Customizing Candidates in Party Animals

I'm a little sad that we broke our streak of consecutive monthly devblog updates last month, but it was quite the hectic month for us as we tried to get work done in between dodging family gatherings for Christmas (A perennial nightmare for Filipino introverts).  We did get quite a bit of work done though, which I'm excited to share with you all today.

Procedural Party Animals

In the process of making Party Animals it was always in the back of our heads to make some aspects of the game procedural in order to increase the replay value of the game.  The way the game is made makes full procedural impossible in the same way a roguelike might be, but there are definitely a few aspects that when randomized will change the way the game plays for you.

First off is the candidates.  We guessed that being able to select your choice of animal candidate would be one of the things that players will like about the game, so we're hoping to making quite a few custom candidates to accommodate everyone's favorite animals (I've had at least one request for a giraffe, which should be interesting).  The candidate's name is also customizable, as well as their traits.  We haven't filled in the candidate's histories yet, but each trait will have an accompanying description alongside it.  Previously our candidates had pretty set histories and traits, but we figured there was more to gain by allowing players to customize their own candidate.

Aside from choosing a candidate's history, you can also rename them, choose their home district and platform as well as selecting the staff you want to hire for your campaign.  We currently only have three staff types right now but that should increase to at at least six by the time we're done.

New Maps

Some of you might have noticed that we also have a selection where you can choose the map you want to play in. New maps can definitely change the way the game is played and at the same time add some visual variety to the game.  The maps will take much more effort than the candidates so we're rolling them out little by little and not announcing anything yet until we've finalized them.  Previously we discussed that the Summer Island map is based on Samar Island in the Philippines.  With the new maps we're hoping to interest players from around the world so they will be very loosely based on countries or continents from around the globe. That said, I'd like to introduce you to Autumn Island!  It's still very rough and has none of the new buildings, but it should be fairly obvious where we're drawing inspiration from.

Thanks for reading.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Party Animals news including our closed Alpha, please sign up for our mailing list!

The Animation Pipeline for Political Party Animals

As we inch ever slowly to a closed Alpha, we’re slowly building up our social media presence.  If you haven’t already, please do follow us and spread the word on Twitter and Tumblr.  We’ve had a pretty good run of bi-weekly testing and for the first time last week the latest version of the game was played by people from outside the team.  The results were encouraging, since both our friends Kyle and Gwen had fun playing (see Gwen's victorious pose), but there were definitely numerous things that we still have to work on.

In the meantime, let me show you my process for the creation and animation of our characters. Previously, I wrote about my decision to stick to frame by frame animation, mostly because it’s what I know best.  Now I’ll go into a little bit more detail in the hopes that you guys might pick up a thing or two from it, or tell me why what I’m doing is terribly wrong.  Let’s get started!

Part 1 : Concept Sketches

With each concept sketch I take an animal, assign its occupation, then make some sketches based on those two factors.  So for example the Crow is meant to be an investigator or reporter that digs up or fabricates dirt on other candidates. I'll usually spend around 10 hours or so first looking at reference material then sketching out concepts  and then coloring them in. If I had the time I would love to spend more time really doing a lot of concepts of each character but as it is I'm squeezing these in after work, which means an hour or two whenever I can find the time.

Part 2: Vectorizing

After the conceptualization is done I pick out my favorite concept animal (this is harder than it looks, and sometimes I have to ask my wife to help me choose) and render it in vector.  This is important in terms of efficiency because once the animal is in rendered this way it becomes much easier to resize it and use it for multiple purposes. It's also important for me to organize it properly in different layer folders.

So let's say for example that I wanted to make a character portrait for the Investigator.  I could just take the body and head part, resize it, and voila! A portrait for the Crow Investigator! It's important for small teams to always keep in mind different ways that they can make work more efficient, which is something I learned having usually worked as the sole artist for many games!

Part 3: Animate!

