On Saturday, May 11 from 12-8PM, Rocket 5 will be at Bit Bazaar promoting our upcoming game, code-named “Ghost Hunter.” A demo of the game will be available for you to play. Rocket 5′s game Get the Orb (GTO) will also be available to play. At our table, you can pre-order a copy of Ghost Hunter (working title), as well as purchase some awesome Rocket 5 and game-related merchandise.

In addition to pre-orders of our upcoming game, we will be selling buttons, stickers, t-shirts, chocolates, delicious baked goods, and adorable needle-felted creatures & moustaches! Here’s a little sample of some of the merch that will be available at our table:

Bit Bazaar starts at noon on May 11th and will take place at 862 Richmond Street West. Entry is free! We will be there alongside many other awesome game developers, so come out and see us! Happy TCAF!

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We made Ghost Hunter as a family summer project with some of our nieces and nephews who ranged in age from 11 to 21! Melanie designed the characters, Max modeled all of the level art, Cathy animated the characters, Tim wrote the code, Christine managed the team and wrote the story, Rebecca, Mark and Patrick drew character and level concepts and helped with the design and Rocket (the dog) provided emotional support. Together we had a ton of fun creating the game and I can’t wait to see what these little geniuses come up with next summer!

Happy Halloween from all of us here at Rocket 5 Studios!
-Tim

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Around 50 people showed up to the 3 hour workshop and although we tried our hardest to get through all of the content, we only completed about 1/2 of the project before it was time to move on to the beer drinking portion of the event.

So while I still had all of the project steps fresh in my mind, I figured it would be a good idea to go through the workshop at home and screencast the whole thing so that everyone could get a chance to follow along with the complete tutorial.

Here’s a look at what the completed project looks like, because you know; editor screenshots in blog posts look cool.

Before you jump into the video, here’s all the stuff you’ll need to complete the project:

• Download the base project files which include all the sprites, scripts, fonts and sound effects you’ll need to make the game. And if you want to skip to the end, you can download the finished project.
• The free or paid version of the Unity 3D development engine.
• Orthello 2D Framework (already included in the project zip) which is the Unity plugin we’ll use for the display and animation of sprites.
• The free or paid version of TexturePacker which we’ll use to make the spite atlases.

And here’s the screencast:

Calculating Orthographic Camera Size

If you’re wondering how I came up with the 6.25 orthographic size used in this project, here’s a handy formula for figuring out the orthographic camera size which was provided by Jason Caldwell.

x = screen width in pixels
y = screen height in pixels
s = sprite height or width (whichever is larger) in pixels
 
x / ((( x / y ) * 2 ) * s )

More Unity 2D Game Tutorials

Make A 2D Game in Unity3D Using Only Free Tools Part 1
Make A 2D Game in Unity3D Using Only Free Tools Part 2
Make A 2D Game With Unity3D Using Only Free Tools Part 3
Make A 2D Game With Unity3D Using Only Free Tools Part 4
Make A 2D Game With Unity3D Using Only Free Tools: Beginning Enemy AI With A* Pathfinding

Show Your Support

If you find our tutorials useful, please considering buying one or more of our games and apps for iPhone and iPad. Your support helps to keep the tutorials flowing!

Giant Moto: High flying arcade style motocross action!
Small Space: Fly a spaceship, eat space creatures, get huge, score point!
Holeshot Drag Racing: High speed drag racing action!
Alien Booth: Transform pictures of your friends into awesome aliens!
iSpoof Walken: A hilarious look into the world of Christopher Walken!
Gaga Eyes: Transform pictures of your friends to give them huge anime eyes!

About the author

Tim Miller is a veteran game developer with over 15 years experience in the video game industry working as a Level Designer and Lead Level Designer at LucasArts, Secret Level and Nihilistic Software. He co-founded Rocket 5 Studios with his wife Cathy and their dog Rocket in 2009. Twitter, LinkedIn, Portfolio

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This is a reprint of Cathy’s Animating Four-Legged Beasts article which was originally featured on Gamasutra in May 2012.

