Skool Sukks! or: Work hard to be lazy

Started by TomatoesInTheHead, Mon 21/10/2019 00:33:04

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TomatoesInTheHead

Hi, wonderful people of the blue cup,

It's been a while since I've been posting and since I've been using AGS, my last short visit was in 2017, but I was mostly active around 2011/2012.
Ideas for new adventure games have come and gone since then, but knowing that I have not too much spare time beside my day job (which I like and thus like to put my energy in, too) and knowing that I wouldn't use all of that spare time for making games for a longer period of time, I've filed most of them under "Make it at some point in the distant future, if ever".
But some weeks ago, at last, I got two realistic ideas for shorter games, the first of which I fleshed out now and started to implement.

Having heard that it can be a motivation for commitment to tell others of your plans, I decided to start a GiP thread this time and share what I have for now. So without further ado I present to you:

- Skool Sukks! -

Robert is not quite the hardest working student of all time, but he always goes to great length when it comes to avoid learning anything at school.
Today he failed to prepare his homework for the n-th time, n being one time more than the teacher is willing to accept. If only Robert had an excuse to skip classes...

The game will have a play time of around one to two hours I guess.
I plan to have 7 rooms, 3 or 4 mini-game-y puzzles and 8 NPCs if you don't count the boring two or three classmates who are actually studying.
I want the final game to come with English and German language and full voice acting, because amateur voice acting is fun (at least it was in my first game) and I want to use my microphone more.

Screenshots



(Question to the native speakers: What is a/the room called where teachers' materials/specimen/planetary models/maps and so on are stored?)


All the stick figures are of course placeholders.
The backgrounds will change too, I did these mock ups in Blender and will then paint over to get a pixel look, an example of the previous room is the following:


I have to redo this one because as you can see the scaling is off compared to the character; but the art style will be the same because that's all I'm able to do.

Production

Story is 99% complete, puzzles are (in the game document) at around 80% finished.
After the story was almost done I started planning the locations, then made some adjustments to get rid of one or two locations with few, if any, interactions.
Since the adventure plays in a building, geometric accuracy was quite important if I wasn't going for a crazy warped comic look (and it would probably be more the case of just calling "the perspective is off" a comic look).
That's why I tried to build all the rooms in Blender first, just with all the details that are most important for the perspective drawing and some lighting set up. This also gave me the opportunity to move furniture and camera until I had a satisfactory 2d view of every room. I would have had a hard time drawing and redrawing them directly in 2d in so many iterations.
The next step now is to trace all the edges and paint over the surfaces with a limited palette of colours.
For now, I set up the rooms in AGS with the stand-in Blender renderings and added most of the hotspots, walkbehinds etc., so I'm able to test these and implement all the interaction and room change logic, dialogs and such.
When the backgrounds and other graphics are finished, I just have to adjust some coordinates and have to redo or refine the masks.
Also, as you may have guessed from the screenshots, currently I have only the down view of my hero, this will also be one of the next tasks.

Cassiebsg

Before you go pixel amok, is pixel art an option or a requirement for you?
Otherwise you could just use the Blender BGs and create your character in Blender as well. Just a suggestion. ;)

Anyway, good luck with the project. I already like it. :D
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

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