Gray

Started by Fitz, Wed 22/09/2010 15:26:07

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Fitz

The Game is Released!!
>>> THE INVASION STARTS HERE <<<



THE ALIEN INVASTION STARTS ON NOVEMBER 30!!!

After two years and three months in development, and some recent, unexpected hurdles, the game is finally allllmost there. The final round of beta testing is almost over and I'm adding some final touches here and there. So unless we get invaded by aliens, the game will premiere on Friday, November 30! Check for more news at the bottom of this post.

The game tells a story of Gray - an alien living on the moon. One day he decides to (drumroll!) go visit Earth. And as he speeds through the atmosphere - surprise, surprise! - something goes wrong with the ship and - SURPRISE! - Gray crash-lands in a corn-field. What he has to do now is... Yes, you guessed it: find the ship and go home. How original indeed!  ::)

Gray is your good ol' point'n'click adventure game - with a smart and somewhat sarcastic protagonist. Expect him to say something about everything he sees, do crazy things and have a snide comment for every one of your failed efforts.

Gray quickly makes new friends - both humans...


...and little critters of nature...


The game runs in 320x240 and utilizes only four colors: dark blue, red, orange and beige. I love experimenting with limited palettes, my webcomic also makes heavy use of three-four color sets. This time, however, it's more than just my whim - in Gray the four colors play a vital role. So I really hope the above screenshots didn't make your eyes bleed!

Here's a little walking cycle of Gray:


and for those who liked the farmer, here are two idleness animations of the hygiene-aware redneck:


UPDATE: October 1, 2010

The game's got a musician on the team now :D Swordofkings128 contacted me last week and offered help - which I was more than happy to accept! The guy's a real pro! His creativity and versatilty never cease to amaze me. Here's a sample of a beautiful in-game music track he did. Click to play!


And here's the location that the song is for:


UPDATE: November 10, 2010

Swordofkings128, who's supplying the music for the game, made a whole bunch of wonderful background themes for different locations and different times of the day. Added a whole dimension to an otherwise humble project. Which, in turn, made me want to expand the whole game! There will be more interactive characters and MANY more puzzles.

Current progress stats (as of November 10):

   Story: 100%
   Backgrounds: 90%
   Animation: 75 %
   Coding: 10%
   Music: 50 %

UPDATE: May 1, 2011

The game had to be put on hold for a while due to work, work, work/college, college, college, some weird health issues plaguing the team etc. But work was finally resumed last month and continues at a nice pace - with yours truly dividing time between graphics, animation and coding. It's hard to estimate the progress in all those areas percentage-wise, because the game grew expotentially, but it's much, much, MUCH farther than the last time I posted an update and it's coming along nicely.
ALSO, a new member joined the team - Sephiroth, who's a great artist and an amazing coder. He's helped me out with some CRAZY pieces of coding (and believe me, I have CRAZY ideas) and a couple of nasty bugs that were driving me even crazier than I usually am.
Be sure to check out new screenshots above (replaced the ones that I originally posted).

UPDATE: January 14, 2012

Check out the newest posts for news and sneak peeks!


UPDATE: April 30, 2012

We have close to all in-game songs and the game's basically playable from start to finish -- but most conversations, Look At's and interaction responses are still in the works. There's still a FEW things to do that I haven't even started, like sound fx, the outro and the Polish translation. I'm hoping it'll be ready for beta-testing in a month or so, so we could then release by the end of June.

In other news: the dev team grew! By 100%! So now there's four of us:

- SwordOfKings128, who's stuck with me from almost the very beginning, does the music -- and blows my mind on a daily basis.

- Sephiroth is back and assists me with some serious coding. I just think of something crazy I'd want in the game -- and thirty seconds later he sends me the code.

- Paul Franzen, the newest member on the team, offered to proofread and edit dialogues (and monologues) in the game. Ah, poor, unsuspecting soul, didn't know what he was gettting himself into :-D

Speaking of which, here's a sample of Gray's rhetorical talent - the all-time adventure game classic:



And this one of the game's milestones -- the game's own Quit GUI:



Because, obviously, a game with only four colors couldn't have a GUI that is GRAY ;)

UPDATE: September 6, 2012

After two years in production, the game is allllmost ready!

Dialogues: done
Graphics and animation: pretty much!
Music: last song in progress

I plan/hope/play for the game to be out within a month. I'm currently in the process of adding sound effects. Once that and the outro song are complete, we'll run the final round of beta testing.

Oh, and here's the new logo:



UPDATE: November 25, 2012

THE ALIEN INVASTION STARTS ON NOVEMBER 30!!!

After two years and three months in development, and some recent, unexpected hurdles, the game is finally allllmost there. The final round of beta testing is almost over and I'm adding some final touches here and there. So unless we get invaded by aliens, the game will premiere on Friday, November 30!

Also, my long-time friend, Ellana Dayligaun of the incredibly talented band Invisible Animals, let me use one of their otherwoldly songs in the game's outro sequence. The result was MIND-BLOWING!

Gilbert

Wow! Looks great! Definitely looking forward to it. :D

CaptainD

My eyes only bled a little  ;D 8)

Looks interesting.  I think the limited colours give it an eerily alien style.  I'll definitely be playing this one when it's released.
 

cianty

For some reason it reminded me of my game boy days...

Anyways, this project looks really nice and I can't wait to check it out. The logo is pretty cool too, by the way.
ca. 70% completed

Fitz

Thanks, everyone! The positive response so far REALLY helped me in motivating me to work harder - because I've been getting kinda lazy lately. Luckily, the work's progressing nicely so far, with the most crucial animations and all backgrounds for chief locations being complete.