Animating animals is usually fun, but can often be complicated and technical. Figuring out what to do with all those legs can really trip up an animator. We can animate human-shaped characters a lot easier than multi-legged beasts because we have an intuitive knowledge of the way bipeds move. It is easy for an animator to act out a motion when the character moves like us; feeling the action ‘in the body’ helps us understand how to animate it. So what happens when the character is a quadruped and you don’t have that intuitive feel at your disposal? How do you make that movement believable? Suitable reference and a sophisticated media player is the place to start.

Luckily for the animation community, there is a wealth of reference material that can help. I’ll walk you through my process for animating quadruped locomotion and share classic references that will help you deconstruct the fundamentals of the four gaits: walk, run, trot and gallop. I’ll also share an example of my own 3D walk animation and offer technical tips for creating believable quadruped locomotion cycles.

Getting Started

Click the image to see the animation. Horse Locomotion Walk 30 courtesy of www.rhinohouse.com

With a media viewer that can scrub single-frame backwards and forwards, like Quicktime, you can watch the movement frame by frame. Drawing thumbnail images with directional notes helps you synthesize the information. There are now lots of websites out there that put up live-action animal footage, such as the Rhino House Human and Animal locomotion website, which has a built-in player that can scrub their video reference material (click the image on the right to check out their website and viewer). Thanks to the Internet, finding reference and getting into it to see what is going on is the easy part.  The hard part is converting that information into something that makes sense to the animator and for the character that is to be animated.

Following a process speeds up your workflow.  Before I get into the creative part of animating, I usually have all of my research done. Gathering and absorbing all of the technical details and reference material beforehand frees me up to get into the creative ‘flow’ of animating, with easy access to my reference material. My process is something like this:

1. Consider what animal most closely resembles the beast I need to animate?
2. Search for reference material. Here are the sources I find useful:
   • BBC
   • ARKive
   • Eadweard Muybridge (books and web)
   • Animal Motion Show (DVDs and website)
   • Life drawing and observation
   • Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, 1981
   • Animal Locomotion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1887
   • Video capture
3. Analyze the reference material and find the section of the footage that is most useful.
4. Create thumbnail drawings to assist with my animation, including notes on direction and any unusual qualities I can see in footage.
5. Animate.

The Four Gaits

In the course of my career, I’ve learned that there is a surprising similarity in how quadrupeds move, from species to species. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic works may be a century old, but they are still relevant and extremely useful.  In his introduction to Animal Locomotion, he maintains that most quadrupeds – be they dogs, cats, horses or rhinoceroses – follow the same footfall pattern.  This is the order in which the hooves or paws strike the ground while moving through the various gaits.  Where they differ is in the flexibility of the spine.  Visualize a rhino running, as opposed to a cheetah. The exceptions, according to Muybridge, are elephants and animals like kangaroos.

The four speeds of movement, or the four ‘gaits’, are shared amongst most four-legged animals.  Almost every quadruped walks, trots, canters and gallops, and their legs move in the same manner when they do it.  As you can see in the image below, adapted from Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, the gaits have been broken down into symbols illustrating which leg strikes the ground in which order, assuming the animal is facing north with the right legs on the right and the left legs on the left.

For example, with the rotary gallop gait, if you start your cycle with the left rear foot striking the ground first, the next in sequence to hit the ground would be the right rear foot, then the right fore foot, followed by the left fore foot.  As for the transverse and rotary gallops, I’ve found the rotary gallop more often in reference material than the transverse, which I’ve mainly seen in horse footage.  The canter is the roughest gait, with a lot of up-and-down movement.   Elephants don’t seem to follow these rules, and should be considered separately.

image adapted from: Animal Locomotion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1887

Once you get the legs moving roughly in the order that is appropriate, you can be creative with the rest of the body.

To save time, you could animate a ‘vanilla’ gait cycle for each gait with the leg movements blocked in on keys and breakdowns only and the body and head having the rough up-and-down motion laid in on those keys. If using a universal rig, this file could then be exported onto any beast (with minimal adjustments, depending on the disparities of beast shape) and be used as a starting point for the animations.  Several different types or speeds of walks could also be created from this base file simply by playing with the amount of frames in the animation and the distance between the legs in the stride position or the distance the beast travels in the ‘leap’ part of the gallop.

