#have a 2D drawn version of our boy

[httyd-art-requests]

toofless please??? :0 when yous hav the time ofc, he’s my favwrite scaley puppy

I'm shocked that no one has directly requested Toothless yet! He's only appeared on this blog, like, 3 times since January

Dragon #128 - Toothless!

Baby boy. Baby <3

[cinemaseeker]

Hot Take: Pinocchio (2022)

There's a reason why the story of this little wooden boy has been adapted to screen so many times. However, you'd never know what that reason is while watching this version, Disney's latest copy-and-paste "live-action" remake.

I think I would respect Disney so much more if they had just called this the computer-animated version. But then again, maybe not. But seriously, if you're going to call something "live-action" then put in some live action. And no, Tom Hanks gawking awkwardly at you through your TV screen does not count. I really hate bad-mouthing Tom Hanks like this but he and we both deserve better than this:

Maybe Disney knew they had a stinker on their hands and that's why they released it on Disney+ and not in theaters. The platform is starting to feel like a dumping ground for projects not anticipated to do well at the box office (don't even get me started on Turning Red, I'm still not over that nonsense).

But it's becoming increasingly obvious that the writing is on the wall.

The jig is finally starting to be up. And something's gotta give.

Here's the thing: there's a big difference between being told that something is whimsical and actually witnessing something whimsical. This whole movie feels lazy and condescending, like the corporate equivalent of waving keys in front of a baby's face. I'm not going to laugh just because the movie tells me that something is funny or cry just because they tell me that this moment is sad (Major pet peeve alert: fake-out deaths in Disney movies. In my mind, that's about as cloying and manipulative as it gets.)

Emotions are not something that can be told, they have to be felt. And that's what studios don't seem to understand. They keep trying to wring tears or laughs out of us to no avail. They keep trying to hedge their bets but now they need to start pulling new tricks up their sleeves or start putting actual effort into their projects if they want us to keep watching.

Either way, things need to change.

These movies have no reason to exist outside of making money and banking on our collective nostalgia. But who's the blame here? The studio that keeps giving us garbage or the people who keep watching and, more importantly, paying to watch it? Money talks loudly in Hollywood, no more so than in Disney, and our dollars have told them that this is apparently what we want to see:

Now with all that said, I do understand the appeal of these remakes, how exciting it can be to see familiar stories take on new forms, and how these movies can provide comfort for people burned out on a chaotic world filled to the brim with uncertainty. I would never wish to take that comfort away from anyone, but I still believe that we can demand better products from our corporations.

After all, they are here to serve us, although it often feels like it's the other way around (aka, backwards).

The sad thing is that this had the potential to not only be a decent remake but an actual good movie. This could've been a golden opportunity to incorporate some outstanding practical effects and use, oh I don't know, ACTUAL PUPPETS in this story about a LIVING PUPPET. If any studio had the resources to make that happen, it's Disney and the fact that they didn't even think to take advantage of such an opportunity is beyond insulting.

Hopefully these remakes can help turn younger generations onto the far superior hand-drawn animated versions and maybe help turn the tide back to 2D animation. These remakes could actually be good case studies of why some concepts work better in hand-drawn animation than in CGI, or even vice versa. I AM glad to see more studios taking the hybrid approach, using the best of both worlds.

But for now, all we can do is pray that Guillermo Del Toro's take on the story, set to be released on Netflix later this year, will give that little wooden boy the proper creative treatment he deserves.

My Rating: 2/5 wishing stars

[chaosstar290]

Reasons try out Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore.

Nintendo's been pretty casual with porting Wii U games over to the Switch, and for good reasons. Normally, I'm not all into porting games that I've already played, but my personal favorite games on the system that lack good marketing and advertising are now getting the attention and love they deserve.

Take Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for example, one of my favorite 2D platfomers. The game originally sold 1.72 million copies worldwide on the Wii U. Not very good numbers, huh? However, the Switch port managed to beat those sales numbers with 2.25 million units sold worldwide by the end of March 2019.

So while this could be seen as a way for Big N to earn more $$$, this is also a way for those who never owned a Wii U and missed out on some of the system's best titles to give these games a shot. Now we just need a port of Xenoblade Chronicles X and The Wonderful 101...and Star Fox Zero, I guess.

But that's a topic for another time. This post is specifically for my favorite JRPG on the Wii U only to be tied with Xenoblade Chronicles X....Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.

This'll be a long one, so here's hoping you'll stick with it until the end.

Development

Before I get into the reasons, lemme educate you guys a bit. Back in January 2013, both Atlus and Intelligent Systems made a teaser trailer for a potential Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem crossover for the Wii U.

The trailer was mostly just a slideshow with various character artwork. Despite this, there was a decent amount of hype surrounding it. But development around the game was pretty silent. That is, until we fast forward to the Nintendo Direct in April 1, 2015. We got a trailer of the ambitious SMT x FE crossover that fans were waiting for...but this was the final product.

Needless to say...neither SMT nor FE fans were happy about this. The fandoms were incredibly salty and foaming at the mouths, basically calling it a Person 4 Lite with a hint of FE. Heck, they're probably still posts on this site from 5 years ago that'll show that.

Fast forward to the games initial release, and you'll see quite a few positive reviews and thoughts about TMS. Unfortunately, the sale numbers were not all that great for the game. Obvious reasons being that it was a Wii U game, and many fans of both SMT x FE were not happy with how it turned out.

And to be honest, I wasn't feeling the game myself at first. It seemed too lighthearted and upbeat, and the J-Pop, anime-ish aesthetics were very off-putting. However, the more I saw about the game, the more I was drawn into it. Somehow all that disappointment I had about TMS originally just washed away. And considering it was a new IP, I decided to give it a chance. And hoo boy...I was generally pleased.

