Anime Style Animation - WIP

Last week I teamed up with my cousin Jatinder Singh to start work on a anime style animation. Jatinder is a very talented artist and is currently studying at an art school in London, Elephant & Castle. We always planned to work on a project together because we both have some brilliant ideas and we both possess skills that complement each other.

Currently Jatinder is working on the concept art and is drawing up some characters that we want to put in this animation. We definately know the main story and jist of it and we already have a lead character, 'Monkey Boy'. We are also going to elimnate the need for sound effects or voice acting and just have music playing through, which will suit the mood of the emotion.

I won't go into too much detail about the story until we have a more solid concept and made a few more decisions on setting. What I can say is that it is about a boy (Monkey boy) alone in a dead and deserted city (think of 'I Am Legend'), he seems lost but hears this blissful music, and he goes in search to find the source of the music, hoping to find someone.

I've been doing some test renders, trying to get the cell shading similar to animes, and found a very useful 3ds Max plugin that generates building blocks (Greeble).

Below are some concept drawings of monkey boy that Jatinder did and some test renders I did in 3ds Max.

The Temple - WIP

I had an idea for a game concept a while back, which I only decided to start developing and refining a few weeks ago. As I am a massive Star Wars fan, I was heavily influenced by it and in reality if I were to describe this game, it would be an IP of Star Wars, cue intro:

"Thousands of years after the events of 'Star Wars: Episode VI', the Jedi are merely a myth..... Nothing remains of their existence, just ruins and evidence of years of battles.... A young archaeologist and scholar in history believes the Jedi race to really have exist and goes in search for evidence.... He arrives at the planet Yavin IV, which is now a dead planet covered in desert.... He finds the ruins of the Massassi Temple and so his journey of discovery begins...."

This is basically the idea that I imagined, but I am not going to use any reference to Star Wars or Jedi for that fact, because in this setting Jedi don't exist and no one knows about them. This young archaeologist/tomb raider just happens to discover some sort of energy/force in the temple ruins he is searching and unlocks this force within himself, then go on to face his dark side, which is just an evil version of himself.

It is not meant to be a long game, just a demo for my portfolio, but even so it takes a lot of time and is a very long process when doing it alone. I am planning to make all models low-poly, say to the standard of a PS2 game. This will help save a bit of time and give me a chance to go through the process of making my game efficient and optimising it as much as possible. I am planning to use the open source graphics engine OGRE3D, its a very popular engine and will save me a lot of time that I wouldv'e spent trying to optimise the graphics. There are many plugins that people have developed for OGRE too, and hopefully with some more research and testing I will be able to find a physics engine/plugin for this game too. I mean the main purpose of creating this game is to get experience in developing games and I don't want to start re-inventing the "wheel" as they say, so I will try to get my hands on all major parts of a game from whatever sources I can. I have recently downloaded the evaluation edition of the Havok engine, so I am going to look into this more and setup a working environment for it.

Below are scans of some concept sketches for 'The Temple' and a couple of screens of the main character model I've done so far (beware concept drawings are rough).



As usual I would appreciate any comments, thanks!

Dragonball Z Mini Flash Game

I haven't posted my work as much as I should be, you could say I'm not the "blogger type" but I will try and make much more of an effort.


So here is something I did just today, I wanted to get something up and just put my game development knowledge into practise with something I'm very familiar with, Flash. I programmed in AS3 and did minimal artwork to save myself time. I will however go back and improve the overall artwork and animation of the main character. I also wanted to put a cut-scene at the beginning to give a reason to why he is blasting rocks in the air using his "qi" (a term used to explain a persons life force energy, some people may know this as "chi"). Anyway, I wanted to use an existing concept so that people that play this would be able to understand the premise of the game and/or charcter, so if you're an anime fan you would recognise this as Dragonball Z. As this game is just for practise and demo purposes I didn't seem the harm in using someone elses concept.

Sprites provided by http://sdb.drshnaps.com/SpritesSNES.htm

You can play my game by clicking here

Controls:

• Move: Up, Down, Left, Right
• Attack: Ctrl
  

I would appreciate any comments, thanks!