Welcome back followers of the fearsome!
Nick’s gotten back from his awesome Memphis trip, so there’s not too much news on the development side of things. However, we hired the amazing Creative Shift Studio to revamp our offices a bit, and last week we received got our new super cool Human Scale desks and monitor arms! These bad boys are height-adjustable and can take us from a sitting to a standing position in mere seconds! Yay for our spines!
We took the opportunity to clean out the office as well, and now there’s room for so many activities!
Here’s a before and after pic of Jesse! Notice the horrible posture while sitting, but the amazing posture while working standing up.
Alright, next week there will be more ‘DEV” in the Dev-Blog, we promise! Once we’re sick of adjusting the height of our desks every 5 minutes, we’ll probably get some actual work done. :)
Till next week! Keep those turtle cannons blasting!
Follow us on twitter: Nick: @nickwaanders Jesse: @jouste SlickEntertainment: @slickentinc
Posted by: Jesse Under: Slick Entertainment
Welcome back followers of the fearsome!
It’s Jesse here with some super cool information on how we slay out all our art here at Slick! If this goes by alright we’ll be returning to this format every now and again much like Nick’s “Waanderful-Tech” posts!
To start I thought I’d take you guys through the process of art creation here with a brand new character just for this Dev-Blog post. Now we are still getting some things ironed out with our new project but we’ll stay in the same theme which happens to be a sort of a wacky fairy-tale cartoon world with a slightly dark edge. I like drawing in every genre pretty much but I find that fantasy tends to resonate with people the most, probably because they were raised on all these classic ideas of dragons and swashbuckling. Dragon’s and swashbuckling? That sounds like a great starting point, let’s work on some sort of pirate-dragon!
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Step 1: Rough Ideas, and I mean ROUGH
Now that there’s an idea rattling around in my head I’ll start scribbling down some ideas. This is actually the most fun I have drawing because there’s no rules. Plus a lot of rough sketchy stuff tends to look cooler as your brain has a good time making sense of the messy lines. Here we see that there is definitely some elements that are coming up, we got the classic cutlass in the sash, a parrot atop his tail, and even a nice big hat to emphasize his grizzled head. We’ll make him the first mate and call him Scalesbeard for now.
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Step 2: Refinement Pass with some tighter brushes
Now that Scalesbeard has got it going on we’ll refine him and his parrot friend with a slightly tighter brush and get those ideas less abstract. The entirety of Shellrazer was drawn with 3 Photoshop brushes so we’ll use the same tools to make our sea-faring dragon. I tend to draw mostly from my head when it comes to making stuff for the worlds here at Slick. Reference is always super awesome but when it needs to be done faster I draw from my gut and just get it down. We can see that we added quite a bit of embellishments to those scratchy shapes, the attitudes of the character and his props really start showing up in this phase. Things like the hooked tail and the pistols in the sash are drawn with more confidence because we are more familiar with the character now and can safely say “Sure, Scalesbeard would totally have those!”.
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Step 3: Color and shade that action!
The last pass I usually do for fast stuff like this is going over the refined lines again with a static brush. This brush has no sensitivity and keeps the lines even. I fill everything with flat colors and then throw a 40% black over the whole character and “Scoop” out areas of light with the lasso tool. This may not be the prettiest way of adding dimension but it’s super quick and gets the point across. With our new game in the works I’ve been experimenting with some other styles of shading and coloring but the game will definitely have the same visual feel of Shellrazer. So here’s our first mate Scalesbeard! If he were to be animated I’d start chopping his parts up in a puppet fashion and get to animating a few different states for him.
And there we have it! a quick look at how some goofy stuff gets made up here! I hope you enjoyed this small sample of how art gets done up around here at the Slick office and be sure to tune in next week for another super cool Dev-Blog. Let us know if you’d like to see some more goofy art stuff on here in the comments! And if you too are a fierce drawbarian and have any questions about being an artist on a small team just fire away and I’ll be sure to answer them! Have a great week everybody!
-Jesse
Follow us on twitter: Nick: @nickwaanders Jesse: @jouste SlickEntertainment: @slickentinc
Posted by: Jesse Under: Art Work,Slick Entertainment
Welcome back followers of the fearsome!
This week was one crazy week. We shipped Shellrazer on Android as a free app with an in-app-purchase to unlock all levels, and we got over 450,000 (!) downloads since last Friday. Sweet! Thank you to all the people giving Shellrazer a go on Android!
I thought in this weeks dev-blog we’d give a little update on how things transpired.
We launched on Wednesday, and we fixed a few minor issues preventing the game from being installed on some devices. On Thursday things were slowly picking up, and then on Friday we were featured on the Google Play store. Open the floodgates! Very quickly we had 50,000 downloads and, as expected, a number of support issues. Since I’m the sole programmer on the team, if kinda felt like the picture below. :)
I worked through the weekend to fix one particularly big issue on the Samsung Galaxy S3. For some users the inputs were lagging so much that the game was completely unplayable. This freaked me out a little, because it seemed to affect only certain models in the USA, and I didn’t have access to a phone of exactly that model. I changed a bunch of things in the code, and had a few of the people who emailed me about the problem test it on their device (Thanks a ton! You know who you are!), and confirmed that it was in fact fixed. We updated the game to 1.21 yesterday morning, and things seem to have calmed down a bit.