The Walk

In the case of the walk gait, the rear left foot strikes first followed by the left fore leg.  The rear right leg strikes third with the right fore leg falling last.  The walk is the slowest gait and is shared by all quadrupeds.  Muybridge breaks down this information into a chart for the walk, trot, canter and gallop gaits in the introduction of Animal Locomotion.  Converted into a graphic table, a walk cycle would look like this:

image adapted from: Animal Locomotion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1887

Horses are great animals to study because their legs are so long and slender, creating a easily legible silhouette.  Below is an example of a walk cycle broken down into 8 phases:

Image adapted from Horse Locomotion Walk 01, courtesy of www.rhinohouse.com

Once you understand what the feet are doing, it becomes easier to understand what to animate next.  Think of the quadruped walk as two offset human walk cycles.  I wonder how often studios have used two people in a horse costume for motion capture? Preston Blair’s iconic walk cycle with the “stride” and “passing” key positions is a great illustration of the basics of a biped walk demonstrating the following:  fall into the stride and recover and rise up into the passing position.

Adapted from Preston Blair, Animation, 1948

For the quadruped, the hips and chest become two offset ‘bouncing balls’ in the same manner as the hips in a bipedal walk. Consider circled image 23 from the horse walk cycle (below), which shows the fore legs in the “stride” position and the hind legs in the “passing” position.  I’ve added circles to show the up and down motion of the hips and chest in that phase of the movement. The head could then be animated as yet another bouncing ball, offset from the hips and chest (follow-through! overlap!).

Image adapted from Horse Locomotion Walk 01, courtesy of www.rhinohouse.com

Animating A Walk

To illustrate this locomotion in 3-D animation, I’ve roughed in a slow 40-frame walk cycle. Cycles must be symmetrical, or there will be a visible hitch in the walk, like a limp or a hit in the animation.

There are almost as many methods of animating as there are animators, but I prefer to approach posing as I would with 2D or Classical animation. Posing out the whole character, rather than starting with the hips or isolating the lower body, and working on the entire character at once when creating the four major poses.  Details like toes and tails can be ignored or turned off at this stage.  I create the four major keys or poses of the walk: two stride and two passing. I make them as symmetrical as possible, but they don’t have to be mathematically the same.

There is an advantage to keying all major elements on the same frame. At this point, the keys can be slid around easily to change the timing of the walk. It is quick and easy to adapt and manipulate your cycle by figuring out your basic timing to the point where you start to add finishing details like overlap and follow-through.  Keys arranged in an orderly fashion are really easy to manipulate in your 3D software package (here I am using the dope sheet in Maya 2011).

Four key poses, JoJo walk, property of Rocket 5 Studios

This is also the break off point where different kinds of walk cycles can be created now that the feet have been appropriately positioned. Variety can be added like floppy overlap or stealthy sneak.  The four basic poses can also be used as a starting point for other walks.  You don’t have to re-create the 4 basic key poses; you only have to adapt them to your specific purposes.  Use the graph editor or tweak by hand, but remember to have each opposite pose match each other.

It is important that your software has a great graph editor. When animating cycles, I spend a fair amount of time cleaning up the graph to get symmetrical movement. Don’t forget to check all channels! The above video has been carefully tweaked to remove all hits and holds. The stage just prior to this revealed a few errors with the arms:

There are several ways to fix errors like this but the easiest for me at this stage is to look at the graph editor and find out where there is a problem with the curve.

note: flat tangents causing slow down at apex of movement

The highlighted motion trail shows other problems that can be solved by the graph editor, such as the linear movement of the arm in the air. Arcs always look more natural than linear paths of action. The solution for the slowdown in the forward progression of the arm is to fix the curve so that it can cycle smoothly, as seen below.

Grab spline handles and move them so that curve looks like it can cycle or repeat.