CaptainD: There will be some intense color combos in further locations, especially towards the end of the game ;D So I suggest getting eye-drops! As for the colors, they make me think of my very first attempts at computer graphics, waaay back in the Commodore 64 days. 16 colors to pick from - as opposed to 16 gazillion colors these days. Funnily enough, this particular set was not accidental - I picked dark blue, red, orange and beige after the 4 rubber stamps I use at work.

Cianty: I never had a gameboy! I feel so deprived! The colors make me think of Mario, though. Good old NES days! As a homage to the classic arcade games, I made the game a side-scroller of a kind. The walkable area is just one pixel thick and the character walks in a straight like only, left and right. As for the logo - glad you like it! I got the idea just today as I sat down to draw it.

cianty

Of course it doesn't look like much like a Game Boy game since that didn't have colour... until Game Boy Colour, of course. So it is indeed more like NES I guess, which again I did not own (only SNES)... Anyways, I do enjoy the retro look and I'm glad you're feeling motivated! Now get cracking! :)
ca. 70% completed

Babar

Beautiful!  :o

I really love the atmosphere the art and colours create. Very pretty.

Err....not got much more to say. Makes me remember that I'm still missing Chicky's Herman Toothrot's Monkey Island game...
The ultimate Professional Amateur

Now, with his very own game: Alien Time Zone

Fitz

#7
Cianty: D'oh! That's right! ::) Never had a handheld, anyway - except a bunch of these way back in the commie days ;) No SNES, either. And my NES was actually a Pegassus - BUT it had all the NES innards and ran all NES games.
And I AM cracking! Doing a backround for one of the cutscenes as we speak :)

Babar: Thank you! The colors do wonderful - and sometimes crazy - things to the atmosphere. You'll be able to visit most locations at various times of the day, and some look so much different every time.
And which Monkey Island project do you mean? I see a MI-inspired game being made - and looking truly GORGEOUS - in this very section of the forum!

Babar

The ultimate Professional Amateur

Now, with his very own game: Alien Time Zone

Swordofkings128

Oh man this looks sexy! :o Aliens are incredibley fascinating to me!

Looking forward to playing.


Igor Hardy

Look really stylish!

And yes I too was reminded of that cheeky Herman Toothrot game.

Fitz

Swordofkings: Sexy? Hmm... Oh well, whatever floats your boat, my friend ;) Seriously though... I've always been fascinated in aliens and UFO's, too - even if this particular story doesn't represent very deep thoughts on the matter. I just wanted to do something humorous :) I'm a huge fan of the old LucasArts classics (with Day of the Tentacle being my all-time favorite).

Ascovel: I love the graphics in that game! For some reason it makes me think of Atari games (the computer, not the Infogrames aka Atari Interactive). And of a comic/children's book about a humanoid goat I read as a kid. Hmm...
As for the graphics in "Gray", I wanted to keep it simple, without the DotT-style twisted perspective or crooked houses. Ok, so that tree looks a bit weird - but I like to think it's "artsy" rather than bizarre ;) The "technology" I'm using is similarly old-school. I'm doing all of it in good ol' MS Paint, with a mouse (lent the tablet to my sis). Yesterday I worked on the background for one of the cutscenes which I knew would be the most difficult: the cornfield. The whole problem was how to keep it clean and simple. But it turned out even nicer than I thought it would :)

Alun

Quote from: Fitz on Wed 22/09/2010 15:26:07
The game runs in 320x240 and utilizes only four colors: dark blue, red, orange and beige.

Huh... hadn't noticed this the first time I looked at the pictures, but just glanced again and this time noticed that they do have a little bit of black as well as the four colors you list.  There's so little black that, especially given what you said above, I wonder if this is a mistake, or is somehow a product of the way the images were saved?  (Specifically, in the first image, there are a few pixels of black along the inner edge of the farmer's right hand, and in the second image, there's a small solid black circle about halfway between the alien's stomach and the big white flower left of the tree.)

Soup - The Comic Strip
http://www.soupcomic.com
Gods, heroes, monsters, and soup


ThreeOhFour

Nice palette!

Fitz

Alun: You've got one hell of a hawk-eye! :o My bad! The black flower is so obvious, right there in the front that I'm kicking myself for not noticing - but the the farmer's hand I'd have never noticed. It's part of a talking animation and this is him scratching his side. And since I did most of the graphics with nothing more than Paint, there are still some stray pixels here and there. Will have to check and re-upload. Thanks for pointing it out!

Ben: Thanks! It's not nearly as crazy as the one you used in ! and I did try to make it easy on the eyes - but with the intense red it's a tad difficult.

ThreeOhFour

Oh, I wondered about the extra colours in certain places then realized you have uploaded jpegs! .png might be a better choice :)

Good to see you round as well, and sorry I didn't recognize you straight away  ;D

Chicky

That farmer looks awesome! Pretty way of drawing the tree, too! Thanks to Babar and Ascovel for the plug  ;)

Fitz

#17
I've updated the original post with some great news - and a little bit of in-game goodies. Something for your ears to enjoy! So scroll up and... well... ENJOY!

Oh and thanks, Chicky :) Doing idleness animations for that guy was lots of fun, too.

Fitz

#18
Check the original post for some great news on the game development AND some idleness animations of the farmer (specially for you, Chicky!). They're so much fun that I'll probably make more of those.

EDIT: Also added the background of the location that goes with the song I posted earlier. Fully animated!

joelphilippage

Funny thing, I picked my nose just as I saw him do it.

Besides that point,...
Um,....

Looks great!  ;D



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