Making proper puppets in Flash

Hello. It's been a while again, I know.
I have been trying out the bone tool in Flash CS4, as in theory, this should make my life a lot easier. It also means I will probably be making this all in Flash. So if you are a good flash coder, you can expect some cries for help from me.

Here is a little nosey at the basic male puppet. I will probably animate this and rescale it for different characters(if I have any) and for children. Then I will add different items of clothing to each of the movieclips. e.g. a hat on the head.










I'm still have a few problems with this puppet, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it and get some help from the lovely online community (who also seem to be having problems with skeletons).

Hopefully will post a walk cycle or something else in a few days.

Cheers :D

Iain


(portfoldio)

Park Scene

Hello again at last.
I've been pretty busy the last few months, and was starting to feel quite bad for not doing anything creative.
So, This is just one image for you I'm affraid. I got the idea for a kind of woodland/wooded area when I watched Sleepy Hollow a little while back. There is a scene where a figure holding a little lamp, glides through a foggy orchard, which looked pretty spooky. So I got to work on some trees and lighting, and I eventually put in a fence and a gate, to suggest it is still set within the city limits.












Hope you like it :)

Images and ideas

Hello,
back again with some new images and game ideas :)

The first image I put together to have a play with lighting and to try some silhouetted Victorian assets. As you can see, it''s pretty menacing. With the 'Bates' style house in the background and the distant London skyline beyond that...It is perhaps in a London suburb...which judging from Roman Polanksi's Oliver Twist, are semi-rural..which would explain the hills :)


















The next image is more a test of scale. I think this would look really cool....kind of wide screen....1280 - 512. Which I think is influenced by 'Keith Reynolds can't make it tonight' (by Felix Massie) and Nilfa's Knytt games. I think it looks nice to see detailed things on a fairly small screen..and it's a good way to cheat a bit with the animating :D but having said that...I'm sure I'll be picky with the animating no matter what.











As for the actual GAME in all this...I'm not entirely sure.
With a story or basic narrative, however I have a few different ideas which in each case lends themselves to different game mechanic ideas.

I'm pretty sure this creature is going to be a big part of this game, which gives a more supernatural edge to it....just the kind that I like too :D Creepy creatures.
I like the idea of the creature being found in a cave which has been discovered by mining children. The game could be entirely based in this cave or the mines with children, which would be pretty much the same as the Descent, but without the gore.
Or.... The creature could be discovered by the children, then captured by their masters to be taken to London in the hope of profiting from it in freak shows. This is just an idea to get the monster to London, which offers some good opportunities with its visuals (as you can see in the image above).
This is where my ideas split...Is the creature a Friend or Foe? Although in the first image in this post looks very creepy, I find something quite cute about the creature. If you look at the Mine image at the end of my last post, it is almost like the boy and the creature are exploring together, and the creature is not sneaking up on the boy as I intended.
Here are my ideas so far:

Friend
A boy finds the creature in the mines and befriends it. When the Master of the boy discovers the creatures he takes it to London to claim his fortune.
Here it is split again.

Play as the boy to save your strange new friend from it's captor's...

• Perhaps a old Prince of Persia style traverse through London to the place where the creature is being held.
• Assuming the creature is saved already, and you must guide it through the streets of London, in a Sleep Walker style. Hiding him in shadows or giving it commands to Run, Jump, Duck etc. You help the creature to escape London and beyond, to get it back home. This could be done in an Abe's Oddysee style or a Monkey Island style point and click.

Play as the creature who frees himself or is saved by the boy..

• Help street kids with their struggle to survive by hunting down their cruel Masters and gobbling them up, or scaring them off. Become a Vigilante duo, set on ridding the city of it's evil.
  
• Using the Prince of Persia idea again, traverse the streets of London using shadows..again like Abe's Oddysee or a 'Sneak 'Em Up' like Metal Gear.

Foe
It could still be based in the mines, which I think the Foe idea works well with. But, of coarse it still works with it being in London too :)
Again, we could play as a boy, the creature, or even a man..?...?..?

Play as the Boy who discovers it in the mines..Or in London.

• A classic deadly game of cat and mouse....perhaps similar to the Scrabanian or Paramonian Temples in Abe's Oddysee...where the player is having to maneuver through the torturous and unstable mine shafts, while being chanced by one or many of the creatures...without much time to contemplate the route for fear of being gobbled up by your pursuers.

• Play as a boy who must hunt down the escaped creature as it terrorises the street children of London. Which could be more a detective game...where you could discover the patterns and habits of the creature, to then use them against it, setting traps in particular areas of the city that it seems to frequent most. This could be done in a point and click style. It can also work with playing as a man, or actual detective.

Playing as the creature could again be an attempt to escape London and return home, or it could be a opportunity for the creature to have an almost endless amount of food and fun.

