Panda Town - Hotel Room

I find that working on at least two projects at a time is a good practice, so long as time constraints are imposed on neither.  This way, when one project starts to wear on my soul, it can be temporarily dropped in favor of the other.  By the time the second project becomes a grind, the attractiveness of the first project has freshened.

Finding myself in this situation with Panda Town, after realizing that the art of drawing sprites was quite tedious and time consuming, I allowed the project to take a back seat for a month or two in favor of a Resource Container project which is a concept I've been tinkering with in one form or another for the past couple years. Over the last week I've found myself in a position with that project which is fostering a renewed interest in Panda Town, namely the position of being sick of thinking about the project.

So here we are, firing up Panda Town development again, and with a lot of the initial graphic work out of the way, I'm free to start focusing on the story line and puzzle aspects of the game.  While I haven't solidified things so much that I want to start talking about the concept of the game, I can say the format is going to be puzzle based insomuch as you are confronted with the puzzle of how to use various available items together in the proper sequence and time frame in order to achieve an end.  I'm sure this genre has a proper name but I do not know what it is nor do I have the patience right now to look it up.  Why I've chosen this genre is a subject of a potential future post, but not today's.

Current State of the Hotel Room

Where is the project at?  As I noted above most of the initial sprite work has been done and the general room layout is setup to my satisfaction.  There's more graphic work to be done, namely animation, which I feel is going to be even more draining than the initial development, but this level of completion gives me a test bed on which to develop the story and puzzles.  I've posted an image of the hotel room in which the game takes place and while I'll be cleaning up some of the graphics as time goes on, the image gives the general idea of how the game is going to look and feel.  Tonight I'm going to start really diving into puzzle design as this afternoon I came up with a better mechanism for laying out the story and puzzles than notes in a notebook which I found to be too static for my liking (probably the topic of a future post again, that's two, two future post topics in this post, ah ha hah).

Panda Town Sprite Development

Since this is my first official post about the Panda Town project, for those not yet familiar with the project, it's probably also the first you're hearing about it.  To give you the brief intro, Panda Town is a game I'm working on, the engine of which is entirely Javascript (though the game definition is housed in a tripple-store and delivered asynchronously to the game engine upon request).  Graphics are courtesy of HTML5's canvas element (which is an element with a LOT of potential for those of you who haven't played with it yet).  I'll post more about the engine itself in the future but right now we're talkin' graphics.

Being my first venture into Sprite Graphics (I don't know why I capitalized those words), I'm having to draw and re-draw a lot of the work, but some of the elements are starting to coming together.  I want a bit of a retro feel to my work, something maybe reminiscent of Zak McKracken or Monkey Island (the early Monkey Island, not the newer stuff (which is also solid work) ).  My primary tool thus far has been Photoshop and my best friend in Photoshop has been the 1px pencil tool which gives the image the blocky feel that I'm looking for.

A Panda and his coffee

Working with the constraints of individual pixels and the constraints of a particular feel has been a great exercise thus far.  The medium, while challenging, is also somewhat rewarding, especially for someone who still loves the classic feel of Maniac Mansion or Lolo. Just changing a couple pixels can have a huge effect on the way the image is perceived since you're dealing outside of realism and have to trick the eye into seeing some degree of continuity.  

As I get further into the drawing I'll probably post some more teasers.  At the moment I'm waiting until I figure out what I want the floors and walls to look like (and by that I mean waiting until I have the patience to draw the floors and walls) to post any full rooms.  I also hope to talk a little more about the engine soon since it's close to being done.