One particular thing players seem to dislike is that Shellrazer is listed in the Free games list, yet it requires an In-App-Purchase to unlock all levels. When we hired our Toll-Troll, he thought it was going to be the job of a lifetime to collect the toll from people, and he was super excited to start his job on Wednesday. He had to endure quite a bit of abuse and one star ratings, so he’s had a rough few days! Poor guy.
I thought I’d address why we chose this model of a free game with an in-app-purchase to unlock the rest.
When we designed Shellrazer for iOS, it was our intent to make it a paid game, and have completely optional in-app-purchases for things like a coin doubler (the bookie) and coin packs. We made an effort to make sure the in app purchases aren’t required to have fun in the game. People with skill should be allowed to play the entire game without ever having to buy a coin pack. I think we managed to achieve this goal very well, and we’re happy with how the game isn’t pushing in-app-purchases on you.
When we started working on Shellrazer for Android, we wanted to use the same model: a paid game with optional in-app-purchases. However, when we first uploaded a test version of the game to Google Play we saw that the game was compatible with 1701 different Android devices! That’s a huge number of devices! We can’t possibly test on all those devices, and the last thing we wanted was somebody buying the game and then finding out that it doesn’t work on their device. That would really suck. So instead we decided it might be a good idea to make the game free, and have an in app purchase to unlock all levels. That way people can try the game first, and if it works properly on their device and they like it, they have the option to buy the rest of the levels. Great! … right? … right?
Something we probably haven’t made clear enough in the game, or possibly people aren’t aware of, is that there are two types of in app purchases. There are consumable and non-consumable in app purchases. Consumable purchases are things like coin-packs: one-off boosts to your number of coins. Non-consumable purchases are things that stay linked to your Google Account forever, just like when you buy a game. The bookie and the unlock all levels are non-consumable purchases. So if you install the game on a new phone, and you use the same Google account, the Game will have the levels unlocked and the bookie installed right away, because these purchases are stored in your Google Account. So in a way, buying the in app purchase for all levels is the same thing as buying a paid game, except you can try it out first and see if you like it.
Alright, I think that’s all for this week. I hope it cleared a few things up!
Again, thanks a ton for playing our game, it’s pretty awesome to have this many players so quickly. 1 million players, here we come!!
- Nick
Posted by: Jesse Under: Shellrazer,ShellRazer Dev-blog,Slick Entertainment
Wow, what’s that above here? Another Dev-Blog of the Beast?! That’s right!
Today Shellrazer came out for Android on the Google Play store! You can find it here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slickentertainment.Shellrazer
For Android we made the game free for 10 levels, after which you’ll find the way forward blocked by a toll-troll. You can bribe him to let you through and raze the rest of the levels, how sweet is that! Our goal is to have as many people as possible try our game and see if they enjoy it. It’s a different model than the iOS version (which is a paid app), but we thought we’d try it out. If this model does really well on Android, then maybe it’ll be worth experimenting with a similar version for iOS. I guess we’ll know in a few weeks!
It’s been a bit of work getting my engine ready for Android, but it’s finally done. Some people commented before that I should have just outsourced the conversion to Android, but I wanted to do the conversion myself to make sure that the engine was Android-ready for the next game we do. I’ve got this system set up where I can develop the game entirely on the PC (Visual Studio ftw!), and then flip a switch and the Android version or the iOS version is generated for me almost without . If I had outsourced the Android build, this would have been a lot more difficult to get right. Give a man a fish vs. teach a man how to fish kind of thing.
Alright, that’s all for this weeks dev-blog, start up those turtle cannons on the Android!
- Nick
Posted by: Jesse Under: Shellrazer,ShellRazer Dev-blog,Slick Entertainment
Welcome back followers of the fearsome!
This week we have another blast of baddies and some game ideas for Star-Razer! More of another fluffy art post but Nicks been super busy hammering away at some tools and getting that Waanderful Engine of his implementing new things. So lets just sit back and get our alien-enemy on!
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Here’s some of those Starsquatches we saw in earlier posts. We wanted them to be a tough race to take on so we thought about minefields, bunkers and other defensive structures. Attacking a Starsquatch Asteroid base should be a tricky mission, Starsquatches are one of the only races tough enough to have space-faring marine type units that really pack a punch for their small size. Playing around with the “blasteroid” idea paved way for floating gun emplacements attached to slowly spinning asteroids.
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Talking with a few friends at the Full-Indie last week the Refractor race really seemed to resonate with some of them. That got us brainstorming some ideas on what their battle-asteroid could look like and what enemies you would need to take on. Making some enemies more monstrous in appearance and attacks could really mix things up. The Man-O-War for example would pummel your ships as well as zap them with lasers. We also toyed around with the idea that the Refractors could bounce beams off of pylons to nail your ships, so you would need to take down the pylons before approaching the crawlers.
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Enough of the spaceships, lets get some monsters up in here! Here’s the Crabulons, scary shelled space creatures with armored carapaces and scary beams mounted on them! We were thinking Crabulons would be an entry level asteroid where you’d deal with mindless creatures and get the hang of the game being more physical than your average space shooter.
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So another week blasts by! We’ve been doing some planning and looking into the future here at Slick and will let you guys know what’s happening next week! Sorry for another fluffy art post but we never want to miss a week with you guys! Have a great week all and we’ll be seeing you next time here on Dev-Blog of the Space!
-Jesse
Posted by: Jesse Under: Star Razer