With that outta the way, let's get into why I'm excited for the Switch port of game, and hoping people will give it a fairer chance.

The Setting

The plot of Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is mostly simple. You start out as high schooler Itsuki Aoi, the main character of the game encountering his childhood friend Tsubasa Oribe at an audition event to become a idol. It isn't until moments later in the game that the area gets overruned by shadowy creatures known as Mirages that suck out the creative energy known as Perso-- ah I mean Performa from the other idols and audience.

Poor girl doesn't know what's gonna happen next.

Despite our main characters seeming unharmed by the effect, the Mirages drag Tsubasa into their world known as the Idolsphere. And of course, courageous Itsuki takes action to follow and rescue her.

After trying to make a daring rescue, Itsuki gets bombarded by a Mirage, but somehow manages to awaken it. Taking the form of Fire Emblem Awakening's protagonist Chrom. Itsuki does the same with the Mirage that captured Tsubasa that takes the form of Cedea from Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon. The two awakaned Mirages, however, suffer from a bit of amnesia and can't quite remember who and what they are.

From there on, Itsuki and Tsubasa form a partnership with Chrom and Cedea, encountering various characters trying to reach their way to stardom while trying to draw back the opposing forces from taking over Tokyo and the world. Typical RPG stuff, am I right?

It's a fairly standard and slightly cliche plot with some common anime tropes, but for this game...it works. It's a plot that's incredibly silly, upbeat, and over-the-top, but again...it works for this game. And I love it. It may not be original, deep, or complex, but the story does its best to not take itself too seriously, and it doesn't fail to keep a smile in my face.

Aside from the vanilla cookie-cutter MC Itsuki, the various casts that you meet are incredibly charming, and go through their own personal growth as celebrities. Though you mileage may vary on this.

The Gameplay

The combat is the real star of Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Basically, it's your standard turn-based combat system...but with a few twists. If you've ever played a SMT or Persona game, then don't be surprised that elemental weaknesses make an appearance here. Along with that, the Triangle Weapon system from Fire Emblem also makes an appearance in the game.

But if you're not familiar with either franchise then give you a basic example how this works. Say that you've encountered an armored Mirage wielding an axe. The weaknesses on that enemy are both lightning and swords, and Itsuki just so happens to have both the necessary element and weapon equipped.

In case you're wondering...how the Triangle Weapon mechanic works in FE is that Swords beat Axes, Axes beat Lances, and Lances beat Swords.

The interesting thing about this is that once you exploit an enemy's weakness, other characters will jump in and combo extra attacks. These are called Sessions, and their not only powerful...but also flashy as all hell and it's glorious. Not only that, but there's also Duo Arts where two certain characters will sometimes perform a song that unleashes a powerful attack...which also strings up more Sessions. As broken as this sounds, it actually is pretty strategic for taking down harder enemies, and they can also form Sessions...so be careful.

There's more to the gameplay like roaming Tokyo, exploring dungeons, and upgrading your characters and Mirages by Tiki from Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon as well.

There's mixed opinions on the dungeon aspects of Tokyo Mirage Sessions, but...I personally enjoyed them. Aside from the first one. Once you get past the first dungeon, they get better as the game progresses. From exploring a darker version of Shibuya where you have to avoid giant cameras from sending you back to the entrance of the of the room you currently entered, to venturing through a maze-like TV studio.

There's also side-missions that you can do with your main cast that'll help them grow and develop even further. You'll be rewarded with either a special cutscene or a special attack. Or maybe both.

The Visuals

Go go...Persona Rangers?

If it wasn't obvious from the amount of images I'm posting, Tokyo Mirage Sessions is a very colorful game. Fitting with it's lighthearted theme, the amount of colors the game throws at you makes visuals aesthetically pleasing. Heck, you could make these your personal wallpaper on your phone or something.

Sure, Tokyo Mirage Sessions isn't nearly as strong as Persona 5 graphically or even artistically, but like most Nintendo games...what their games lack in terms of detailed ultra-hyper graphics, they make up for it with giving their games gorgeous artstyles.

Also, this game has some reeeeeally good artwork.

The Music

J-Pop plays a pretty big role in Tokyo Mirage Sessions, so expect a lot of vocal tracks. If you're not into this kind of genre of music, then you might wanna stray away from this game. If you are (or if it doesn't bother you), then you're in for a treat. As someone who really isn't into J-Pop myself, the songs in this game are incredible and catchy followed by some beautiful cutscenes. Reincarnation from Kiria Kurono and Feel from Tsubasa Oribe are some of my personal favorites.

The music from outside the vocal tracks are pretty good too. The normal battle theme and the Illusion Shibuya dungeon theme are just to name a couple.

What's New?

Like I said before, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore is a port of the Wii U version, but with added content. Any DLC that was added in the original game will part of the base game in the Switch version. But let's talk about the new stuff.

EX Story and Songs

The EX Story is basically a dungeon that you explore in short bursts. Here you'll find new costumes such as a Joker outfit from Persona 5 for Itsuki, or an Annette outfit from Fire Emblem Three Houses for Mamori Minamoto. Or you can have a much easier time grinding for EXP. Also, much like the side-stories, this dungeon will also explore the main casts' issues and help them grow.

New songs will also be added in this port. A duo song called "She is..." sung by Tsubasa and Kiria is one of them.

Sessions

By making Sessions even more powerful and ridiculous, unplayable characters like Tiki, Maiko Shimazaki, and Barry Goodman will also join in Sessions.