The next step is to flesh in the walk, adding overlap and follow-through, offsetting the head and making sure there is enough weight in the up and down movements of the hips and chest. When you are pretty sure the cycle is working the way you want it to, animate the feet, hands, fingers and toes. I usually animate the tail last, one rotational axis at a time.

Walks and Runs: In Brief

Walks and runs can be considered a controlled fall with a little acceleration happening right after the passing position, which is similar to a push-off. As with all movement cycles, the forward or Z-translation would be non-linear.

The speed of the walk is dictated by the length of the legs and how far apart the feet are planted in the stride position. There isn’t really a moment where all four legs are off the ground as in the other gaits and the legs can only move so fast without looking ‘sped up.’  Conversely, the speed of gallop is largely determined by the shape and unique qualities of the beast. The faster you need the beast to go, the more flexible the spine will have to be, and the greater the squash and stretch. Look for this when watching reference. As the legs bunch up under the beast (the squash) energy is gathered, preparing for a ‘leap’ or ‘stretch’ where the animal can cover as much ground as its form, weight and strength allow. The tighter the squash, the more extended the stretch and the faster the beast can travel.

Gallop cycle animated by Paul Capon on Nico

Variety in the weight or ‘attitude’ of the walk, trot or gallop can be achieved through the shape and movement in the spine and the amount of overlap and follow-through. The amount of flexibility and motion in the spine is key to defining the differences between a horse and a rhino and a jungle cat.

Personality, the key ingredient in any good animation, comes not only from the shape of the key poses but also from what is happening in between the poses.  How the character gets from stride to passing can define the character.  Are they high-stepping? Straight forward and no-nonsense? Whimsical? Are they flopping around like a puppy or are they hard and densely muscled like a pit bull? The overlapping elements that you’ve added to the animation and their follow-through shows the audience who the character is and what it is made of.

Image adapted from Tiger Locomotion Gallop 01, courtesy of www.rhinohouse.com

Image adapted from Horse Locomotion Gallop 05, courtesy of www.rhinohouse.com

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The event led me to my first experience with both Dames Making Games and Bento Miso. I’d heard of DMG before and I know that Tim works at Bento Miso a few times a week, but I first got to see the space when we went to a DMG social the night before Cathy’s presentation. It looked like a pretty awesome place to work and the people were welcoming and friendly- which is exactly what I’d heard about Toronto’s gaming community. The social also introduced me to the Jeuxly participants (who would attend the workshop the following day) and their games-in-progress.

The workshop started off with a review of Cathy’s background in animation and the history of Rocket 5. Cathy talked about Rocket 5’s beginnings, and what it’s like to make the choice to ‘go indie’ when it comes to game development. She talked about salary VS self-employment, and the workshop participants were quick to help provide risks associated with working for someone else and the benefits of being your own boss. Cathy stressed that making this choice is personal and not everyone should make the same one, but that when it comes to choosing self-employment, one of the most important things to remember is that YOU are a valuable asset.

When talking about Rocket 5’s beginnings, Cathy also emphasized the importance of being flexible and ‘diversifying your revenue streams.’ Taking in contracts for extra money has been important to Rocket 5’s ability to produce original games. This flexibility meant solid teamwork, as well, and Cathy went on to talk about the importance of choosing your team carefully and maintaining a professional relationship when you’re working, even if you’re close to your co-worker (say, husband and wife).

While the choice to go indie and the task of choosing your team is entirely personal, so is your concept of success. Cathy outlined Rocket 5’s criteria for success in 5 points:

(1) Does this make us happy?

(2) Are we making games we love?

(3) Do other people love our games?

(4) Do our games receive critical acclaim?

(5) Do we make enough money to live comfortably?

This definition of success is entirely subjective to Rocket 5, but it means that the inspiration for games is not, ‘What sort of game will make the most money?’ I think this is why the indie gamer community is so colourful; profit isn’t the only driving force behind these games. There’s room to be unique and innovative, and make games you love, so indie game developers aren’t just pumping out game after derivative game.

