Don't Wake Mommy Commercial

Don't Wake Mommy PrintNPlay Game

Arctic Arena Process

 This was the process for a piece I worked on during my free time in between classes the past week. I am very proud of how this came out, but I know if I push myself hard enough I can do better the next time around. My wonderful mentor and friend Andy Timm (concept artist for Hi-Rez) gave me some very constructive criticism, and things to consider for future compositions or if I chose to go back and recreate this piece.

Print N Play "Don't Wake Mommy" Playtest

Friday night I had the interesting opportunity to see my classmate Alisa, and a freshman student enjoy my print n play game of "Don't Wake Mommy". It was fun, it definitely had a lot of sabotage, a lot of deceit and of course laughter.  Along the way however I observed them and together we uncovered a few tiny issues.

First of all, I needed to get more interesting things to happen in the red and blue cards. There were 4 of  each card, which lead to a lot of repetition. It was only a matter of the crunch time, and that was an obvious and easy fix. Also another thing that was a peculiar issue was the color palette of the character markers. Now and then we would confuse each others markers simply because of how washed and similar they were. I chose to saturate the colors on the character cards and markers so that this was no longer a problem. Another issue was the abundance of red tiles vs blue tiles, and not being able to reach the end goal of 30 candies. My solution to this was reducing the amount of red tiles, and also adding more candy winnings on the blue cards vs the spankings or candy loss on the red cards. Those were the biggest issues, there was also a matter on how tricky it was to collect the candy because of how they were simply cut pieces rather than having an outline. I also took the liberty of making  one of the playable characters more interesting to play as.

Update: There was another flaw in my game's layout that was not brought up until I spoke with my teacher and played the game with him. My game does not have any skill, it is mostly based on chance. To remedy this I changed the mechanic of the red and blue cards. You can hold blue cards and use them against your players, and red cards do not punish you until there is a card where you have woken up mommy.

Combining 2 Games and Making 1

As a workshop in my Game Development Class we had the objective to get 2 board games and combine as many components as we could to make a whole brand new game. I brought a game called "Red Dragon Inn 4" and my companion Alexis brought Munchkin Oz Edition.

From "Red Dragon Inn 4" we combined the mats, the markers, the drink me deck, the gold, and the character decks. From Munchkin we combined the doorway cards and die.

Basically the set up was each player chose a character, then had 10 drink me cards and 10 doorway cards on the mat. Before the game begins they draw 7 of their character cards. The players roll the die to see who rolls the highest. Whoever has the highest number wins the round and the loser has to be punished. The player rolls the dice again to see how many cards they must take from either the drink deck or the doorway deck. The winner of the round decides for them. If the player has a card to ignore one of the drink or doorway cards, or to even punish the winner a little bit as well now is when they can do so.

If a player draws a drink event card it is considered a "pass" card, meaning no action needs to be taken. If a player draws a doorway card that says a certain amount of treasure, they lose that amount of gold, if they have no more gold they take health damage, which is the red marker on the mat. If one of the markers ever reaches the other side the player loses.

Theme For Board Game Project

In my Game Development class I am in the progress of creating my very own board game. I have come up with a concept called "Don't Wake Mommy" where the players are children running around the house. They have to complete quiet dares and activities to gain candy, and if they wake Mommy on red tiles they get "spanked" and lose candies. The ultimate goal is to collect 30 candies first.

The game setting is inside of a typical home. The layout will be similar to a Clue board but trail the player follows goes through the rooms There are different rooms that the characters have to navigate through. I also have to come up with a theme for the game. I feel like the best description would be "Survival of the Quietest" or "It's all fun and games until someone loses a butt cheek". I also plan for this game to have a pastel color palette.

As for the art style I am not overtly certain which direction I want to take whether it be a Candy Land esque thing or otherwise.

Art Style/ Mood Ideas

 

This was a small project I was doing for myself. It was something I always had in my head but never had the ability to put it to paper until now. A series of Halloween inspired pinups of a witch, vampire, and a zombie. I plan to upload these to redbubble and society6 for people to purchase some unique merchandise for this Halloween season.

What I Have Learned in Game Art

Being in the Game Art Major for 2 years now I have collected a vast amount of understanding about the career path I have chosen to take. Much more compared to when I first walked into Ringling. Yes, When I was a freshman I had some form of understanding of what I would need to accomplish by senior year. I would have to learn how to comprehend color, value, and perspective to best illustrate my concepts, model characters, objects, environments, animate motion, and much more to complete my senior thesis. However, this sophomore year within the first month of being in class I have discovered there is much more to it.

A couple of the biggest things in sophomore year that I have learned is how much thinking and planning that goes into a game, even in it's raw stages. Sometimes to best illustrate your concept you have to get inspiration from the world around you, which requires an understanding of what you want and how to get resources of it. While I knew good communication and body language would be a positive asset in such a communication based work field, I never considered how vital it would be. If I was still a soft spoken student with a meek body language, I would not have made it through freshman year. Additionally there is so much organization into the game's levels, it obstacles, it's rules, it's end goal, and how it makes the player feel. The end goal of a game company is to make a game that the player would walk away from with satisfaction of completion, but it is not always obvious what will make the player feel satisfied. Sometimes that idea is a shot in the dark, and it is up to the game company to come up with the best guess.