In addition, a Quick Session option will be added. Which is a major upgrade in my book. One of the big issues the Wii U version had was while the Sessions were fun to watch, they took forever to get through with the more characters that joined your party. There are also smaller improvements like the Switch version having faster loading times.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this long as hell post will spark some interest into those who'll give the game a shot. I know there's small nitpicks like the lack of English voice acting and censorship, but the latter is a topic I'd rather not delve deep into.

Regardless, these small cons are greatly outweighed by the large pros this charming game has. If you're an Atlus fan, a lover of JRPGs, or wanting to play something that'll ease the wait for Persona 5 Royal, I highly recommend you give Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE encore a shot.

If you're also waiting for Persona 5 to actually come to the Switch like me, this game is next best thing we've got for the time being.

This is one of the most stylish menu screens ever.

[cherry-valentine]

Winter 2019 Anime Season, What I’m Watching:

My Roommate is a Cat is easily the cutest series this season, possibly the cutest in the past several seasons. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much you like cats, but for me the show is a delight. Following a reclusive young author who recently lost his parents (the only people he interacted with on a regular basis) as he bonds with a stray cat he decided to take in on a whim, the show cleverly splits its time between the viewpoints of the human protagonist and the cat. The smartest thing the series does is show both viewpoints of the same events, first from the human, Subaru, and then from the cat, Haru. And somehow, even though we’re viewing the events for the second time, Haru’s view is more compelling. The show is by turns genuinely funny and genuinely touching. Subaru reminds me of a less extreme version of Handa (from Handa-kun and Barakamon) in that he’s socially inept and usually assumes the worst intentions from those around him. Haru is a somewhat feisty young cat who thinks she’s protecting her strange, hopeless human. Haru is a bit rough around the edges after spending much of her life as a stray, and her tough attitude keeps the show from getting too saccharine. As it stands, the show is just the right amount of cute, sweet, awkward, sad, and funny. Very high on my watch list.

Meiji Tokyo Renka is yet another historical otome series (seriously why do so many otome anime have historical settings?) featuring a high school girl being sent back in time to the Meiji period. This is, of course, one of my favorite time periods just for the clothing alone. The character designs are varied enough to make all the guys stand out from each other and the colors and backgrounds are lovely. The heroine, Mei, is much more comical than the standard otome heroine and is refreshingly proactive in her own story. She’s surprisingly independent in a time period when that was probably frowned upon. There’s a strong supernatural element to the story, not even counting the time travel aspect. There are spirits in this series that only certain people can see, Mei being one of them (and it’s nice that there are several others in the main cast who can as well, preventing her from seeming too conveniently special). It seems like these spirits can come in many forms, from cute animal spirits to literal ghosts to characters in novels springing to life and escaping the books to run amok. The show is certainly not dull. The romance is almost shoved to the background to make room for spirit shenanigans, but I’m not complaining. One of the more fun otome series in recent memory.

The Promised Neverland is easily my pick for best show of the season. It has a fantastic setup, with a first episode twist that I did not see coming (I knew something was going on, but my guess was way off the mark). It has a unique art style that makes it stand out, fluid animation, awesome opening and ending themes, a kickass heroine, and some heart-stopping cliff hangers. It’s the show I look forward to most each week. There’s only one minor quibble I have with this series, and that’s the weird way faces are drawn. The mouths seem too high on the faces, to the point that I kept thinking their mouths were their noses. I’ve gotten used to it as the episodes rolled by, but every now and then I still notice it. It’s just... irritating. Still, that’s a super nitpicky  complaint for a show that’s otherwise excellent on every level with consistently high quality art and writing. At the very tippy top of my watch list.

Boogiepop and Others is a sequel (I guess?) to a much older series called Boogiepop Phantom that I watched many years ago. To be honest, it’s been so long that I don’t remember most of the details about the original anime. I just remember that it was a somewhat gloomy show that focused on supernatural mysteries and was episodic in nature. This newer series has an updated art style with more modern character designs. It’s also easier to follow, and has a stronger focus on action, whereas the original focused more on atmosphere. Special mention should go to Aoi Yuki’s phenomenal voice acting. She really brings Boogiepop to life and carries the show, much like she did as Kino in the recent Kino’s Journey anime. The show has great music, with my favorite ending theme of the season. Has a secure spot on my watch list.

B Project Season 2, an otome series about cute male idol groups, has seemingly decided to dial back the focus on the whole otome thing and instead showcase the borderline BL relationships between the boys. Seriously, there are several episodes in which the heroine, Tsubasa, is barely there at all, and even when she is, the series gives no real indication that any of the boys like her as more than a friend. Instead, the boys seem to be in love with each other (which is fine by me). This season adds a new boy band to the three we already had, which I felt was a little unnecessary. The new group really doesn’t add anything to the story. The music is nice, especially the ending theme, and the character designs are attractive. The series seems to have taken a page out of Tsukiuta’s book and now uses CG for the more elaborate dance numbers. The problem is that they don’t look nearly as good as Tsukiuta’s and definitely don’t blend well with the 2D animation around them. Overall, the series is cute but I still think of it as “less fun UtaPri”.

Fukigen no Mononokean Season 2 was a bit of a surprise for me, since I didn’t realize it was being made. I enjoyed season one very much with its pastel, candy-colored art and sweet, mostly light-hearted stories. And of course, the main draw of the series was the budding friendship between our two leads, Abeno and Ashiya. Season two keeps all of those elements and adds a very interesting mystery concerning Ashiya’s father, as well as an overarching plot and an actual recurring “villain” type character. The stakes are raised considerably, but the overall tone of the show is still fairly light and gentle. Seeing the cute mascot character Fuzzy (a white, furry youkai) makes me a little sad though, since it reminded me so very much of my cat (also a white furry creature named Fuzzy) while watching season one, and Fuzzy has since disappeared. Which reminds me, the youkai in this series are so adorable, varied, and charming. Very high on my watch list.

