Author Topic: Brock Crocodile - Has now been Greenlit (See latest post)  (Read 62958 times)

Offline Barry the Nomad

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #15 on: October 02, 2014, 08:09:35 pm »
It is a nod to Sonic 1 and Madonna of course!

Offline MadeManG74

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #16 on: October 03, 2014, 08:28:26 am »
It is an artistic statement to showcase that men are uncivilized animals and truly women are the superior sex that will lead the huwomen race into a glorious utopian future.

Guaranteedsales.jpg

For real though it's looking really fantastic. What do you use to make the sprites etc? Are you limiting yourself to a certain resolution to keep a certain aesthetic?

Offline JRcade19

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #17 on: October 03, 2014, 11:00:01 am »
I need this music in my veins.

Offline Aki-at

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #18 on: October 06, 2014, 01:27:29 pm »
Guaranteedsales.jpg

For real though it's looking really fantastic. What do you use to make the sprites etc? Are you limiting yourself to a certain resolution to keep a certain aesthetic?

Good ole MSPaint, I've been sticking to the palettes used in most SEGA Japan games from either the Mega Drive or the Mega CD, it helps to give off that bright colourful effect. When it comes to the basic sprites, unless they're larger than normal, I tend to avoid shading simply because I only have a limited amount of pixels for me to play with and that is a real challenge I'll admit. It has it's advantages too though, mainly it's far easier to animate!

I need this music in my veins.

Glad you loved it so far! Steve, the guy who made the trailer music (Which is the first stage song in the game.) has all his musical stuff hooked up to a Mega Drive so he's as authentic as possible when it comes to replicating the sounds, the other tracks his working on so far sound pretty grand, I'll be sharing some hopefully in future once's his finished them.

Offline CrazyT

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #19 on: October 11, 2014, 05:17:27 am »
It is an artistic statement to showcase that men are uncivilized animals and truly women are the superior sex that will lead the huwomen race into a glorious utopian future.

Really the tiger in the middle is a girl, they'll be other non-humans but I prefer drawing female humans.
I like this actually haha

I almost missed this thread but damn this looks fabulous.

Offline inthesky

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #20 on: October 12, 2014, 02:46:02 am »
It is an artistic statement to showcase that men are uncivilized animals and truly women are the superior sex that will lead the huwomen race into a glorious utopian future.

Really the tiger in the middle is a girl, they'll be other non-humans but I prefer drawing female humans.

:lol to all

Damn I like your art though. I can't imagine how exhausting it must be to be that detailed everywhere.
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I support Shenmue and Skies of Arcadia HD ports!

Offline marcoslucas

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #21 on: October 14, 2014, 02:00:41 pm »
No version for other o.s. in future?

Offline Aki-at

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #22 on: October 14, 2014, 03:20:57 pm »
I like this actually haha

I almost missed this thread but damn this looks fabulous.

Thanks bro! Been working pretty hard on this project, literally my life's project since I came up with the idea when I was like 5 or something, so any compliments I get is much appreciated!

:lol to all

Damn I like your art though. I can't imagine how exhausting it must be to be that detailed everywhere.

It actually comes to me relatively easy heh, the hardest part is animating the sprites. Though the game originally started at 200 x 180, infact this is what the first two levels use to look like;





I've come a looooong way. I've got a lot of rejected level tile sets, probably enough to make an extra level or two heh.

No version for other o.s. in future?

I actually want to get it on as many places as possible, though I am not a particularly skilled programmer (And I'm the only one to boot!) I'm focusing on one for now. But if I can get it on OS, Linux, even on consoles I'd be damn willing to. As there exists an exporter for iOS that's the most likely though that does bring it's own selection of headaches.

Offline Barry the Nomad

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #23 on: October 14, 2014, 04:33:19 pm »
Aki, if you sneak a SEGAbits reference into the game, I can then news the reference. Hint hint ;)

Offline Aki-at

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #24 on: October 20, 2014, 02:24:00 pm »
Aki, if you sneak a SEGAbits reference into the game, I can then news the reference. Hint hint ;)

Barry please, don't you know I abide to the highest moral and ethical standards humanly possible?

(Sure I'll put you and George as graffiti causing maniacs, that's a SEGA reference in there too!)

Offline Aki-at

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #25 on: October 20, 2014, 02:28:04 pm »
Thought it was best if I went a bit further in detail in the tools I used and a bit more on the history of the title. Consider this my first *proper* developer blog! (Which happens to me copying the post off my website!)


The Design Process of a Brock Sprite

HISTORY
Brock Crocodile finds it’s early roots back in the early 1990s when as a young chap I decided that I wanted to be a game designer. From designing the characters in LEGO bricks to making faux magazines posting previews and reviews of the title. After a stint in various fangaming communities during the early 2000s I had come across Clickteam’s highly popular The Games Factory, a video game development program. The application used a range of GUI tools instead of scripting to help allow users an easier way at designing computer games. But it was not until 2009 that I actually began designing Brock Crocodile.


The Gazadiaz Ruins in 2009 (Left & right image) and present (Centre images)
The First Pieces of Art
On a late Autumn day I finally decided that I should give my attention at actually designing the game I had planned to and so I set about creating the first Brock sprite. Opening up Microsoft Paint and using the basic palette as a guide to the colours I would use, I drew some nifty little circles and started attaching them together, before long I had the first official Brock Crocodile sprite! But I did not stop there and quickly after completing Brock I went straight for designing the first area the Gazadiaz Ruins. Looking back at it, whilst the same Brock sprite has remained through from 2009 the first stage has changed considerably. Now with more shading in both the foreground and background with much more detail, I opted to abandon the strict restriction on the palette limitation I set on myself.


