Ahh, the characters.  :) 

When designing characters for videogames, it’s important to not only make a visually appealing design, but make sure it works within your technical limitations.  Sure you could make this super sweet illustration showing off your mad 2D skills, but you’re really shooting yourself in the foot.  Before picking up that pencil, you need to think long and hard about the bigger picture at hand.

So to kick off my first art post, I’d like to share a small glimpse into the world of the thinglefin art mentality.  Below is a picture of a simple concept for a generic dog and cat design.  Besides sharing strong sihlloutes (which is extremely important in our games), they are fairly simple in design.  However, if you look at the bigger picture you will begin to see why they were designed this way.

One word: “Customization“.

Imagine picking one of these base designs, then having the option to switch out the ears, nose, tail, etc.  What if you could add custom graphics or designs?  Switch a cat head with a dog head? The possibilities are endless.  With these options in mind, the player could really make some interesting combinations.  After all, who wants to use the same ol’ design that 50 other players are already using?

Before I go, please make sure to leave any comments you have about these sketches below.  We would love to hear your feedback as these characters evolve and will continue to keep you in the loop here on the thingleblog.

-Alan

Cat and Dog concepts

Our friends and colleagues at Conduit Labs just announced that they have successfully raised a round of venture capital.

Its an exciting time in this strange little world of web-based social games, and we wish the best to Nabeel, Dan-O, Shadow, and company.

Congrats, guys. We promise we’ll leave some room for you! ;D

Hello, Alan!

Welcome aboard.

PS - When Jeremy gets back he’s gonna have to help me figure out how to embed these Flash movies directly in the blog post instead of these links…

Hi, my name is Alan Diekfuss and I’m the new art director and concept artist here at the ‘fin.

I first met with the team about a month ago and I was immediately impressed with what they had hidden up their sleeves.  Not only did they have a boatload of great ideas, but they knew what steps they needed to take in order to pull them off successfully.  Having worked exclusively for the big boys (Nintendo and Sony) for 2 1/2 years, I felt the guys here had a great understanding for what it takes to make exceptional games.  In fact, I was so impressed that I decided I had to help them out any way possible.  And here I am today.

So what is my role as art director?  Well that’s a good question and one that I plan to answer through the coming weeks.  Expect to see me posting everything from concept art, illustrations, and designs right here on site.  Here at the ‘fin, we believe in interacting with our audience throughout the development process and we feel it’s extremely important to get your feedback before we call it “done”.

Anyways, before I go, I wanted to leave you with a quote that I’ve kept close to my heart throughout all these years.

“The Pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.” - Marty Feldman

With a new project comes learning a new programming language, Flash.  Or more specifically, the scripting language that drives the Flash runtime, ActionScript.  Before starting up with Thinglefin, I didn’t know the first thing about it, so the last few weeks have been quite the learning adventure.

After the break, this post will get down in the programming weeds, but of general interest may be my first ActionScript app.  While starting to learn a new language, I usually start with a simple Hello World program, then add little things to it to try out bits and pieces of the language.  Since this is Flash, though, my “Hello World” program is a bit, um, flashier.  You have to click a moving target to get it to say “Hello World.”  Try it out: Hello Flash!  (Credit: about 75% of the code in this program came from this online tutorial.) 

(You may need the latest version of Flash Player installed too: get it here.)

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It’s been pretty quiet up here on the website, mostly because we’re all hard at work down below, in the dark bowels of the company, working on our first public release. While we do that, feel free to sign yourself up to our new email announcement list, the Thinglefeed. There’s a form to do so over on the left hand side of the screen. Once you sign up, we’ll let you know as soon as there’s something you might be interested in taking a look at.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Eh, I’m not going to give these clowns my email address. They’ll probably send me several gigs of monkey porn, and then sell my address to Clear Channel.” If you are thinking that, that’s kind of weird, but ok, I can dig. You can always just subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, I suppose. BUT… I’m not going to make any specific promises at this point, but it seems highly likely that we’ll want to create some kind of special “early adopter” bonus for certain accounts, and being on the Thinglefeed may well be your only chance to get it! Just think of that sweet bonus and how much you want it! I signed up myself just now so I would be sure to get it.

We have a press release going out tomorrow. Its mostly boring stuff concerning our financing, but it does mention a couple of newsbytes on the game we’re developing. If you’re reading this blog, I imagine you’re a hip netizen, searching for the next juicy gamedev morsel. Or more likely, you’re Ryan’s Mom. In any case,  I thought I’d scoop our own press release, and spill the little bit of game-specific information it contains.

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All right, so my first week at Thinglefin is just about over.  It’s a big transition in quite a few ways, some of which I’m sure aren’t even clear yet.  Perhaps the most obvious is the difference in working environments: I’ve switched from the stereotypical cubicle farm to a home office in my basement.

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This just happens to be another rambling post about programming. I’d like to get some kind of little tags by the post title so you can quickly tell what a post will be about, but until then, I will warn you manually.
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We’re using the Collada file format to get skeletal data and animations into the game, on the theory that it’d be simpler to use this exciting new open standard file format than it would be to write and support yet another damn Maya exporter. This theory might have been wrong, but at this point it’s working and there’s no going back. Read on for boring complaining:

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