Kaguya-sama: Love is War is a comedy about two overachieving high school students who are secretly in love with each other but are too prideful to admit it, so they set traps for each other to try to force the other to confess first. It sounds like a dumb setup, to be honest, but it actually works surprisingly well. The two leads are likable despite being petty and stubborn. Even though they’re extremely talented, they have tons of quirks and they’re both completely clueless when it comes to love. There are a few fun side characters as well. The show is hilarious, with three skits per episode. There’s also a touch of sweetness as their affection for each other comes across as genuine. Anyone who’s ever been in love can relate to some of these moments, of going to great lengths just to increase your chances of being near the person you like, or making little changes to your appearance just to see if you get a reaction from them. Or, of course, the disappointment you feel when your carefully laid plans get ruined. The series uses humor and extreme reactions and hilarious facial expressions to convey these feelings, resulting in a highly entertaining show.

Carry Over Shows From Previous Seasons: Black Clover Run With the Wind Hinomaru Sumo Best of Season: Best New Show: The Promised Neverland Best Opening Theme: The Promised Neverland Best Ending Theme: Boogiepop and Others Best Male Character: Subaru (My Roommate is a Cat) Best Female Character: Emma (The Promised Neverland)

[leminwedj]

Lets get back on track

March 4th, 2016 is when I posted the first images to this account. It was a few panels of a yet-to-be-named Undertale alternate universe (or au for short) that were all drawn on note cards. The idea for this au was short and shallow, with everything else planned to be a "make as you go" sort of deal. I hadn't drawn enough panels to truly solidify the idea, since tumblr wasn't letting me post images the day I had planned to post a new batch. That really demotivated me from doing any more drawings, combined with the fact that I just didn't know where to take the idea at the time.

But the idea still flourished in my head and I began to think about all the finer details. At the time. only the starting point and end goal were planned, but now I have a much better path towards the end goal than before, seeing that there was no path to begin with I've taken the time between then and now to gather ideas, see what sticks, and judge if it would fit or not, and now I have something far better and greatly different than what I did before. I have something I can truly begin to present, something I can answer questions about, something I can complete with certainty of what to do.

My Undertale AU is called "Redo," and instead of being a web comic thingy, this is going to be a full length 3D first-person game made in Unity, with the goal of sticking waaaaay out of the crowd. I've had this bad boy on the back burner for nearly 3 years just sitting there slowly sizzling, and I think i'm ready to begin sharing some info that I have so far.

In the background, not only have I been intensely brainstorming ideas, but i've drawn some rough concept art, conjured up a whole cast of 5 new characters out of (roughly) 100+, and have been working on trying to make the game with a good friend of mine that lives nowhere near me at all. Working on the game has been a battle against life and high school for the both of us, and progress on the game has been painfully slow during the two years of "active development" because of this, but nonetheless, I have crafted some early level concepts, and in those two years we've learned a fuckton about coding with Unity, so once summer swings by again we can hammer away at making this game.

As already stated, we are using the Unity engine, and it has been a wild ride of updating versions and broken code since the project started on Unity 5. During that time a lot of focus has been spent on just perfecting the player code since a lot of the game will depend on the player. It's planned to have a light focus on mobility (like Mirror's Edge and other such) with survival-esque aspects, all while trying to keep it from straying too far off of rpg territory. The player is how the game is played, and if you're slackin' on how the game is played, it will inherently feel clunky, floaty, or just bad in general. I can't get too in-depth with explaining this since we don't even have our final player code yet, and that may take an extra year to complete.

All levels need to not just be remade into a 3D environment, but there needs to be some extra work done to fit it into a 3D environment, including adding completely new areas or removing and replacing some as needed. Undertale was designed around a top-down 2D perspective, so a lot of things had to be done to make sure the game played well in that 2D environment, such as having anything interactable like a sign or a button facing towards the player, so it'd become noticeable in a 3D environment. This will also help to keep the game fresh and original.

As for new characters, the goal is to replace any non-essential characters and add some more to the mix where needed. Essential characters to the story include Asriel, Toriel, Sans, Papyrus, Asgore, Mettaton, and Alphys. Anybody else is marked as "to be replaced." So far there are only 5 new characters including the protagonist. The cast will surely expand in due time, but making up (roughly) 100+ characters on my own is going to be difficult on my own, so I may have to reach out to other people to help me in that department.

For right now this is as much as I can think of. I will be sharing some more stuff later such as screenshots and drawings, and if anybody has any questions, feel free to ask.

[mythaura-blog]

Hey all! Welcome to our December development update. Here is what lies under the cut.

What’s new

NPCs on Mythaura

New Monsters and New Item Patreon Illustrations

FAQ

Community spotlight

This month, we have been working on basic back end set up. Login and register systems are currently being built and tested. We’ve had some continuous trouble with our current server, so we’ve found it best for development to move to a new server. We’re currently in the process of shifting everything over - there may be some downtime on the Beast Demo, we will give everyone a heads up on our social media channels when that time comes!

On the topic of the Demo - we are planning some new and exciting usability features for Demo V3. • Link generation for sharing After creating a Beast, a link will be generated. The link will be a url to your creation. You can also import a link from another creation. • Lock and unlock options Options can be locked and unlocked by clicking the lock symbol. This will ensure your option will not change even when clicking randomize. • Shift Special order Shift Special options by moving the arrows. This will change the layering order of Specials without having to choose options again, making it easier to customize.

