A Stormy Nights Game
So, I spent almost 2 months prepping for a Kickstarter after being given the idea from a stranger I met at a local convention, and it ended up getting funded in 22 hours.
(Okay… if that’s not the most clickbait-y article summary, but that’s totally what happened)
Edit (You might actually want to see the kickstarter): http://kickstarter.breezethegame.com/
I went to a local convention in Dallas that had an indie game showcase (and mostly only wanted to go to check out Chimera Lab’s game: OTHER – Her Loving Embrace demo and meet up with the devs.
While I was there, I met someone while chatting at the booth, and we spoke a bit about Breeze. I gave him one of my Breeze pins (Protip, if you ever find mine IRL, I totally hand these out), and he was like “DUDE, sell these!”.
At the time, I wasn’t really ready to “sell them” yet and was kind of waiting until I had more merch planned out, but he hyped me up so much that we ended up planning out an idea to make a Kickstarter for a variety of merch.
Also, after that convention, I got the idea of hosting a Halloween Fan Art Contest as well. I had a small order of pins left, so I wanted to give some of them away for fun ~
Once again, I decided that I needed to go overboard with the whole thing, and came up with a script for a video, along with a list of merch ideas.
I reached out to Seibai again, who designed the original Breeze pin, and went through a list of ideas and created concepts for all the merch. This included a few iterations for some of the characters, whereas others were done pretty quickly!
Next, I worked with a few of my artists (Katrina and Komoroshi) to come up with a storyboard to match my original script! The original idea was to have this more “animated comic book” concept.
We went through one pass of a rather rough concept to get the idea across of the character’s placements and movement and then drafted out a more stylized rough after. I roughly timed all the panels so that I could estimate how long the video would be if there was a traditional “textbox” reading like in a game cutscene….. It was rather long.
I ended up speaking with one of my voice actors, Timber Puppers (recruited MANY years back) who voices Float, who might be able to voice Float’s parts, however, that would also mean, many other characters would need voices, and I wasn’t really trying to recruit like 5+ characters voices in a week or two’s time, but the crazy lad was like “I’ll do all of them for now (temporarily)”.
And he did that. REALLY impressive and exciting at the same time. It was also a treat to have a reason to create a list of voice comparisons for some of the characters, before and after listening to his “tryouts”.
After adding his voice work however, the video ended up being even longer (2 minutes and 24 seconds), and honestly, the important stuff was only really 30-40 seconds of content. The rest was banter and such. Also, this would have resulted in needing to clean up over two minutes’ worth of “animation”, and I was already a bit behind my original schedule.
SO, after trying to find a way to tackle or minimize the video, Piti came up with the idea of making a more “Visual Novel” approach. He created some assets, and I pretty much sat down and created a revised script.
After doing that, I opened Premiere and started placing graphics down and timing how the text would work with graphics. Not too much work (as I’ve done some video work in the past), but then I realized that I needed to figure out a way to “animate” the text, as well as making other aspects of the graphics more interesting. I ended up going to After Effects.
I haven’t exactly used After Effects before… So I learned!
I ended learning some of the basics of Motion Graphics and generally how to use the program!
Unfortunately, I also learned that my workflow was a mess… I already laid out the audio and a lot of text in Premiere, so from my limited knowledge, I basically had to redo it all in After effects.
So after a couple of days, I managed to complete the video, and also added a track made by Alan Gee to really spice it up! He also did some tweaks to the Voice Acting audio to ensure it balanced right with the music.
Check out the tune here:
Anyway, that’s about it! A daunting amount of work, but I think it turned out! If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:
Alrighty (I’ve been abusing Mini dev logs for a while so… time for another journal!)
So this post was a little delayed. Discordians know already, but my laptop decided that it hates me and the GPU died, so I had to send it out for repair.
Meanwhile, I kinda messed up my Windows partition on my desktop after removing one of the drives to use for backing files up. Managed to fix that issue, but lost a couple of days of dev time 😛
ANYWAY! Some things did get done! Some of it harder to show (and some things I’m not wanting to show off just yet)
I sat down with Jonathan Wedge and did an interview! Listen in as I ramble on about my inspirations for Breeze, a bit about the project’s history, and see how *cough* rusty *cough* I was at Smash Bros that day!
So, it’s been a productive couple of weeks! I got some rather disappointing news that might affect my productivity for a while but gonna keep truckin’ along as much as I can. Anyway, here’s the current changelog since the last dev update!
I also wanted to start doing some videos as I think that they might cut down on the amount of writing/explaining and might be a little more engaging. I already wrote up a large changelog below, so I’ll be adding it too, as I didn’t want to add all this content to the video (so lazy, I know).
(more…)Our first batch of enamel pins for Breeze arrived! They turned out great! The pin was designed by @seiryuuden
Many of you may have seen and voted on some of the concepts we presented on Discord/Twitter, and after taking feedback and making some adjustments to get it ready for manufacturing, we settled on this design!
They turned out great! I can’t even explain how anxious I was when first opening the box and seeing them! (Also, the fact that they were scheduled to arrive a day after getting the shipping confirmation made it a bit hard to sleep!)
Now it’s time to figure out what to do with them 🙂
Seeing how I missed like two weeks of mini blog posts, I’m deeming this one an actual “Devlog” (fanfare and such yada yada). I’m just going to call it a Dev Log.
So much has gone on the last few weeks that I’m struggling to piece it all together, so here is an attempt:
So, I don’t haven’t built a dev machine from the ground up for years now, (maybe since college?) and typically just upgrade parts as I see fit (graphics card, ram, processor, etc).
Well, my motherboard has been giving me problems for close to a year now, where it occasionally decides “yeah, don’t really care about your boot device today”, as well as other miscellaneous things that required me to do things like removing the CMOS battery or main drive. I was also running out of upgrade options, so I got a bit fed up and decided it might be time to replace it.
(more…)Well, last week was a busy week! Let’s get started
Accomplishments this week:
I hope everyone had a great holiday and such! We’ll be getting into the normal swing of development updates soon!
I also wanted to write up a post of some of the bigger things accomplished last year, but I started a little later than I wanted to, so that’s gonna take a little longer to complete ~
As always, thanks for your support!
Hey all!
So for those that are on the Discord server, you probably know I was sick pretty much the first week or two of December :P.
Shortly after that, Smash Ultimate came out (one of my favorite series of all time, and a pretty big influence for Breeze’s combat), so I had the chance to play that a bit while I was recovering.
Outside of that, I did manage to get some things done in the last few weeks.
(more…)Hey there folks!
I’ve decided to (try) and commit to a mini devlog habit, where I discuss some of the behind the scenes work to show some of our progress from time-to-time.
So for this week, we have around 5 major accomplishments:
(more…)