Cathy spoke about the resources available to indie gamers, particularly in Toronto. The Toronto game development community, which I’m just getting to know myself, is completely friendly and accessible for people just getting into game development. It’s growing more and more each day, too, increasing the potential for games to rise up as a more popular art form. In addition to this, there are plenty of online learning resources for game developers, and Cathy suggests that anyone looking to get into the industry should ‘be a sponge.’ Soak up all the information you can get and remember that learning never really stops. Check out this past blog post for a ton of links to some of these resources.

After this, the workshop participants broke into groups. Cathy and Tim explained the components of a basic game design document, gave each group a fill-in-the-blank version of one, and asked them to come up with some game ideas. Tim suggested each member of the group pitch an idea and then the group would choose the best one. The ‘teams’ only had about an hour to do this, but when the time was up, it was amazing what kind of ideas they’d managed to come up with. Each group presented their game concept, and the ideas ranged from the more traditional to entirely experimental. It was awesome to see everyone so involved in the exercise and eager to get their ideas out there. One group even said they had four fully fleshed out game ideas and had difficulty choosing only one to present.

It was great to hear all of Cathy and Tim’s advice, learn about game design docs, and then see the workshop participants so enthusiastic about what they were hearing. It was an awesome experience and has me more and more excited about getting to know Toronto’s game dev community, which is apparently full of motivated people with exciting new ideas and an eagerness to collaborate.

Some Relevant Links

• Dames Making Games
• Bento Miso
• Jeuxly
• MaRS: Entrepreneurship 101
• OSEB (Ontario Self-Employment Benefit)
• MEIC – MAP (Mobile Accelerator Program)
• Digital Tutors (software tutorials- be a sponge!)

About the Author

Christine Feraday is a new addition to Rocket 5. She is attending University of Toronto St. George, studying psychology and English, and is super excited to be a part of the Rocket 5 team!
Twitter

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As the panelists explained their background and played demo reels to display their previous work, I recognized a few of the games mentioned and found myself making note of a few I’d want to play in the future. These introductions gave way to a discussion about the differences between animating for features and animating for indie video games.

Image courtesy of Matt Hammill!

Cathy’s experience in animating for features came into play here, and she talked about how audience interaction in feature films differs from video games. The character’s believability as a living thing is more important in a film, where the audience is passive. In a video game, the player is the main character. Complex character animation is less important than appropriate reaction times and believable movement. Miguel Sternberg expanded on this by talking about anticipation time before a jump. Certain trade-offs need to be made in order to achieve the right sort of realism; animation may be simpler, but the character moves in a convincing way with a realistic reaction time. Jay Edry pointed out that these limitations (as well as a limited budget) force you to be creative and devise innovative ways to produce your desired games, which is why we see so many unique games in the indie community.

The panelists talked about the multidisciplinary nature of video games; how the very technical aspects mesh together with the artistic. Matt Hammill’s game ‘Gesundheit,’ for example, incorporates his hand-drawn art. His artwork adds a unique texture and atmosphere to the game. The panelists each had different preferences for artistic or technical work, and Ryan Creighton explained the process of using Flash to animate (though most panelists agreed that using Flash can be frustrating, to put it mildly).

My technical understanding is limited, but I found myself engaged by the discussions. Most inspiring, though, was the encouragement the panelists gave to all the aspiring animators, programmers and game designers in the audience. They talked about the rewarding experience of creating your own games and the growing indie game community in Toronto. Cathy pointed out that there’s no real hierarchy when it comes to game design and animation work; it depends on what you’re happy doing.

And we’re happy at Rocket 5!

The panel was a great experience. The audience seemed engaged and the panelists had great advice to share. And, of course, it was awesome to see Cathy talking about her experience and her love for her work. Plus, after the panel, Cathy and I got to go watch short films (“Straight Up Toons”) and eat popcorn. Nom.

Cathy will be doing another workshop soon for Dames Making Games. “Inside the Studio: Games From Idea to Production” is on July 28^th and tickets are $15. Get your ticket!