The level design to the left flows much better in terms of progression
Crafting the Level Design
When it came to designing the levels I originally opted to once again use Microsoft Paint but found it much more effective and efficient if I used the good old fashioned pen(cil) and paper. Another area that saw drastic changes as the project went into full production and saw me unfortunately scrap some good work but trying to implement my originally Microsoft Paint level designs lead me to the realisation they were just not as good as the new set I was making with my pencil and pad. I must have scrapped a good level of two worth of content but I’m not sadden by it, in fact I think what I have designed now is much more impressive! Compare the first half of stage 1 with that of the level design I created using Microsoft Paint to see what a massive difference it makes. Another major contribution to the project was digging through level designs of classic platformers from the 1990s and it proved to be incredibly help at analysing what they did right and how they implemented an effective design centred around the game’s core mechanics.

How very programm-ey
Working on the Engine
Now whilst the art may seem to some to have taken some time, nothing compares to the amount of time I spent programming the title. Thankfully the Clickteam community have a stockpile of tutorials on helping you learn how to use their programs and I finally dived in and discarded my old copy of The Games Factory I had from the early 2000s and decided to purchase Multimedia Fusion 2. Using various tutorials on Youtube and both the Clickteam official community sites as well as the many fan websites through out the internet, I eventually managed to get a hang of coding my first proper engine with Multimedia Fusion 2. From first giving Brock the ability to jump, then to walk, shoot, get hurt etc it all slowly added up. Ironically the core part of the gameplay, Brock’s whip, was the hardest and last core part to implement but finally after many stressful nights that too was accomplished!

“Hey where did the other hoop go?!”
Resolution Wars
Another massive change that happened during the early production of the title was the resolution change. The original levels were designed with a resolution of 240 x 180 to try and stick with the same sort of resolution a 8 bit title would usually be restricted too. However in 2013, after finally completing the base engine I decided that to not only to push for a much more varied and better art direction (By giving myself access to a wider range of colours.) I found a larger resolution would allow for a much less cluttered screen that was being suffocated with the HUD taking more then I would like of the vital space. More importantly though is that it helped the player avoid colliding with obstacles and enemies. Finally, the window size was upped to 320 x 200 (Closer to games found on the SEGA Mega Drive.) allowing me to space out the levels just a little bit more and allowed for a much better swing radius for a key component in Brock Crocodile, the use of his whip.

Brock gives you a thumbs up for reading the whole post!
This wraps up the history lesson for the project, I hope you all enjoyed reading about the project a bit and please look forward to more developer blogs where I’ll be going more in depth from things such as level design to the coding of the game itself. Thanks again for reading and look forward to many more updates coming in the future, till then enjoy your Monday afternoon people!

http://brockcrocodile.com/2014/10/20/developer-blog-1-history-and-tools/

https://twitter.com/BrockCrocodile/status/524274935125266432

Offline JRcade19

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #26 on: October 20, 2014, 09:39:00 pm »
Fascinating write up! It's always a pleasure to read and even have visual peaks into the experiences and thought processes of others, especially in the field of gaming. As a programmer(however novice atm) it also helps with the logistics and system design elements to see the examples of others and how they work around problems.

Planning myself to enter homebrew projects(though not necessarily making games myself, I don't have that much art talent lol) myself in the coming week(s). Gonna be fiddling around mostly with Commodore/Amiga. If I do extend to games it probably will be porting, but I don't expect this to happen for a while, between Commodore BASIC and 68000 Assembly....I have a lot to learn xD

Offline Aki-at

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #27 on: October 23, 2014, 07:13:33 am »
Fascinating write up! It's always a pleasure to read and even have visual peaks into the experiences and thought processes of others, especially in the field of gaming. As a programmer(however novice atm) it also helps with the logistics and system design elements to see the examples of others and how they work around problems.

Heh thanks, I enjoyed writing and hope people find these future posts useful ^^

I've definitely learnt a lot through making my own game and I cannot stress enough that having a rough idea of how you are going to implement the code before you go through it is fundamental, not just a good idea. Prior to this I was just wigging it and left scratching my head needlessly most of the time!

Planning myself to enter homebrew projects(though not necessarily making games myself, I don't have that much art talent lol) myself in the coming week(s). Gonna be fiddling around mostly with Commodore/Amiga. If I do extend to games it probably will be porting, but I don't expect this to happen for a while, between Commodore BASIC and 68000 Assembly....I have a lot to learn xD

Oh by all means do post about on the forums when you've got stuff to show, it's great to see we're starting to get a community of coders on here heh.

Offline JRcade19

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #28 on: October 23, 2014, 09:04:12 am »
I've definitely learnt a lot through making my own game and I cannot stress enough that having a rough idea of how you are going to implement the code before you go through it is fundamental, not just a good idea. Prior to this I was just wigging it and left scratching my head needlessly most of the time!

Trust me, experience has taught me thus so far xD.
SO many assignments that took longer than they should have because I was coding first thinking later x.x

Quote
Oh by all means do post about on the forums when you've got stuff to show, it's great to see we're starting to get a community of coders on here heh.

I plan to, most likely in the programming thread of course! Subject to change based on relevance!

Offline segaismysavior

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Re: Brock Crocodile - Aki makes a platformer because we need more crocodiles.
« Reply #29 on: October 29, 2014, 03:10:34 pm »
This is so frigging sweet. Very inspiring!

I've invested lots of time learning programming and such in Unity, after knowing most of the art pipeline, so I dig that other people are tipping their hat towards game design.