• Loading animation A simple loading animation to appear before the Beasts image is generated. Some other additions would be an "Age" option which changes the Beasts base to the Young Base or the Grown Base. And the categorization of the Base area and Special Markings area so it's a little easier to tell options apart.

The young bases for the three starter Beasts - Dragon, Griffin and Unicorn have been completed. We are planning to have all Young bases and their 125 colors and the current catalog of Special Markings available for the next Demo V3 update.

The Hybrid bases are being worked on and will be ready for the next demo update - here are the sketches for the young Quetzal, Hippogriff and Kirin!

We’ll have news very soon about when Demo V3 will drop. For now, I can share that work has started on the next Hybrid Beasts. Here is a quick sneak peak.

Every shop you visit in Mythaura is run by a shopkeep. These shopkeepers have their own unique personalities, quests and dialogue. They will interact with you, the player, through dialogue boxes. Some moments will give you different options to respond to the NPC and the NPCs portrait will change to different expressions depending on their mood and dialogue. For example; if a player hands in a completed quest, the NPC portrait will change to a pleased expression. Each character will play a large role within the story and game play.

This month our amazing Tier 3+ supporters on Patreon voted in a poll to choose the first NPC players will interact with on site out of three options. Acting as a tutorial guide, they will welcome the player into the world, introduce them to the currency, explain factions, walk players through creating their first Beast and finally leading them into the full game. This is an early look at the Mythaura “Welcome” NPC!

“A cheerful elderly Quetzal. He is a travelling merchant who sells interesting items he found while on the road. His bird is his best bud.”

Next month, patrons will decide on the Quetzal Traveller’s coloring, define their personality, their shop and their name. We’ll have more to share on the NPC system and other characters that will feature in Mythaura soon!

Tier 4 and 5 Patreon rewards have the opportunity to work with the artists to create their own Monsters and Items that will appear in-game. Here are the illustrations that have been created this month. Many thanks to our incredibly creative supporters! Monsters: Lunar Bone Thief - Created with Fizzywits Vitterfolk - Created with Malis (Work in progress! The Vitterfolk’s final illustration will be completed soon)

Items: Crystallion - Created with Aku Reine Plushie - Created with TwinFishes Coelacanth - Created with Frillshark Pahoehoe Flower -  Created with Mezzo

FAQ

So many pet games have been ruined by multi accounts, botters & scammers. I'd like to know what your policies will be on these since I am wary of investing in another site that doesn't have the staff or motivation to keep a clean playing field for all. - Anonymous

Those are completely valid concerns. As with any multiplayer online game, there will inevitability be those who will exploit it in some way or another. We will take our security and code of conduct very seriously, any player found violating that will be restricted or banned.

How many times can you create a beast from scratch? Only when you first join or are there other ways to do so? (Through an item for example) - Anonymous

You will create your first Beast upon joining Mythaura - a Dragon, Griffin or Unicorn. You’ll be able to choose any of the 125 colors on the wheel to customize their Base, Bottom and Top areas on their bodies. At the moment, this will be the only time you will be able to create a Beast from scratch. We are definitely not ruling out any other options! At this point it’s too early to say for sure.

Will there be a way to keep beasts as their 'baby' forms? - katjoyy

Yes! I realize that some people might prefer the young Beast artworks to their grown versions. There will be a method in the game to keep them from growing up - whether through consumable items or another means.

I know there is crowd funding, but will you be using Kickstarter at any point? I am more familiar with them, as I feel many are, and would rather fund through there (Dappervolk Funded within Hours.. or minuets??) I'd love to know, thanks! - bobbybi

Our first priority before planning the final crowdfunding push is delivering on an alpha and beta. We are 100% focused on building Mythaura the best it can be now and our Patreon is helping out a great deal to reach that goal.  

I love Mythaura so much already, I can't explain it in words! I can't wait to see it reach it's max potential. I just wanted to know if there would be a feeding or age mechanic that would cause your creature to pass on eventually. I only ask, because I dislike the game mechanic cause death is no fun. - Anonymous

Thank you so much! Your support means the world  ❤ There will be no death mechanic. We expect players to put a lot of time and effort into customizing their Beasts and it would feel like a waste to have them pass on eventually. Rest easy knowing that your Beasts will be immortal.

In the future, would you be open to beast/monster/item suggestions from users? - Anonymous

We are always open to suggestions! I am actively listening on all our social media channels. I take any and all suggestions to heart and note them down. But if you’re super eager to have your ideas made into reality, Tier 4 and 5 Patreon rewards can have their suggestions made into actual items in-game. 

Okay so, you're making a Virtual Pet game. What do you have planned that will set you apart from other games like Flight Rising and even Neopets? I see the graphics are looking good, but do you have something else new that you intend to bring to the table with this? - formerlybees

As a long time fan and player of virtual pet games, I can say that we have a number of new ideas we are planning to bring into the genre. Some ideas inspired by other virtual pet games and some inspired by other MMOs. We have some incredibly ambitious ideas planned out that I wish I could tell you about, but we need to see if we can actually build them and get it all working! 

Hi, I'm very curious as to what you look for in a portfolio for artists/writers? I'm very new to submitting portfolios and unfortunately art school doesn't really teach you this sort of thing. Thanks in advance! - rexcaliburr

For Mythaura specifically - Artists that show pieces with 2D cel-shaded style similar to our own and demonstrate cohesive anatomy for animal-like creatures. Just a couple of their best polished pieces will deliver the best first impression!  For writers, a small section of writing that best showcases your creative flair and perhaps links to your previous works if any. 

