Alpha Build #2 - New Enemy and Updated Levels!

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is finally here!

Insight, Indies, Inspiration, and Internal Independence Part Two

So in the last post, I talked about half of what feels like the longest title ever. I left off talking about forums and how people let their ego get bruised by others who are generally just trying to give feedback and help someone. I know sometimes in the moment, and especially through text, it's hard to tell if someone is being genuine or if they're just being a jerk. My parents always taught me to give
everyone a chance, and to be open-minded about people. I think having that instilled in me really helps me take feedback from people. Being open-minded has led me to some really great personal discoveries and it also helps me find inspiration to keep going when I feel stuck. Which was where I found myself with artwork a few weeks ago.

Insight, Indies, Inspiration, and Internal Independence

Hey there everyone, it's been too long since I posted something here, and tonight it's going to get personal. I've had some struggles with stress lately, and the roller coaster of all that stress is finally coming to the end of the ride. I can breathe, and that has given me a lot of internal reflection also. I've done a lot of art recently, since we're coming to our deadline of a test of our game. We've landed on an official-ish title, I've found a good place for inspiration, and we're having what I've started calling "workends". It hasn't been sunshine and rainbows everyday, but every low has just pushed me to up my game (pun totally intended). Oh, and I found out that most forums on the internet are all the same. The comment fights about nothing are amazing, but the egos some people have are incredible. More on that later though.

We're Getting Back Up To Full Speed!

As you may remember we were going to try to get a playable alpha test version out to you guys earlier this summer, but a lot of things in our personal life (wedding, new jobs, moving, etc) ended up taking a lot more time than expected. All of those are behind us now and everything else is really winding down, so we're ramping back up to work on the game again!

Centerpieces - Luigi and Zelda take the lead!

This is our first update on our centerpieces. As you can see we got our Zelda and Luigi themes finished!  Pictured above is a test run of how they're going to look when they're put together. Let us know what you think!

Centerpieces - Get Ready. GO!

Here are some updates from our first weekend of making centerpieces for our wedding!

[Update] Life Gets In The Way Sometimes

Life Gets in the Way Sometimes

I was really hoping that my next post would be about showing off more about our game.  Unfortunately, life got in the way a little bit and I wasn't able to dedicate as much time as I'd hoped to working on our game.  Between a full time job, preparing for a wedding (coming up in September!), and just making sure we still have time to ourselves so we don't overload, I didn't progress as far as I had hoped. 

We have made good progress though, but sadly it's not very visual. I've been working a lot on getting the game menu & multiplayer lobby functional,  polishing the character customization, making sure games restart properly, and finding & adding sound effects.  It might not sound like a lot, but for a first time team that does this in their spare time, I'm proud of what we've been able to do. The menus and such still have a lot of placeholder art, so I hesitate to throw out screen shots so we don't give out the wrong impression of the end game quality.  If you are interested in seeing them, post here or on our twitter @TeamAndrecca and as long as you keep in mind it's a WIP, we should be able to hook you up :)

New doodles!!!!!

It's been awhile since I shared some art with you guys! I have some new doodles. Some game related, some just "sketches" I've done. It's been a pretty busy couple weeks for me, but I'm still trying to focus on game art. I've been putting a lot of time into making a font for general use in the game, but that didn't seem too exciting to share with you guys.

I've been looking at some more tutorials for different techniques. Most recently I looked at this tutorial for how to make pixel art clouds quickly. The clouds to the right were made following that tutorial, and sure enough, it really was quick.

Anyway, on to more art!

Making progress!

Lately I've been focusing a lot on the game menu functionality and I'm happy to say that I've passed a milestone over the weekend!  I've been working a lot on:

Nintendo and Nostalgia

In the last month, Nintendo has released two Nintendo Directs about games that were a huge part of my childhood and teenage years. It makes me "nostalgia pretty hard" about the good ol' days and how much fun it was to just kick it with good friends and beat the heck out of them (through Nintendo characters of course), but it's also made me think about where the industry is going. I wonder things like "What will my nephew play when he gets older?"

Nerdy Birthday Presents

Sometimes when we're not working on Andrecca, we craft other nerdy things. Becca does a lot with clay, yarn and beads when she can. I usually don't get too crafty, but this year I decided I wanted to custom paint some controllers for Becca's birthday.  She really likes to get her hands on pink controllers whenever she can.  She has a pink Wii Remote but there aren't a ton of other accessories out there that are pink, unless you want to chance it with off brands.  Becca is a big fan of the Mario Kart franchise, especially Double Dash.  So I decided that she needed to have a pink Wavebird GC controller along with a pink Wii Wheel. 

The Importance of Being Backed Up

I absolutely know that this should go without saying,  but if you are doing work that is important to you on a computer, back it up. 

Learn from me, my name is Becca and I trusted the one copy I had of a project I was working on. That one copy, yeah, I lost it. It was entirely deleted. Don't worry, this story has a happy ending, thanks to Andrew (he literally is my better half when it comes to electronics).

I am 12%

That title is a little odd, right? I know when people were occupying wall street chanting "we are the 99%" it got people's attention for awhile. While it didn't shut down the government or make any drastic changes, it was a message of solidarity. Same with my message in the title. Recently I read a study that showed as of 2013 women accounted for 12% of the gaming industry, which is up from the 3% my gender accounted for back in 1989.