Panelists’ Websites

Jay Edry – DrinkBox Studios
Matt Hammill
Miguel Sternberg – Spooky Squid Games
Ryan Henson Creighton – Untold Entertainment
Sagan Yee

About the Author

Christine Feraday is a new addition to Rocket 5. She is attending University of Toronto St. George, studying psychology and English, and is super excited to be a part of the Rocket 5 team!
Twitter

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Part of our mission here at Rocket 5 is that we want to teach kids and parents that there’s more to video games than just playing them and that kids might want to consider a future in the industry that provides them with so much fun and entertainment. There are tons of different job skills that are needed to make video games in areas ranging from the very creative to the very technical, so you might be surprised to learn that some things you’re already interested in might help you get a job working in the games industry someday.

To give you some idea of the skills involved in making games, here’s a partial list of the jobs found in a typical medium to large sized game studio. When you work in a very small studio like Rocket 5 or if you’re making games by yourself or with a couple of friends, you’ll need to learn how to do many of these skills yourself, which is totally possible given all of the free resources available online these days.

• Game Designer: Develops the game concept, defines everything that will happen in the game and communicates those ideas to the rest of the team.
• Level Designer: Builds the environments (buildings, tracks, terrain) that the characters will interact with and scripts the game’s encounters and challenges.
• Writer: Writes the game’s story and dialogue.
• Programmer: Writes the code that handles everything from rendering the game to the screen to player movement to gameplay systems.
• 3D Artist: Uses 3D modeling software to create characters, level art and props.
• 2D Artist: Uses 2D image editing software to create character and world concepts, paint textures for 3D models and more.
• Lighting Artist: Places lights in the game’s levels to create atmosphere.
• Visual FX Artist: Creates everything from sword trails to sparks to fire.
• Animator: Brings the characters to life through movement.
• Technical Artist: Bridges the gap between art and code.
• Producer: Coordinates the development of the game.
• Sound Designer: Creates all of the sound effects that you hear in a game.
• Composer (music): Writes and records the music for the game.
• Voice Actor: Acts out the game’s dialogue lines so they can be recorded and played back in the game, similar to a TV or movie actor.
• Tester: Test the game for “bugs”, reports problems to the developers.
• Marketing & Sales: Brings the product to the attention of the public.
• Accounting, Finance and Executives: No game studio could survive without the skills that these people provide.

Getting back to the presentation – the last thing we wanted to do while talking to a room full of teenagers, was to bore them to death with an hour long powerpoint presentation (although we did start with a short powerpoint to introduce who we are). So I thought a good way to teach them about how to make video games was to show them how a game is made and then let them play it. On the Saturday before the event, I prepared for our presentation by making a 4-player cooperative “Capture the Flag” style game. I then broke the game down into basic components so that I could re-make the game “from scratch” in front of them in about 20 minutes. While I remade the game, I talked about the various skills involved – starting with the initial idea, writing/brainstorming the idea into a design document, and then I got to work on the gameplay prototype. At the end, the kids got to play the final game.

We also gave the kids a handout with information and links to lots of freely available resources to help them get started making their own games. If you know of any additional resources (especially if they’re free), please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Toronto Game Dev Community:

Hand Eye Society: The Hand Eye Society is a not-for-profit coalition of projects and people in support of Toronto’s videogame communities.

International Game Developers Association: The mission of the IGDA is to advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community.

Gamercamp: Toronto’s festival celebrating the artistry, innovation and power of play.

TOJam (Toronto Game Jam):  A great local game incubator where for 3 days once a year, hundreds of people gather together to make games over a 3 day weekend.

Academy Of The Impossible: Teaching each other that our dreams can come true, and how to achieve them, through innovative artistic, technological, social and literacy programs.

Game Development Tools:

Scratch: Scratch is a free programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Stencyl: Free tool for making iOS and Flash games (free to use, subscription required to publish games). The programming interface is similar the one used in Scratch making it easy for game designers of all ages.

Unity: Free tool for making Web and Desktop games. Unity is a feature rich, fully integrated development engine for the creation of interactive 3D content.

Corona SDK: Free tool for making iOS and Android games (free to use, subscription required to publish games).

Adventure Game Studio: Provides the tools to make your own adventure games, for free!

3D Modeling Tools:

Blender: Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite.

Maya: The industry standard 3D modeling and animation program (free education edition available).