For artists, I recommend checking out the Dear Art Director tumblr. It’s helped me out a lot personally when I was freelancing.

Any update on best boy reine's final art work? - twinfishieslove

No update as of yet! You’ll have to gaze upon his glorious mugshot for now.

(In all seriousness, the Beast bases come first and are rather time consuming!)

Hey grif! Which, personally, if your favourite species - dragondrawsdragons

Hmm, good question. I’m rather partial to my namesake. Who can’t not love a half bird of prey, half lion?! I’ll give an honorable mention to Hippogriffs, albatross ponies are fun too. 

Our community feature for this month is showcasing the artistic talents of the Mythaura Discord community. Check it out!

I wish I could fit more in! I am so impressed by the art I get to see there almost everyday. It’s an absolute treat.

Every month we will be showcasing some community creations. If you’d like to share your Mythaura inspired artworks, make sure to tag them with  #mythaura on both Tumblr and Twitter. We’d love to see them.

If you would like to chat with other members of the community and members of the Mythaura team - Click here to join us on the official Mythaura Discord!

That’s it for this month. To finish, I’ll leave you with this super adorable sketch of a Beast family drawn by the very talented Luci!

Have a happy new year!

❤ Grif

[creativesplashpune]

Types of Animation

Animate- adj. Origin- Latin Stem- anima, animare Meaning- to give life to

The languages change, the words change, but the emotions stay the same- giving life to our imagination! Animation is an art, a skill and a science that plays a strong role in touching the masses, subtly. In today’s age, digital media has emerged as one of the most versatile mediums of communication. Entertainment, education, e-commerce, engineering, and many such sectors benefit from animating the content. A visual delight, isn’t it?

Animation makes your content a proper example of ‘beauty with brains.’ For this, several still frames need to be moved at a given speed in a second, causing a continuous motion. The term used for knowing the frames injected in a second is ‘FPS’, meaning frames per second.

Did you know?

Studies say that the human eye can perceive 30-60 frames in a second. But, the fastest camera in the world can hold 10 trillion frames per second. Jaw-dropping, isn’t it?

Previously, animation was stereotyped for entertainment purposes. One shouldn’t challenge the range and power of it. It brings an unmatched rise for animation in the business and entertainment worlds. A trove of types has been introduced in animation. Here are a few of them-

3D Animation

What is 3D? When a model is designed in a 3-dimensional style, it’s built in such a manner that it caters to the real-life characteristics of the object. An animator follows 3 steps for creating a 3D The animator uses a digi-doll to make a character rig. The first step is modelling.

What is 3D modelling now? When a series of the polygon is determined using some points or vertices, it classifies to be a raw model. A mesh is then put in use to manipulate and give the object a form.

What is 3D Layout and Animation? The objects are now ready to be positioned. Here, you can animate the object frame by frame or by dedicating a path to the object. Composing of 3D shots, animating the camera, creating a set and placing objects are a few pages of the 3D book.

What is Rendering? The process of generating a 3D output of the artwork done is called Rendering. A good render eats time but as an output, it gives you a clear detail of all the objects and lights placed in it. If you wish to render a great one, ensure that your PC is a beast and can take the load cause boy, oh boy, rendering is all about quality!

Avatar and Toy Story looked fun so every day is a nice time to applaud the artists, eh!

2D Animation

We now know that 3D imitates real life. What is 2D animation then? When you go 2D, you go flat based. Flat drawings and artwork take place on a 2D platform. With a low depth and subtle shadows, we move the objects on horizontal and vertical planes. 2D characters usually fit themselves in heights and widths, and are adorable! The process starts with simple sketches, outlining the background, creating elements in the frame and then comes the detailing of the same. A character performs activities as the elements and backgrounds groove to the timeline. To enhance a 2D animation, sound effects come in the scene! After adding a dash of emotions and communicating through facial expressions, devoting an eye specifically to the gestures and movements, your 2D animation is good to go for a render! Let’s get nostalgic remembering the good ol’ days when Tom and Jerry and Mickey Mouse Club House enticed us with their animations and stories. 2D is a delight!

Traditional Animation

What would be more of an endeavour than actually drawing every single frame? Well, artists did this for years before technology kicked its way in. The journey started with storyboarding the content and followed by that, soundtracks were recorded and put to play. Now, the artists scratched their heads and drew the characters on transparent paper. With each frame, the shape of character had to change. And while all this drama decorated the stage, the background artists found their watercolours being used for painting sets. After immense cleaning and polishing, these drawings were transferred to acetate sheets, also coined as cels. As these cels were dressed up with the sequence, special cameras were loaded with batteries and the final film paved its way towards development and processing. Remember Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? The oldest version was hand-drawn and it still is a spectacular and fine example of art.

Stop Motion Animation

If you think you have high patience levels, try stop motion. It’ll redefine patience for you. With a list of variants like claymation, cut-out and rotoscoping, stop motion turns out to be a nitpicky yet fun job. For this, you have to move every object, frame by frame. Meaning, You move every object bit by bit in a way that when compiled or played back to back, it’d evoke an animated feeling. Snap snap, oh snap! Traditionally, stop motion was a demanding task. A bit shake to the set or shift in the lighting would schedule a redo of the sequence. But now, as of the time we are writing this, DSLR’s have won hearts and live cameras have bought relief to the artists. As long as we are talking about this quirky method of animation, let’s take a moment out to appreciate the makers of Wallace and Gromit. They just did it perfectly, didn’t they?

