Blog Post #14: New office, new team member and new Harkness

We finally got our foot in the solid ground (almost) and had ourselves an office space. Basically a second-floor room from one of our team mates home. We’re joking all the time that we’re like reversed basement developers, attic developers. But one cannot argue that it’s easier to do stuff when all of us can locate in the same space for couple of hours in a day. We also got a new member for our team, he’s going do our sound effects, all those WHIP, CRASH, BUM and PHAU noises we need. Which is pretty neat.

If interested, you should check both of our sound and music talents from they respective channels from soundcloud:

Pauli Ondruska

Adam Al-Sawad

We have also been talking about making the landing page for the game, teaser and demo. Probably we’re going to make an early gameplay teaser or something for the landing page when it will initially launch. We earmarked 21th this month for it, but like always life happens when you least expect it. Probably we crunch again in the last night. With Oh My Kitties we really tried to avoid it, but ended up doing the crunch anyway.

Harknes also got redesign and new 3D model.

"At first I wanted to find the shape for hybrids in general - even though NPC hybrids are way different than Harkness, they now share the same basic shape. After that I made the unique silhouette for Harkness that made him Harkness." - Dicenete 

"This is the first silhouette i made for Harkness, and as you can see, it is more MEH than the one in redesign. This one doesn't have the basic shapes" - Dicenete

At the moment we’re doing groundwork and doing necessary code and new graphics for levels which means that we’re on our way with the game environment building. Things are again happening so fast for the development that it feels pretty optimistic that we get the game ready and it will look good. And it’s a great feeling to have.

Our graphic artist started playing FFXV, because narrative writer made her.


_Rx3 Team

Blog post # 12: Health Game Jam May (fgj) edition

First and furthermost we kind a started Instagram to showcase between the scene work, we’re toning down selfies, but like graphic designs, concept work, graphic artist’s pictures when she has no ideas (at the moment) and more once we start working on Peace Quarter in full speed. Soon. Like really soon. In a week or two. Once we get our new “office” setup done. 

We had a great chance to make and held a workshop about game storytelling and narrative in general and visuals. Workshop was real fun to have and we learned much from our own work while making the workshop. And then there we had awesome conversations about game storytelling and then about visual design and how it shows to player. We also briefed Unity, but had no real chance to really dwell into the game making process on that end.  And because taking pictures of writing is a bit boring here's a some clothes designs for the workshop project we made. We chose to make a walking simulator to demo in the workshop and these are some of the concepts we had with us. 

Clothes design concepts.

Color chart for clothes. Which one would you choose?

Friday started Health Game Jam in Kuopio and our group made small dentistry game as it was health game jam. But then again, all games promote mental health when they are played for fun.Now that our whole team was on the jam we really get to see a fast game development process. It was really fun and from we might have learned a bit from our experience in last Global Game Jam and we were able to focus faster and realize our goals. Which was a good thing and if anyone is interested taking part in any kind of game jam, this is one thing you should try to apply to your work. 48-hours may seem long time in Friday, but it's a blink of an eye on Sunday.

 

Thanks to Lukki and Pauli for working with us on the jam game. See YouTube description for full credits. 

_Rx3 Team

Special Blog Post #10: New promo art.

And here it is. Our first promo art. Gaze your eyes on fine art made by our amazing Dicenete. The art is also going to be possibly part of local Design Week exhibition so we're really happy about that. And probably telling you as soon as we know.


Harkness is gazing over Sektor City while enjoying his old cup of joe.

_Rx3 Team

Blog post #6: Let's talk about Harkness

Our concepting really started from the idea of a mobile game. Simple idea that we made into this story-driven game that we’re now making. When the concepting shifted towards more story-driven game, we made clear line (5 levels) we were going to use. But that’s pretty much a different story, for different post. Now is time to talk about Harkness.

Our beloved main character, Harkness, senior worker in GemFall Wokrforce Inc.

There has been a lot of different Harkness' along the way. First, we have this idea of protagonist being 80's manly man who walks away from the explosion. You know the type if you have seen any of movies with explosions and sweat. Or lately seen Kung Fury. All concept idea was to make the story and setting really over the top. We don't know that happened, but we shifted away from that idea.

Then came the Harkness we have now. Some things from the early concept idea were still there. He is just working there, making his living and his basically sort of lone wolf type of worker. But Harkness became more of an everyday man. This Harkness (Harkness 2.0) has evolved, but not so roughly as Harkness 1.0 (80's hero).

Like, if you look Harkness in our concept designs, he has his priorities straight. Coffee before anything else. (Well, the mug might be from his co-worker or default mug in GemFall Workforce Inc.)

by Dicenete 

So, we have heavily moved for more story-driven game so, like in last blog, we have face the need for more world-building and humane characters. Now we must care about the characters and make sure that player cares about them too. All this affects the pacing of the game, the narrative and even our game design choices. (I'm not saying cool looking hero action isn't cared for and in some cases made so perfectly that they are awesome, it's just a different kind of narrative choice that rely on different things.)

We have to make Harkness’ design that in mind. And we also need to focus on his story arc and try to bring that to the design of his character.

And about that Harkness helmet, that was inspired by Power Rangers. Here are some concept we had for it.

By Dicenete

And finally, you can see Harkness finalized design in GemFall Workforce Inc mobile game. We may do some changes along the way, to sharpen the design and character, but this is what we have now. And it's pretty finalized. And we like him. Harkness is cool.

Harkness starting his normal work day in GemFall Workforce Inc.

_Rx3 Team