2D Tools:

Inkscape: Free open source SVG graphics editor that’s similar to Illustrator.

Gimp: Free image authoring, photo retouching and composition software that’s similar to Photoshop.

Online Tutorials:

Digital Tutors: Software educational site ($400/year).

Lynda.com: Software educational site ($375/year).

Audio Tools:

Audacity: Free open source software for editing sounds

SFXR: Free tool for generating 8-bit sound fx.

Miscellaneous:

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure: A game made by a 5 year old girl and her dad!

Gamasutra: News about game development.

Game Glossary: A reference of the language of games.

I mentioned before that I made the game we used in the presentation on the weekend before the event. Since I knew that I would be making the game in a short amount of time, “game jam” style, I thought it would be fun to take a time-lapse video of the development to help give people an idea of just what goes into making a game like this. I used a Terminal script to automatically capture a screenshot every 5 seconds during the (roughly) 10 hours that it took to make the game and then used QuickTime Pro to compile and export the 4,896 frame image sequence.

Conclusion

In the end I think the kids were really excited to hear what we had to say, we fielded lots of questions and they really liked getting to play the game we made for them!

If you’re in the Toronto area and you would like us to speak at your school or event, feel free to contact us at rocket5[at]rocket5studios.com or through our Facebook page.

This blog post is part of iDevBlogADay, a collection of indie developers writing about their development experiences.

About the author

Tim Miller is a veteran game developer with over 15 years experience in the video game industry working as a Level Designer and Lead Level Designer at LucasArts, Secret Level and Nihilistic Software. He co-founded Rocket 5 Studios with his wife Cathy and their dog Rocket in 2009. Twitter, LinkedIn, Portfolio

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Caffeine, junk food and sleep deprivation.

Before TOJam I had my doubts about whether spending 3 days in a building with 400+ game jammers would be for me. I like my comfort. I think better in a quiet environment. There won’t be enough women there and it will be weird. I don’t fit in with the culture. I’m not a hard-core gamer, I won’t like it. I’m too old. It will be chaos! It will be a waste of time! After 3 days without washing, it will smell like a rhino cage in there. Gak! What possible benefit could I get out of a game jam?

After TOJam: Absolutely. Amazing. Experience. Craziest way to rapid-prototype a game – EVER. Got SO much accomplished! Incredible creative and energetic environment! TOJammers are inspirational! Hard working! Collaborative! Generous! Conscientious! Talented! Funny! Nobody wants to fit in, everyone is just doing their own thing, but together. With such a flux of positive energy and creativity floating around, one cannot help but be motivated. TOJam 2013? I’m there….can’t hardly wait! Even if it did smell like a rhino cage by Sunday.

We at Rocket 5 teamed up with superstar Mujia Liao to work on a simple adventure/puzzle game: Koloro: The World’s Not Ending. We started TOJam with a couple models built and rigged and Tim had done some ambient occlusion lighting tests for another game we’re developing. We had a rough game idea, narrowed the scope and came up with a tight game plan and asset list by Wednesday. Of course, we didn’t get as far as Tim had hoped, but I was thrilled to have a playable prototype to work with. From an animator’s perspective, the first time you see your character running around in the world is a HUGE thrill. She’s ALIVE!

Rapid prototyping requires a kind of cross discipline flexibility that I had never developed before. Coming to Rocket 5 as a character animation specialist, I had never modeled, textured, or rigged anything before. Switching gears to become a generalist is difficult after so many years as a one-trick pony, but it is super fun and motivating. And being a “specialist” also means being a perfectionist. It was hard to let that side of my personality go. I was working on the cat character and forgot to test the animations in-engine. This was a disaster! The animations wouldn’t export properly, so they look really weird and funky in the game. While this made me die a little inside, I had to let it go. They worked well enough to prototype with. We had to move on.

Here’s a look at the final game, TOJam edition. Our heroine is restoring colour to the world, one kat at a time!

TOJam: the most intensive game incubator I’ve ever seen – hurrah for Jim and Em! And a big huge thanks to everyone that made TOJam 2012 possible.

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