Late Night Dispatch

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated the Stage! blog, so I’m going to crosspost this.

So I did some more drawing for Stage! today. Sadly, while I got some more design work done, I’m still not sure about some of the decisions I made, and suspect I’ll have to do some more drawing tomorrow to get closer to where I wanted things to be. As well, I didn’t get any panels or pages drawn, which is a growing problem.

I got a call from a friend who asked me to recreate a logo in vector format, so I had to stop drawing. However, that logo is finished, so I should be back to work on Stage! tomorrow.

Anyway, I’m done for the night. Hope everyone is doing well.

Lee.

Stage! Development Blog - Supplemental 2008 08 07

Still writing the added art direction notes to the script. Probably going to have to take this in stages *cough*, because it’s taking longer to write these notes than it probably would to just improvise them in the drawing stage, which is being neglected. I plan on doing some drawing today, once I have the notes for the first scene blocked out.

A thought occurs to me because of the level of expression I’m imbuing the charactrers with, given that this is largely a dialogue skit with a number of expressions inherent in the lines themselves. I may have to do a slight redesign of my characters to give them slightly more facial detail, so that I’ll be able to properly convey their expressions. I’m not used to using highly simplified facial features to deliver a complex array of emotions. Mostly, the trick is with the eyes. Too simple eyes make it very hard to get complex emotions across convincingly, and my cartooning skills may not be up to it. I may have to do some sketches just to see if I can accomplish certain expressions effectively.

Okay, enough dawdling. Much work left to do.

Stage! Development Blog Pt. 3 - May The Script Be With You

Okay, Deirdra did a very cool Flash animation of the title screen, which I got to see today. I think we’re going to make you fine folks wait to see that though. Gotta save some surprises.

Meanwhile, I have a load of work to do to get caught up on after losing ground over the last three days. I have lost of drawing to do, but I also still have loads of script rewriting to do.

To explain why that takes so long, first take a look at this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Stage! Now in Technicolour!

Ladies and gentlemen, I now present to you Stage!’s very first in-game screenshot:

I inked and coloured this in Flash, and plan on assembling subsequent pieces straight into the game once they, too, get drawn. Since I already had the sense to develop a small prototype, the skeleton functionality for the game is programmed in; all that remains to do is plug in some content. This is pretty much the reason why I’m now helping out with the artwork in the first place. Lee was going to do it all himself originally, but since I pretty much had no more real programming to do and Lee was seeming a bit swamped, we decided that having him do the sketches and me doing the ink and colour would be a good way to divvy up the work a little better while still keeping a unified style throughout. So far, it seems to be working okay.

Stage! Development Blog - Supplemental 2008 07 31

Right. So work is getting done, but I’m starting to get a tiny bit antsy. I’ll probably take a walk shortly and run a few errands. But meanwhile, I thought I’d post a couple of massive screenshots, to show what I’m working on right now.

The first screenshot shows me scanning some of my thumbnails, so I can finally share my design document with Deirdra. The second displays the process of grabbing and rewriting the script in fully fleshed-out form.

As you can see from the brackets at the top of the page on the left-hand side of the second screencap, the directions for the art in each panel go into the little rectangles you see beneath the panel listings below, many of which I’m still filling in as I go.

I have a preconceived notion in my head of how some of these shots are supposed to go, but many more are just empty panels in my head that I’m having to solve one line at a time. I’m trying to leave just enough information out so that I’m still creating something on the fly, but offer enough detail to make sure I don’t leave out anything important.

Now, technically, I don’t have to do all of these steps ahead of time if I’m just working from the basic script and drawing everything myself (minus inks and colours, which Deirdra is doing). The object of thumbnailing and then scripting all of the panels ahead of time is to give me an idea of how much room I have for the dialogue, which was written before the plan to render the game in comic form was decided on.

If on the day we finally fly the text into place we find that the text is still too dense, we’ll do some spot rewriting to make things fit better. Probably trim off some fat and tighten up the jokes too, if we’re lucky. The object is to make the dialogue read as rhythmically smooth as possible without sacrificing the meaning or some of the better gags and quips. It’s about getting the pace just right, after the fact.

Right. Supper’s Ready is almost over. Think it’s time to go run those errands. If I can’t get back into script writing when I get back, I may do some cartooning instead, to get these character designs fleshed out once and for all.

Later!

Stage! Development Blog - 2008 07 30

So the first page has been pencilled. It’s been sent off to Deirdra to take a stab at inking and colouring. If I haven’t handed her something that she can’t work with, we should see the first official page before long. Most of the work will be kept until the game is released, but periodically I plan on showing off pencils and maybe coloured pages for promotional purposes.

So let’s see what we have to show and tell today:

The script for this page simply reads:

SCENE 1 START

PAGE 1
LOGO against red CURTAIN; LOGO hanging from ropes tied to tops of letters.
[Curtain raises automatically after short delay; Musical cue?]

The colours should come out just a little bit like this mockup I use as a userpic on LJ:

So there you have it. Things are finally under way on the visual end. Check back periodically to see more goodies.

Stage! Blog Supplemental… oh, I have no idea what the numbering scheme’s supposed to be anymore.

I hate project management. I’m just not cut out for it. I don’t find any enjoyment in getting other people organized; I would much rather allow someone else to do the organizing so I can focus more on what I really love doing, which is being creative. And yet, as this project muddles through, even though it’s only being worked on by two people, the need for organization and structure is as clear and present as ever. Hence, I’ve found myself stepping in and trying with all my might to fill that role.