Now this is the meaty part, the animation!  We have a list of animations that each character has, for example we need animations for move, bribe, etc.  for this one I will show you the move animation for the Invesigator.  The first step is for me to sketch out a very small animation.  I sketch it small so that I don't overthink the details and just try to get a good sense of movement going.  I wanted him to be all sneaky like to fit his ability to fabricate scandals.

Once that's done I take the original vectorized image and then start making frames based on the smaller animation.  If I have time I will go ahead and sketch out larger frame by frame animations as well, but I usually make do with using the small animation as a reference.  This is where having separated the different body parts before is really key, as I can I much more easily pick out the body parts I want to animate and move them around rather than having to look through a whole mess of vector layers.

In about 2-4 hours I will have something like this!  I actually had quite a bit of trouble with this and had to refine the previous quick animation some more before I had an animation I was happy with.

This is an image showing the frame by frame animation within photoshop, so you have a better idea of how many frames I use.

Part 4 : Shrinkage

Once again this is where doing everything in vector pays off, as I can easily shrink the different frames of animations, flatten them, give them an outline an then save them one by one as pngs for use in the game.  We use 2dtoolkit for our animations, which I'm starting to realize may not be the best for a game with multiple animations.  The file organization for 2dtoolkit seems pretty primitive, and you can easily be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of individual images.  Right now we aleady use 213 sprites, and we're probably at 1/10 of the amount of animations we're planning to do.

And finally here is the Investigator in action in the game!  His special ability is to fabricate a scandal, which if it's revealed in the district will do massive damage to your opponents reputation.

Thanks for reading.  If you have any suggestions about how I can streamline my process without overhauling it entirely I would definitely love to hear from you!  To be one of the first people to try our closed alpha, please sign up for our mailing list!

Expressing Personality Through Animations

The Party Animals team is going heavily into revised game mechanics right now, and we're hoping to have something to share on that front very soon.  In the meantime I wanted to show off some of the animations I've been working on in my free time.  These animations will show up on the world map as your characters go around and do actions.  They will be much smaller than they are right now (see previous post), but I work on them on a much larger scale to inject as much personality into the animations as I can, hoping that some of that will translate even when the animations are reduced.

For example, let's take a look at the candidate Crocopio Imperial.  Croccy is the scion of a political family and is absolutely loaded with cash.  He's so rich that even while moving along the map he's already throwing money around.  The gleeful abandon with which he throws around money is almost infectious.

And when it's time to start bribing, he gives you the whole sack of cash.

The Investigator, who is a staff member you can hire, is much more stoic. Even when he gets mad there's a minimum amount of motion. I worry that this won't read very well when it's reduced, but it's a risk I'll take, since I feel it is very central to the Investigator's character that he doesn't have any wasted movements.

Except when he's exaggeratedly sneaking around, of course.

Contrary to the Investigator, the Police looks like she once wanted to be a disco dancer, flailing he arms and blowing that whistle as she redirects traffic for your candidate's convoy.

She's equally as exuberant when she's able to conduct a campaign successfully on your behalf.

These are just a few of the candidates and staff that we're going to have in the game.  We have a bunch more in store for you, and I'm excited to start working on them already. It's a lot of work animating them all, but I hope it'll be worth it in the end.  Please let us know what you think!

Thanks for reading.  If you want to be one of the first people to try our closed alpha, please sign up for our mailing list!

Political Party Animals December Devlog Update : More Political Machinations and some new art!

December has been a rather slow month for the team.  A storm earlier in the month delayed our weekly meetings, and the inevitable Christmas slowdown set in by the 23rd.  We're starting to get back on track now though, and looking forward to 2015.

More Political Machinations

The paper prototype phase has been very useful in making hard game design decisions about scope, but given we only meet once a week, in order to be efficient we need to find digital ways to test out game design ideas.  Our latest design that we wanted to test is called "Horse Trading".  Have you ever watched those political TV shows where the main character goes around making deals in order to push forward legislation?  For example, in one episode of Madame Secretary, Tea Leoni is trying to convince her husband to give the Russian Ambassador's daughter an A so that Russia will sell military technology to the Iranians, who will then release an American spy.  While we won't have anything quite that dramatic, the ability to make deals like that is central to politics, and it's one we hope to simulate.  Tristan has already talked about using Joris Dorman's "Machinations" to test out designs before, but this time we're giving you something that you can actually play with.