The Age Of Nintendo Indie Titles Has Begun!

I'm talking about Nintendo's new indie development program that launched last year!  March 6th is when the first one of us in the program officially launched a game on Nintendo's eShop.  RCMADIAX (Mike as I'll refer to him - it's just easier) launched his first game, BLOK DROP U, on that day and I couldn't be happier for him!  I've been quietly watching his progress since he announced,  just as I've been keeping an eye on other eShop titles yet to launch.  From what I've seen Mike is pretty pleased with his launch and is still working diligently to stay in touch with his community.

Mini art!

I've been doing a lot more with my tablet, and recently I started making what we call "tiles" with it. I generally take about 15 mins each (which isn't super long for a warm up), and they're all drafts. I have just kind of been playing with techniques and seeing what the tablet can do. The majority of these don't have any real theme, they were just free drawings when I was listening to music or had tv going. One of them is a "Who's that Pokemon?" like from the TV show. I bet you can't tell me which one it is...

Getting Ready

This is not the final title screen.

How do you convince yourself you can do something you've never done before? Something that not too long ago seemed like something you never thought you had the capacity to do, but always appreciated. Do you just take a lesson from the story The Little Engine That Could and "think you can, think you can, think you can"? Or do you just dive right into the project and never look back? These are all questions I've been asking myself since I started thinking about the title screen for the game. I have to really get in the mindset of knowing I have come this far, what's pushing a little more going to hurt. No that's not a mistake, not a typo, it's not meant to be a question. I love the art that I do, and I love how it makes me feel. In the beginning of this project I was filled with self-doubt.

Was I really good enough? Could I really do this? Was I really an artist?

New tech with a new toy!

Comfort and creativity for me have always gone hand in hand. When I was a kid, I never liked having to sit at a table to work on creative things. I rarely got any good daydreaming done in a wooden chair. There seems to be a correlation between the stiffness of a chair and the lack of creativity I have. I tend to do a lot of daydreaming in my downtime, but I didn't really have a way to easily jot some notes or sketch out the things I wanted to set into motion. I had basic pen and paper, but those things weren't always handy. I began to daydream about an easy way to come home from my normal job, unwind, and have something right at my fingertips to doodle with, write on, and maybe even read on if the mood struck me. A couple days ago I got a shiny new tool to help me do all those things in my downtime.

Game Types in Andrecca

A fitting level for the weather currently outside.

Now that you've gotten to get a look at the style of Andrecca and the overall game mechanics that it'll use, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the different game modes we're planning.  As mentioned before, Andrecca is mostly going to be multiplayer focused, but there will be a lot of content you can play singleplayer too if you'd like, it's just not our primary focus.

Creating Customization

Lady character customization

Growing up in the 90s was pretty awesome. The videogames are/were so amazing to me. There was just one thing that I wished I could change about them, I wanted more character customization. Don't get me wrong, I love games with iconic characters, like Super Mario 64 as an example. Playing as Mario makes sense, but as a kid I thought "I wish I could make this Mario feel more like me." Maybe give him a pink hat instead of Red, or be able to change the color of his overalls. A majority of the games from that era seemed to be a "here's the character, now play" type of design. The only game that I played back in that time that offered a kind of specific customization was Super Smash Brothers, and I remember being blown away that I could play as a red Link if I wanted to.

Now that I'm older I definitely realize that there were a lot of limitations on games back then. The data limitations on a Nintendo 64 game (64 megabytes), are so small compared to what can be done in this day and age.

New Perspectives

Working on the game lobby.

Before I get started on this topic, I wanted to let everyone know that with the new year comes a new blog schedule!  Initially, we tried to do a post once a week and, well you saw how that worked out. We didn't really hold ourselves to it and it ended up being more like once a month instead. With the new year we've decided to change up how we're doing posts to hopefully keep us more on track! We're still going to strive for once a week, but Becca and I are going to alternate weeks. Neither of us are really used to logging our lives on the internet like this, so it's taken some getting used to, but we've been getting more used to it and I promise 2014 will be a better year! Now back to the original topic at hand, New Perspectives.

We're Going To Have An Awesome Soundtrack!

We just got done making a deal with Indigo Rain to create the soundtrack for Andrecca Adventures!  Some of you may recognize the name since he's the same artist we used for Baneling Bobble.

New Year News!

Hey there!

It's a new year and it's already been full of excitement for the Andrecca team. We've recently started to move towards working on the user interface (UI), for the game. I've still been working on art and even branching out into other pixel art projects too.

As far as the UI goes, we want it to feel unique yet comfortable to play no matter what controller is being used. We've just started tweaking the UI and it's going really well as far as what buttons to use and setting up how it will look for the player(s). Making use of the negative space on the screen without it looking cluttered, is not as much of a challenge as I thought it would be. The space we have is not huge, but I think with the options we'll have on the screen, it won't feel cluttered or crowded. It's really coming along nicely, and quickly too. Hopefully I'll be able to share some screenshots soon!

The art I've been working on is really more of doodles and it's been a lot of fun.