Music – Listen Now or Else
March 9th, 2010
Cleveland Bledsoe Jr. has been doing some fantastic work for us, and I wanted to share a small cut of one of his tracks with everyone.
A Peak at the Process
March 5th, 2010
All these posts seem to be focusing on the Fox character, when there is so much else going on with the project. But we need to keep some secrets to ourselves (insert maniacal laughter).
Here is a sneak peak at some of the conversations that go on in the developer forums. Makes you want to sign up and contribute, doesn’t it?
Post by Andrew Gardner.
After I got the go ahead to texture, the first thing I took into consideration was my lights. I was using a sky light for no reason in the beginning as it lights the object evenly with out having to play with any settings. It was just by chance that when I turned the shadows off from the light that it gave a very nice clean cartoon look.
Next I started off by sectioning off my texture map. Read more…
New Concept and Model Walkthrough
January 21st, 2010
Here is an update with a new piece of concept art and the beginnings of a model for it. This post also goes through how we provide feedback on the progress the modeler is making, which is an extremely important part of how we ensure proper quality control.
The Initial Sketch
Let’s step through the process once again. First we get an initial sketch. Today we will be looking at our Fox Demon concept, created by Christa Wolf and modeled by Andrew Gardner.
There are three categories of units in the Kung Fu Kingdom world: player units, neutral units, and NPC Faction units. Neutral units generally wander around the world by themselves according to their own coded behavior; that’s just how they roll. Fox Demons are mischievous and potentially troublesome. If they like the units in your faction, they may be helpful: helping units out in combat, or blessing one of your structures. If they dislike units in your faction, they may be disruptive: blowing your cover when you are trying to hide, etc.
Here is some select feedback that was given on the forums: Read more…
From Concept Art to Model
January 7th, 2010
A lot of concept artists who join our team are quite skilled, they just don’t quite know what is required from a professional concept artist in the games industry. So let’s walk through it.
The Process!
The first thing that a concept artist should do is create a rough sketch of the asset requested. This will allow the artist to get feedback on their sketch before putting too much time into it. If the asset needs to be abandoned, it should be before the artist has put any significant amount of time into the concept.
Here is an early sketch of a bench asset for Kung Fu Kingdom done by Christa Wolf ( http://www.nameless-account.deviantart.com/ ).
Stealing Design
December 29th, 2009
Kind of a blunt way to put it, but I’m blunt like a used pencil.
Steam currently has some fantastic deals running, and so I picked up some great looking games: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Gratuitous Space Battles, Altitude, Trine, World of Goo, and Braid. As I played through them, I started doing what I always do, which is to jot down some great design choices they made, and some bad ones. Here are the results of my investigative analysis, starting with the first two listed games. Read more…
Infinite Ammo
December 19th, 2009
This is a great video put together by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot (Source: tigsource.com) on the company Infinite Ammo, which made Aquaria, a fantastic little indie game.
Being a Producer
December 16th, 2009
There are quite a few articles out there on what exactly a producer does in the games industry. They typically go into excessive detail, and are a good way for an aspiring producer to really lose themselves in the detail. So, what is it like being a producer for an indie project? Read more…
Progress Update
December 1st, 2009
Time for an update!
By checking Google analytics, I’ve been able to see that there are masses FROTHING for the smallest bit of news to be released from the Kung Fu Kingdom website. How can we blame them? We do exude awesome.
Project Progress
Programming
We have currently finished a sandbox programming environment which can load a game-world, units, and objects. From this, the rest of our programming team is branching out and working on Pathfinding, Basic Player Controls, and GUI.
Art
Concept art is flowing from our artists like water from the Hoover dam. Well, when the flood gates are opened. We are narrowing in on the type of Cel-Shader we want to use for our units / props while constructing several sample models to test it on, including the Clueless Monk – our mascot.
Staffing
Currently we have one full time employee (My beautiful self) and thirteen part-time volunteers who are actively contributing to the project. There are a further five developers waiting in the wings, much like chained tigers, once we have work specific to their areas of expertise.
We will always welcome more people onto the project. Join a sub-team and work together, or go lone-star and create a few assets or features on your own. Either way, it is a win-win situation for everyone.
Something to Show?
Soon. Very Soon. Perhaps this time next week. Drop by and find out!
2d Hand Drawn Art vs Rendered 3d Models
October 20th, 2009
Lately I have faced the decision of 2d vs 3d objects rendered in 2d. That is, do we go with hand drawn images for the game, or do we model our assets in 3d and then pose them and render them out in 3d. As with any decision, I started figuring out what the pro’s and con’s of each approach was, and then finding blogs or posts by people who had faced a similar choice to see what their solution was. I eventually decided that rendering out 2d images of 3d models into sprite sheets was our best option, so lets discuss some of the reasons why I choose this path. One blog which explores the Read more…
Exploring Perspective
October 12th, 2009
One of the challenges we faced in Kung Fu Kingdom was deciding what perspective to use when drawing our isometric 2d characters. Our priorities were: 1. Retain enough side-perspective that we avoid having a top down head-with-arms graphic for our characters. 2. Maintain enough top-perspective to allow the character to blend properly with the world, and avoid a clash of perspective with the character being side view and the world being top-down view.
This is a pretty easy challenge, it simply involves some experimenting. This is what John Corbett (Artist) came up with.
Another challenge was finding the right size for the units. Too big and Read more…
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