To try it, first download this xml file. Next, go to the Machinations website and click file>import and click on the horse trading xml file.  Then you can do the following:

1) Generate an Event
2) Do Quest- Do a quest for Kapitan 1 or Kapitan 2(costs resources)
3) Use Favor with Kapitan 1 to resolve quest for Kapitan 2 and Vice Versa
4) Make a Kapitan like the other Kapitan to reduce amount of Favor needed to resolve quests.(cost resources)

So here we are exploring ideas like using favors to satisfy the "quest" requirements of a Kapitan, improving relations between Kapitans to lower the cost of the requirements, and then in the end calculating the amount necessary in "resources".  Resources in this sense can be a variety of things, but starting from 100 to 0 we start to get a general idea of how much effort is required to make deals between Kapitans (100 being easy and 0 being a lot of effort).

As a bonus, here is another machinations xml called evil deeds, where we explored the cost to the reputation of candidates who indulge in shady tactics.

New Kapitan Art

Banker Bear

TV Network producer/Newspaper Editor

Rebel Kapitan

This month I finally had some to get back to designing characters, which was a refreshing change of pace!  We needed some new Kapitans to populate the new districts we created, namely the Bank, the TV Network, and the Rebel districts.  The Bank was created to give us a way to offer loans to the player, the TV Network introduces the media component of elections, and the rebels?  Well, the Rebel district was a bit of a lark. We had two farm districts side by side, which felt a bit redundant, so Julius suggested a Rebel district since many areas of the Philippines still have areas that are nominally controlled by rebels of different stripes.  

Thanks for reading.  If you want to be up to date on the latest Political Party Animals news, sign up for our mailing list!  

Goat and Dog Concept Sketches

I'm back with some more concept sketches for you, this time of the Goat and Dog Kapitan.

The goat Kapitan is based on some of the indigenous tribes of the Philippine highlands.  I say "some of" because there are many of these indigenous tribes, and I wanted to represent them overall and not one specific tribe.  These tribes are some of the earliest inhabitants of the Philippine islands.  Similar to their aboriginal cousins in South America, they face many difficulties integrating into modern society, and this goat Kapitan reflects those issues.

The dog Kapitan is quite obviously based on the religious groups in the Philippines.  Religion, for good and ill, continues to play a very strong role in Philippine society.  While there is technically a separation between Church and state, various religious groups hold a lot of sway over their parishioners, and inevitably sway politicians.  In fact, in 2004 and 2010 Bro. Eddie Villanueva ran for the President of the Philippines (finishing a distant fifth).  Religion is at best a sticky topic, and we don't want it to be a distraction from the main game.  To heighten the sense of satire (at this point I'm starting to think we should call the game an allegory) I've decided to create a fictional religion whose symbol is a bone.  Surely that can't be taken too seriously by anyone.

I've also taken the initial Kapitan Sketches and created more polished final art from them.  As you can see from this comparison between the original rushed in-game art and the new Kapitans, there's a bit of differences in terms of look and polish, which means I'll have to revisit these older sprites at some point (really boring but necessary work).  

Lastly, in our dialogue screens with the Kapitans, I'm also hoping to have the Kapitans react emotionally to what you say to them.  Their emotions will be pretty binary, but I wanted an "active" angry versus a "passive angry" and vice versa.  The "active" images will show up when you initially displease a Kapitan, after which they will settle into the "passive" image.

That's it for now.  In the next few weeks I'll be experimenting with animation in spriter to see if there's any point to moving to rigged animation versus straight up hand drawn keyframes.  Stay tuned for more!