Motion Graphics

Animation is such a vast sea. So vast that every time you set in an anchor, you find a new technique. One of them is motion graphics. Now, what is motion graphics? We also refer to it as ‘animated infographics.’ The content, concept and visualization walk hand in hand when motion graphics is playing in the tab. Let’s simplify this. If you think of planting some graphs in your video, using motion graphics is the way to go! With motion graphics, you directly get to communicate your thoughts and with good content and catchy music, motion graphics paves its path to perfection. It’s a great tool for branding, creating awareness amongst and keeping their eyes on the screen.

Such a variety to choose from! You have the types of animations on your desk but who will do them? Worry not. Creative Splash is an 3D Animation Studio in Pune, which will help make your brand shine using all kinds of animation. We specialize in 3D Animation, 2D Animation, Motion Graphics, Logo Animation, VFX Animation for various genres like Product Videos, Explainer Videos, Tv Commercial s, Advertisements and many others.

Check out our YouTube channel to have a glance of the animations. Feel like getting one done for yourself? Call us at 8554982761 or say hello to us at info@creativesplash.co.in. Let’s animate our world and make it just the way we like it!

[theswanprincessofficial]

Rick Rich Answers Fan Questions

We had some of our most avid fans ask their burning questions for Swan Princess Director, Richard Rich.

His long-awaited interview is here:

Don't miss hearing Rick's voice answer the last question!

What got you in to animation?

When I graduated from college, I wanted to work at Disney. That had been my life desire. I had graduated in Music and I wanted to work in the music department. Of course, there were no openings for a young guy like me. Disney had a traffic department with about 30 people that would pick up and deliver the mail all day through out the studio. The idea was that the talent would be able to go around and meet people on the lot and if they found an opening they could move out of traffic into some area that suited them in studio. For 3 months I would write a letter to Disney and the next week I would call and the next week I would write another letter and so on. Finally they said “ok ok enough, come in and we will give you a job in traffic”. The traffic department did not pay very much and I was married and had a little boy. I decided I would teach piano lessons at the studio for extra income. So on my lunch hour I taught a couple of animators and a couple secretaries. The only piano I could find was right next to the head of the animation department. Interestingly enough, the head of the animation department at that time was named Donald Duckwall. I always found that funny. An Assistant Director was retiring from the animation department and in discussions of who to hire for that position they thought it would be nice to have someone who knew something about music so they didn’t always have to go through the music department. Donald Duckwall spoke up and said “well there is this young guy in traffic who teaches piano lessons everyday next to my office on his lunch hour”. They interviewed me and 25 other people applying for that job. The job was an Assistant Director to John Lounsbery who was one of the 9 old men, original animators; he was now going to direct Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. I got the job! Really just a typical Hollywood story of going from nowhere to somewhere.

What was your inspiration to make The Swan Princess?

We wanted to make a fairy tale, a classic fairy tale, like Cinderella. Swan Lake had never been done and was very much an animation type project since the main character changes to a Swan. The only way to move forward on an idea like that is to have a great story. Brian Nissen and I started researching. We read different versions of Swan Lake, listened to the ballet, whatever we could think of. We were able to come up with a story concept that was really quite intriguing. We got more and more excited as we worked on it. The big breakthrough for us was the moon and how the moon worked into the story. She would only be a human when there was a moon. Every night she would change from a swan into a human as the moonlight touched the lake. That was a very exciting, beautiful kind of transition that could happen. What really made the story come together was that there are nights with no moon in the sky. It was a night with no moon when Odette was supposed to come to the castle so Derek could vow his everlasting love. But, of course, she couldn’t turn into Odette. She stayed as a swan. Odette had to fly to the castle and that gave us a really exciting and dramatic moment. Once we came up with that we knew we had a really great story.

Get the new Haunted by the Moon t-shirt here.

How long did the art take for the first film?

The original Swan Princess was in production for 3 years. The first 6 to 8 months was a development period. It includes writing the script and doing character designs to develop what each character will look like. The actual production period was 2 years. That is when we would do the storyboards, which all have to be hand drawn. Then we would do the layouts, which were also hand drawn, at that time. Then painting the backgrounds, completing the pencil art and painting all the cels. The art process took that entire two year period.

Check out the art here!

How long did the first film take to make without cutting anything out (in total)?

In animation we pre-edit the film. It’s not like live action where we shoot lots of footage and then we cut it all together. The entire animated film is put together in story reels using story sketches. The reason we do that is because animation requires so many people and so much money to get it all right that we don’t want to animate a scene that isn’t in the picture. We spend a lot of time in developing these story reels or anamatics we call them. They’re just still shots going from one scene to another. But we know how long each scene is and we know what the actions with be in that scene. Once we like what we see, we like the pacing of it, we like the dialogue that we’ve recorded then we move into animation. So there are very few out takes in animation. That doesn’t mean we don’t trim and tighten things up but its pretty much done in the storyboard phase of the production. So that is a big part of the 3 year production period that was required for The Swan Princess.

Are there any more productions that you are going to direct that will be in traditional animation?