I came up with 30 rough concepts of board games I could try and create for a project in my class. I managed to come up with a more refined definition for 2 different games. "Don't Wake Mommy" and "Cubicle Carnage", the other ideas had some spark to them, but sadly there was not enough where I could get behind it and make something great out of it.

In "Don't Wake Mommy" There can be 2-6 players (kids) on the board. The board layout itself does not have a final goal, it loops around continuously. Each player's goal is to get "candy" by landing on blue spaces on the board. The one who reaches 30 candies first wins. However, if a player lands on a red tile, they have woken up mommy and you have to lose candies. Each kid has a unique attribute, for example one kid may have the ability to "tattle" or swap places with someone if they are caught on a red tile. Another may have an ability to "bribe a sibling" and give a sibling 5 candies to take a punishment for them. The result of gaining or losing candies is predicted by drawing a card the same color as the tile you land on. Some cards may gain 3-6 candies, help a friend gain candies, lose 3-6 candies or have someone lose candies with you.

The alternative "Cubicle Carnage" is a card based game. The story is that the 2nd Amendment has been tossed to the wind, the right to bear arms is obsolete, and guns have been destroyed, holding one is illegal. You are working in your office, and a zombie outbreak threatens everyone. You have to use cards, that are objects within your office to create a weapon. For example: a rubber band card, a ruler card, and a pencil card can create a pencil crossbow. At the beginning of each round all of the players draw 7 cards. If they can make a weapon from the list they survive the round, if they cannot make a weapon with the supplies they have they have to pull a card from the fate pile. There is a 60% chance your survive, and a 40% chance you get bitten and lose a life. There are two ways of winning, you survive without losing all 3 lives, or you pull the "boss room key" card in the deck. The boss key card basically gives the player access to the boss' office, who has a secret stash of weapons that ultimately would give the player who draws it victory.

Don't Starve Trailer, one of my personal favorites.

   

      I played a Print N Play game called "The Empire Engine" with my fellow classmate Maria. In the game you run an empire, and in each round you can choose what actions to take, whether it be collecting supplies, defending yourself from enemy empires, or attacking them. The end goal of the game is to collect as much soldiers, inventions, and goods as you can. The one with the most overall wins.

     The core mechanic of the game is your left and right engine cards, you twist them clockwise using gear cards to execute actions such as attack, defend, or gather supplies. The game is card based, with a few tokens to represent items in the game. However, the aesthetic and artwork of the game makes the environment feel steampunk-esque. There are three key objects in the game that you have to collect: soldiers, goods, and inventions. There can be quite a few states that the player can be in during the rounds. They could be focusing on collecting resources, they could be defending their empire, or attacking other player's empires. By choosing one of these three actions the results can vary. You can gain the resources you needed, you could gain a soldier by defending yourself from an attack, or you could lose resources if you leave yourself vulnerable to attack.

     The one thing that I noticed about the game was that it was almost an elaborate form of rock paper scissors. You use the two gear cards to turn one card two times and the other once. You cannot tell what your opponent is planning because you flip your gear cards at the same time. There is a bit of strategy, you can try and predict what you opponent plans to do and work with your gears against the odds. Overall, it does seem to be a bit more of a matter of chance than anything else.

 

     I played a few Print N Play games with my fellow classmates. We played Lance, Final Boss, The Big Time, and Sweet Nose. There was quite a range in complexity, some enough to frustrate my peers just in preparation. By far The Big Time has the most interesting artwork behind it in my opinion. The game play was great as well. The hardest game to construct was certainly Sugar Nose. The confusing cutting and folding guidelines, and the directions written in Chinese, and so many pieces made us unmotivated to play by the time an afternoon was invested to cut it and set up. I admired the games that had something new to me. Final Boss was practically a table top card rpg, and The Big Time was a delightful concept for a game. The thing that frustrated me the most was that for most of the games the directions were tricky to comprehend, and the first game was always full of errors out of confusion or miscommunication.

https://docs.google.com/a/c.ringling.edu/presentation/d/1ZwjABqhUlHCYPkCkBhrF3VL29e6YOn-rbcRJpw079Ss/edit?usp=sharing

Current Work In Progress on a digital painting I am doing. Plan to have the whole piece done by the end of the week.

 One of the bigger projects I worked on in my freshman year of Ringling was in 2D Design with my instructor Aaron Board. The final assignment we had to create an interior space (bedroom) for a character in a film, that did not already have one revealed. I chose Bunnymund from Rise of The Guardians. I sketched out concepts, evaluated lighting ideas, and then painted a final piece. This class in general was enriched with information I will carry with me throughout my career path, but this project pooled everything together into one satisfying product. How to balance lighting, how to imply moods, and how to divide light and shadow.