Lizard and Pelican Concept Sketches

Behind the scenes we are madly restructuring the game mechanics of Party Animals.  It's very exciting for us, but also frustrating that we cannot share anything yet since everything is in such flux.  I have been on a roll with these concept sketches though, so I here are some more characters that may find their way into Party Animals!

Pirate/merchant/smuggler Lizard.  This character draws on our complex relationship with successful Chinese immigrants, and a semi historical pirate that tried to create his own kingdom in the Philippines (he failed, btw).

Chieftain Pelican.  He represents the interests of the tribal villages outside of the city.  He constantly worries about how modernization is affecting their way of life, and where he is going to get his next fish.

Introducing our Main Characters

Today I'd like to introduce you to our main characters.  So far they are nameless, but they have underlying motivations that have helped shaped them as characters, which will continue to build on as development progresses.

Mousey

Our central character, named "Mousey" by Julius, is a former government bureaucrat who wants to make a difference.  Why a mouse? Aside from being adorable, mice are often used in metaphors as being meek or silent.  This is a mouse who has worked silently for most of her (or his) career and is finally just fed up with how inefficient the current government is.  So now she is running for mayor on a platform of change.  She is idealistic, but also pragmatic.  Having worked in government for many years she understand that politics is compromise.  Just how far she is willing to compromise is one of the central themes of the game.

You'll notice that compared to the other two characters Mousey isn't really wearing any significant clothing.  This was intentional.  Being the player's avatar, we wanted to let the player project themselves onto Mousey and not necessarily try to conform to her characteristics.  We also wanted to let the player choose Mousey's gender.  In this image Mousey is male (although oddly I have been referring to him as her), but if the player chooses female the bow tie is doffed and a ribbon is put on to signify that she's female.  We considered adding a 3rd gender but could not figure out where to put the bowtie.  Ultimately people probably lean towards one gender anyway so hopefully they don't mind picking the one they feel most affinity to.

Croc

The Filipino word for crocodile is buwaya, which has a long history of being used as an idiom for people who are corrupt, specifically politicians.  It made sense that Croc is our incumbent mayor, part of a political dynasty that has held sway over the province for decades.  Croc and his family aren't all bad though.  The original Croc was an excellent mayor and provided good social services for his constituents while finding ways to boost the local economy.  As with any hereditary position though, there will be good eggs and bad eggs (literally, since they hatch from eggs).

This current generation Croc continues the pro-business tradition of his predecessors, however his reliance on the market to solve social ills means that a lot of social services are lacking funding.  The businesses that he supports are also mostly owned by family and friends, meaning that while there is economic growth, it's not as inclusive as it could be.  Having access to the government purse makes Croc a very difficult opponent, since he can very easily sway a vote his way by strategic spending.

Here is Quentin Tarantino looking very pleased to be wearing a barong.

One last thing about Croc that non-Filipinos might find interesting is his barong tagalog. The barong tagalog is the traditional men's wear of the Philippines.  Men wear them to almost all formal occasions like weddings, baptisms, etc.  

Pig

Pig is the poor boy that made good.  A farmboy with the voice of an angel, Pig has had a successful career as a pop star and noontime variety show host.  Pig has a good heart, and likes to give away a lot of stuff to his poor fanbase during his shows.  He is vaguely patterned after a lot of different Filipino celebrities.  His choice of clothing is not specific to a Filipino celebrity, but we wanted to give him that "faded rock star" look.

One of our influences for pig, who we will not name because lawsuits.

Pig wants to give back to his community, which is why he is running for mayor.  Cynics would say that he is merely aware that his showbiz career is almost over, and he's using his fame and fortune for one last push towards relevance, but we withhold judgement.  It's obvious that pig cares very much for the plight of the poor, but unfortunately his economic policy is to throw as much money at them as he can.  He runs on a populist pro-poor and anti-rich campaign, which is ironic considering he has multiple estates and fancy sports cars in the capital city.

That's all for now.  There are many more characters under development who will play an important role in the game, but as of now they are still being formed in our minds.  In the next couple of weeks I'll probably have some design notes and Julius will blog some more about his programming methods for the game.