my ability to meet people and draw these things quickly. I bought 500 blank cards with. I drew 30 by the end of the burn. And totally forgot to take photos of a bunch of them D:

Chatting to people about what they wanted their spirit creature to be was incredibly amazing. It gave a glimpse into their mind and their life, the part that might otherwise not have come out through small talk and pleasantries, and for that privilege I’m superbly grateful. I feel as if I got more out of my gift than I gave.

Throughout the burn, I learned that asking people “what is your spirit pokemon?” very easily resulted in answers like “Charizard!” and “Pikachu!”. So after the burn I rephrased the concept to Spirit Critter, and now I collect these babies daily in my dedicated #spiritcritter tumblr.

spiritcritter

For the longest time I had wanted an ongoing project that would hold my attention. Previously I did daily pokepeopledoodles for a while, but then I eventually got bored of translating pokemon into human form. This, translating real people into pokemon, is *so* much more interesting and meaningful, so this is going to be an ongoing thing for me.

Hope to meet you and your spirit critter someday!

Here are some of them: Catch more of them on the #spiritcritter tumblr!

Loved my Ludum Dare #33 - PokEscape

09/07/2021

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tuism

TL;DR: Had an amazing Ludum Dare, one week to go for rating LD33 games, so go play my game (available as web, windows, osx, linux):

Play PokEscape now!

Interpretive Dance

Last Ludum Dare, I went in with pre-conceived notions of what I was going to make, and I felt it would have been better if I didn’t. This time, I went in with a blank canvas. Hell, I didn’t even look at the theme list to prepare myself.

The theme was You Are the Monster - a theme quite a few jammers bemoaned because it’s quite close to a theme a few LDs back - You Are the Villain. I wasn’t around back then (darn kids, right?), but I vaguely had the feeling it was done before. I didn’t care though, brainstorm commenced, there were a few decent ones, but when our chatter made me laugh out loud, I knew I had to do it;

You’re a monster. You’re a pocket monster (pokemon). You’re the lamest pokemon ever. You’re Magikarp. No, you’re so lame, you’re Magicrap. But you want to be the best you can be. Which is Gyrados. No, Gyradeuce. The crap puns flowed. I laughed, and off I went.

A stealth game where you have to eat your cover

That was the final destination of the core mechanic brainstorm, and that turned out to be super important. There were many interpretations of that core mechanic alone - Initially the game was not going to be on a grid, and physics-based, so you would dash around the place and slide and roll, etc. A turn-based version was also considered. But eventually a real-time, grid-based system was decided upon because it was actually the most predictable in terms of building and balancing.

Art priorities: 1. Fast, 2. Acceptable

The process was fairly straightforward, I made placeholder art because I didn’t want to spend too much time on art in the beginning, and just like the previous LD, I didn’t really get a chance to update them later. I think this is pretty much going to be the norm rather than the exception. Make okay placeholder art, but don’t waste time on them initially.

I’m privileged in this regard because I’m an artist/designer primarily. But don’t worry, what advantage I have on art I make up in shortcomings on my coding side.

Three dee two dee

The one interesting thing that I feel like is worth talking about technically and art wise is the 3D/2D effect that I have, where the sprites order correctly. Anyone who knows about z-sorting knows it’s a chore, and I didn’t feel like making the game constantly read y values and re-assigning them to different layers at runtime. So I tinkered and came up with this:

3d2d

By tilting all the sprites at an angle, they overlapped correctly without having to programmatically set each sprite’s layer at runtime. The camera is a perspective camera with a limited field of vision, so it looks 2D, but is set in 3D.

I really liked how the effect came out - there’s a little 3Dness to it but still has the 2D charm that I love. And I didn’t need to make polygons 😛

In action

Initial feedback on the game was super cool 🙂 It’s currently sitting on 110 ratings, which I think is the highest I’ve had (though I can’t confirm this, don’t know how to look up past rating counts).

There’s also been a bit of coverage by some really awesome people 😀

By Indiegames.com

By Jupi