• The game could be one that is simply timed, and the aim to be to scare as many people or animals as possible. Running through the streets and finding the areas which contain the most amount of people. Which would mean multiple play through's to find the best streets for the job.
  
• Escape London, taking out anyone who gets in the way. A perhaps GTA way of going about it..on in 2D....kill or be killed...kill people at your own discretion...the only goal is to get home. What seems like the entire city is after you, there's a large bounty on your head.
• Explore the city. A more mellow take on the game. Slower paced and concentrating on discovering some beautiful cityscape scenery. This would also involve hiding from humans. Abe's Oddysee + Prince of Persia.

I think that's about it for the ideas for now....Though I do have a working title for this project....seeing as it is set in the 1800's, I'm calling it '1800'....
Or, another idea is a take on idea of a cave dwelling creature in this time...Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking study 'on the origin of species' in 1859...so I could give it a subtitle..
1800: origin of species
I think it sounds quite good. And considering how much my partner and I struggled to come up with a name for a our graduate game..I'm pretty keen to get some kind of a placeholder in now!

For historians out there, I am aware that a ban on women and children mining was passed in 1842...which mean the game would have to be based before that time and is a long way off the Darwin link...however...it could be an illegal mining operation ;)

Anyway..
I hope people are liking the ideas, and getting as excited as I am :)
If anyone has any comments or ideas you wish to share, please let me know. you can comment on this post or email me at gillespionage@gmail.com

Thanks

Inspiration and a new Creation

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog.
I decided to start this because I have finally been inspired, and ended my creative drought :D

The trigger of this inspiration was a book that I found on a friends coffee table. called "Newport Pem and Fishguard Revisited" it was a book about the area where we had grown up in. Containing lots of photographs from the late 1800's to the early 1900's.

I was fascinated by images of the places I had known all my life and how different they were. There weren't decent roads, or half the amount of buildings there are now. There also seemed to be a lot of people there, which is a huge change from the ghost like town it is now. Industry and trade were huge in that area at the time, and almost everyone seemed to be involved.
I wish I could see it with my own eyes.....
alas!
I can't.

Here are some of the pictures I liked most
























































































































With a new interest in the Old, I casually browsed through information of historic events from 1700 to 1900, which I enjoyed but decided to look further into the 1800's. The 1800's I found interesting because they didn't seem really really old, or were they similar to the to much seen early 1900's of the first world war. The Victorian era in particular has a very harsh and cruel feel to it.

I decided that I'd like to come up with something based around the 1800's. A game most probably :)

Pitching for a job in the last couple of weeks sometime, I was tasked with making 2D silhouette animations for a game coinciding with an up and coming Chanel4 docu/drama.
For the pitch, I made a 2D puppet in Flash, which I then Rigged in After Effects. The result was pretty cool and seeing as I didn't get the job, I thought I may as well keep the idea in mind and use it for something else in the future.

So after watching the Hughes Brothers 'From Hell', I though it might be cool to use the silhouette puppets in 2D Victorian based game :D
Perhaps based on Jack the Ripper.....Or coal mining children

I converted the Soldier puppet I made for the pitch into a man and an Oliver Twist style boy






















I quite liked the idea of an original Prince of Persia style game, set in a maze like coal mine. It would be pleasing to the eye and would be pretty easy to make. But I also liked the idea of using the gloomy streets of Victorian London as a backdrop, which would also be great to play with lighting. Seeing as I am apparently colourblind and find colour pretty hard to use, I thought this would all definitely look good in black and white :D

I chucked the Rig of the boy straight down a mine to see how it would look and I quite liked it.











While playing around with the mines idea, I remembered a few drawings I had done a few years ago of some kind of cave dwelling creatures I called 'Stalkers'
















































































They would travel round in pairs, one has eyes and the other a mouth. The Idea being that one would search for food (the seeker) and the other would then eat it (the feeder).
This doesn't really work that well, which was a design problem at the time and still it. It could be resolved, but I have long since gone off the idea of them traveling in pairs.
I drew these about a month or two before 'The Descent' was released..so once that came out and I realized my monsters where very similar one the ones in that, I just forgot about them, until now.
I still really liked their shape and wanted to see how it would look in silhouette.















Turns out that it looks pretty good :D
I get it a tail to give it a little more balance in its cave environment as it still doesn't have any arms.













It looks pretty scary eh?

So.....I really like it.
The equation for the game at this point looks like this....

Victorian Era + The Descent + Jack The Ripper = What ever I'm making

It could be a platformer? Point and click? Puzzle? Mystery? Horror? Action? Violence ridden?...anything at this point...

I think that's it for now..Though I will make a separate post today with a new image or two that I have been working on :D