Keeping organized is hardest when your team works exclusively over the internet, which is what we’re doing, because we live an expensive six-hour plane ride away from each other. I wouldn’t do this under normal circumstances — I do the majority of my game development on my own, or in an office in which I’m being paid — but I’m making an enormous exception here because Lee is a close, trusted friend of mine, he has really good ideas, and he’s promised not to disappear on me like other internet teammates tend to do. That said, I often feel like we’re handicapped because we can’t work together in the same room and sketch things out for one another to better explain our ideas for the game. Today, I just discovered that we were pretty much working from different design documents, thus making for a lot of scrapping and starting over on one or both of our parts.

Slowly but surely, however, we’re coming up with better ways to get organized despite this handicap. We’ve been meeting over IM at least once a week to discuss various issues, and at the moment, we’re in the process of figuring out a more convenient, step-by-step method to coordinate our work so we won’t fall into this pitfall again. Time will tell whether it all works out in the end, but I’m hoping things go well… if this game gets finished, it will be my first in terms of unpaid team projects, and that in itself will be an accomplishment.

Stage! Development Blog - Supplemental 2008 07 25

Nice short update this time.

Okay, I spent the better part of the last week or so talking about ideas I had for added interactivity to Stage!. However, after talking with Deirdra The Wiser, I have come to the conclusion that I’m jumping at shadows. So we’re going to continue on as we were, and try to get a working demo up and running so we can get a feel for just how interactive the story does or does not feel.

So Deirdra is going to work on the text-only demo, and I’m going to work on the actual breakdown script, so I can sort out what’s happening in the panels, now that I have the page layouts more or less finalized (a few decisions I made during the original pass are a little suspect). Still no new art to show off, but I’m hoping to have something pretty to look at sometime in the next week or so.

Ta!

A brief note from the programmer.

Hello, folks. Just thought I’d drop in and make a post of my own to this little development blog of ours, to let you know I’m here and alive and plugging away at the more technical side of Stage! (or will be, once I get my brain working again… just got back from a lengthy vacation, you see). To tell you the truth, I’m not all that sure I’ll have much to say of note in general, seeing as a) I’m generally more of a person who’d rather get things done than spend too much time talking about them, and b) unlike Lee, whose fingers almost constantly drip with paragraphs upon paragraphs of honeyed prose, I’ve always been a woman of brevity.

Side note: Amusingly enough, this latter tendency came to manifest itself in the script we’ve been co-writing; much of my dialogue is short and to the point, whereas much of Lee’s is lengthy and novelesque, even after I went and trimmed some of it down. Gradually, we’re getting said script to look more unified, so hopefully the final product won’t demonstrate this too obviously.

Another side note: For the programmery types in the room, when we mention “scripting”, we’re usually talking about writing a script in the story sense, rather than writing ActionScripts or coding in some other scripting language. This note is probably totally unnecessary, but I just thought I’d put it out there, because even I get confused by this terminology sometimes.

Anyway, yeah. So far, what I’ve been trying to do is get a reasonable prototype of the game up and running in Flash. Pretty simple so far, though things may get more complicated if Lee’s ideas in the last post wind up flying by me. Thing is, I’m the lazy kind of programmer who’d rather not implement extra features if I don’t deem them necessary. (Sort of like my writing style. Go figure.) But we shall see…

Stage! Development Blog - Supplemental 2008/07/20

Well, it’s been a pretty quiet weekend, so I figure I should add some noise just so folks have something to read. I’m crossposting this to LiveJournal, because I can, and because I feel like talking to a few more people who don’t know what I’m doing over here.

I woke up thinking about Stage! and how it needs something more interactive to make up for all of those pages where all you do is read and flip the page. I know I have to write a full script with scene details and Pop-Up Video-type comments about anything shown in the background. I’m actually going to have to draw a lot of background stuff, at least in the big panels, and I’m definitely going to have to map things out in such a way that, when I plan the blocking notes, I’ll know what ought to be in the background of each major shot.

If I could handle 3D modelling software, I’d take a stab at modelling the stage and working out the shots that way, but ultimately, it’s work of a different kind, and if I could do 3D modelling better, this project might not have happened to begin with.

I may actually need to do a bit of research to figure out some stuff I’ve forgotten about basic stage mechanics. I was never a member of a stage crew for a theatrical production, so I don’t have first hand knowledge of all of those cute little details that stage hands know. However, doing this research will give me a chance to come up with humourous comments about anything not bound by the set or the parts of the play that we don’t get to see. Sometimes you just have to give everything you can think of, and in a setting this small and contained, that means the deity of your choice is in the details.

I’ve been playing with an idea of designing an actual puzzle to go along with all of this stuff. Strictly non-compulsory, though I am thinking there might be some uses for this added interactivity, as an optional ‘oh crap’ button. I may have to run the idea past Deirdra just to see if she thinks it will fly, but I was thinking of sneaking some literal puzzle pieces into some of the panels, and that, when enough are gathered up, the player is given an opportunity to reverse some misfortune and continuing on where the play would have come to a premature ending. I’m also thinking that, if used at the end of one of the more complete endings, it might yield a new scene after the stage rehearsal is over; a sort of prelude of things to come.

Anyway, none of this is set in stone (or even pixels), and Deirdra isn’t back yet to run the ideas past, so I may just be spinning my wheels for nothing. Still, I may sit down and do a little bit of preliminary scripting, along with that research I mentioned, just to see if I can get a leg up and show these ideas off in the best possible light. I’m making a lot of extra work for myself, but somehow, it just feels right. We’ll see.

Lee.