Promo images!

Isaac the Elephant and Molly the Giraffe teaming together using their special abilities! 

Mo encounters a trap on his adventure to recover The Lost Bananas in the Temple of Doom!

Promo game-screen.

The Striped Swindler mugshot, Been to jail once not afraid to go again!

The Pack before The Striped Swindler stole their prized possessions.

Final touches in the next few days to polish before Protoplay, Got a few surprises for people who come to our stand! Come play our game and vote box #11 if you like it!

End of week 7, We now have a trailer for our game!

We also now have a gameplay trailer so you can now see our game in action 

Now to polish for protoplay!

Big thanks to all the mentors from dare you advice has been invaluable!

Update!

It's been a while since we've posted last as we were preparing for the focus testing on 15/07 and trying to get every feature we could!

We have finished all of our animations, made our tutorial level, finished all of the animal mechanics, added particle effects for hints. For the coming week we will finish the user interface and the game state manager (which allows you to resume the game if the game is interrupted by a phone call the user hitting a button accidentally) also we are finalising level art so we can have nice parallax scrolling backgrounds.

Stu has begun working on our trailer ready for Nathan (Our sound/Music guy) to add some glorious tunes ready for Protoplay. Nathan has also began working on sounds for our game which will really polish the gameplay coupled with the animations!

Thanks to our focus testers, we have found bugs and issues that we did not find so this week we will be ironing out the bugs and issues to polish up what we have already!

Week 4

It was a fun break to mess around with the green-screen, We went in with a vague idea of what we wanted to achieve so as soon as we got in we got straight to it, after an hour or so we received our pictures, after some laughing at our ridiculous poses and choosing our pics, Stu began to implement us into the promo images. After a day and some thought about implementing the new art style into our new promo image, Stu and Toby emerged with our team and game image!



We spent some time thinking about our tagline, we had so many tag-lines and in the end it had to come to a vote between us, it was 50:50 between two tagline with Toby having the final vote, When he came back from lunch we asked him which he preferred and his choice was "Puzzle With The Pack" so there's our tagline!

So far this week we have continued making animations and have only five animations remaining, We have now implemented the animations we have into engine so our white-box now looks lovely. We have finalised animal movement and nearly finished making them move as a pack when together. We also finalised the layout of our tutorial level today.

For the coming week were hoping to finish all of the animations, the tutorial level, the animal abilities, help/hints and to implement a pause, restart and an end of the level all ready for the focus testing on Friday.
Thanks to Ross Wallace from Rockstar North, Steven Lewis, Chris Brown and Liam Wong from Crytek and Stuart Campbell and David Hynd from Ruffian Games for their advice this week.

week 2 + 3 progress

The past two weeks have been very difficult, a broken level editor and a glitchy SVN.

But thankfully we managed to fix these problems, The SVN trunk kept adding random files and lines of code that stopped the IDE from compiling and the level editor was corrupted possibly from disk transfer but we had multiple back-ups!

So far we now have GUI selection using the buttons and the camera smoothly moves to the character, We also have all the camera controls implemented. We have fully working physics and now have the elephant draining pools of water and spraying it using particle effects, The animals cannot pass areas where there are monsters in until the lion has roared. The monkey now can climb vines. The level editor now has images so it is visually easier and can also add in game objects and create triggers. 

So far we have approximately 1/2 of the animations these being key animations ready for focus testing. We also have outsourced Nathan Palmer to do the music for our game and trailer so we should have a trailer soon!

In the coming week we will finish movement, Special abilities, GUI and hopefully the animations, Were hoping to start work on level art and layout this week.

We have met many people from the industry the past three weeks each with priceless opinions that have helped us make decisions and changes for the better, We have met :-

-Tony Colgan, Senior Engineer & Tone Brennan, Senior Producer from Outplay Entertainment.

-Kory Vandenberg, Designer at Blitz Games Studios.

-Chris Brown, Lead Artist & Steven Lewis, Lead Designer from Crytek.

-Billy Thomson, Creative Director & Stuart Campbell, Art Lead from Ruffian Games.

-Eevi Korhonen, Development Assistant from Denki.

-Andrew Dennison, Lead Programmer, & Mike Nimmo, Senior Programmer from Codemasters.

-Daniel Leyden, Technical Manager, Michael McDonald, Senior Programmer/Design & Colin Gordon, Senior Artist from Cobra Mobile.

-James Sweatman, Games Designer & Peter Spence, Artist, Jagex.

Thanks guys for your advice!

-Today (or tomorrow depending on which way they go around) we will see Tony Colgan and Tone Brennan again from Outplay Entertainment and later this week we will see the return of Chris Brown and Steven Lewis from Crytek hopefully they will see our progress!

-We are also seeing Imran Sarwar, Associate Producer & Ross Wallace, Lead Level Designer from Rockstar North later this week!

Our level editor

Rhys has been working on a level editor for the past two days and has nearly completed it. We can add multiple sized platforms and the animals. You can place platforms with the buttons/entering the pixel value or using the mouse. You can also increase the size of the level and navigate the level using the buttons, the previewer for the game screen is the same resolution as the windows phone 7. You can also save and load levels into the editor, it saves them as text files which can be read into the game to draw the levels. Next to add is the level objects! Well done Rhys!

Click to enlarge!

Latest images from week one at dare to be digital

Final Apollo the Lion concept:-

Final Molly the Giraffe concept:-

Final Isaac the Elephant concept:-

Final Mo the Monkey concept:- 

New game-screen with character select buttons and a pause button (the paws in the corner!)

"Plunder in the Jungle" game concept

Lion concept 1 :-

Monkey concept 1 :-

Giraffe concept 1:-

Elephant concept 1 :-

Lion colour palette:-

Main Villain concept :-

Early in-game layout :-

Game control mechanics concept 1 :-

Puzzle concept 1 :-

HUD concept 1 :- 

Game screen concept with HUD :-

 Puzzle 1 walk through :-

In-game concept 2 :-