Traditional animation is pretty much a thing of the past. The reason is that all of the major studios have moved into CGI. The great artists that it takes to draw a hand drawn animation feature just aren’t out there anymore. There is not eough of a demand. Back when Disney and Dreamworks and Warner Brothers were all competing for the artists there was a real boom in the need for the hand drawn artists. All that went out the window when the computer animation took over with Toy Story and slowly moved away from 2D animation. So the problem in doing more hand drawn animated film is not a desire but it’s finding the skilled and high-end talent that it requires to make a beautiful hand drawn picture. However, it is important to understand that even in the CGI world of animation it isn’t all computer and there is still the requirement for artists. We still use hand drawn art character design and storyboards. They are first designed with the pencil before we take them to CGI. Storyboard artists are very much in demand and those are the artists that visualize the written word from the script and make it come alive with drawings. Anyone who is interested in getting into animated film making does not need to specialize in animation, because that is not a step that is done anymore, but in the pre-production steps of layout, character design, storyboard, painting backgrounds and working with color. Those are still skills that every CGI production house requires. That’s where your emphasis should be put.

Experience the films on

Can you tell us something more about the series revival in 2012?

Back in the 90’s we made 3 full-length Swan Princess films and then stopped. When 2010 came around DVD sales were declining all over the industry but the Swan Princess DVD sales remained kind of steady. Sony Pictures approached The Swan Princess Producer and said “There seems to be a demand for this brand and fans out there that really like the films and the story. Would you be interested in making more of them”. We had originally thought they would need to be 2D animation, but it was really difficult to find the artists to do that. So we built all of the original characters in CGI and showed Sony that we could make them look pretty close to what they look like in 2D. They got very excited and we made the transition into the 3D world, into the CGI world. It has been so exciting because it opens up so many more possibilities of making the shows with many more visual effects.

Own the Swan Princess movies and music

How much different it is to make CGI movie than hand-drawn animated?

The difficult step in a hand drawn film is the artistry, especially finding the artists that can draw the characters so that they always look the same. Numerous skilled artists are needed because one artist can’t draw all the images of a character. Getting the characters to look the same through out the entire film is one of the biggest struggles and where we spend a lot of time and money. In CGI we build a model that is just like having a human actor. We don’t have to draw the character from every angle, which is very difficult in 2D. We can just shoot the model from a down shot, an up shot, any angle we need. That process has made the consistent look much better in CGI. No matter where we place the camera or what action the character does, it always looks like that character.The other thing that CGI adds to the process is that we get to use the live action camera. In 2D animation you pretty much can truck in, you can pan sideways but you can’t move the camera around a character. In CGI we can swish the camera around and do all of the dramatic things that you see in a live action movie. You can see this in all of the new Swan Princess films we have created, we are starting on Swan Princess 9 now and it is just thrilling to see what the camera can do in this show.Interestingly enough a CGI film is not much faster to make because some processes take longer in CGI that were shorter in 2D. A live action feature takes two or three years just like it did in the 2D drawing. It doesn’t save time and it is not cheaper. It just gives us capabilities that we didn’t ever have in 2D.For instance, when I was at Disney I was one of the Directors on The Black Cauldron. In that film Taran had a little bauble that could fly around, it was a little glowing orb. I can remember we spent 6 months on a scene where this little glowing bauble went into a cave. I wanted to make sure that the light from the bauble lit the walls of the cave. We had to make all the moving mats on the side of the wall to make it look like the light was moving across this cave, which was very time consuming. With CGI we just light it like a live action set and the bauble and the light move together. This could be created in a couple of weeks at the most.

How do you write a script for a Swan Princess movie? Where do you get ideas? Do you have plans where you are going with the story and the characters?

The stories come from a variety of ideas and requirements. Some are marketing driven. Some are fan driven. Some are just to fun ideas to experience with the characters. For instance, when we got into doing the CGI films in the series, Sony felt it was really important that Derek and Odette have a child. We didn’t want to repeat the process of growing up that we had done with Derek and Odette in the first film so we came up with the solution of having Derek and Odette adopt Alise. She gave us an opportunity to give Derek and Odette a child who could already talk and have her own story.We have had a lot of remarks from fans saying they want to see more of Odette and Derek and more of a fairy tale feeling. So in Swan 8 we have done a new story built around Derek and Odette, to capture the loving feelings that they had in the first film. Swan Princess 8 worked really well to give us a dramatic and rejuvenated love interest. In Swan 9 Alise and Lucas are now 16 and 17 involved in a love triagle with another Prince from China. Alise has to face difficult decisions about who she is going to love. It’s a very dramatic story and it captures all of the feeling that was in the original Swan film but with new characters.We don’t have a thru storyline, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings because these are not books. We come up with ideas that feed off previous stories but take us into new territory to keep all of the fans interested and show them the characters changing, growing up and facing challenges.

Get the deck of cards featuring The Swan Princess characters here

I love the character of Alise, was it risky to change the main character in the middle of the series? And will Odette ever have main role again?

Alise is still a side character. There are films that have really focused on her but she will continue to be used in the series to display the love Derek and Odette have for one another and for children.

Go Royally Undercover with Swan Princess sunglasses

Can I have hope for many more movies to come in the future beyond 8 and 9?

Hope is eternal! We are hoping that there will be many more and it looks like everyone is working to make that happen.

I've always loved the sidekicks - Jean-Bob, Speed and Puffin. I also loved the addition of Number 9 to the group (is it okay to officially count him as part of the group now?). Is it possible the original fourth sidekick, Whizzer, will return?

Yes indeed you can count Number 9 as a sidekick. His character is so entertaining. Another character in the show that really fantastic is Scully. There is something about him that draws you into the story.Whizzer was a fun, comic character in one of the earlier films. As we get farther and farther into the series there is always a chance that he could come back.

Is there a chance there will be at least one more movie with Odette turning into swan?

The idea of Odette of changing into a swan is a challenge. We get requests for that quite often but it is an issue that we face as storytellers.If Odette is changed into a swan it has do be done through magic, one of 2 ways, either through good or through evil.If we use evil, we will be repeating a plot that we have already used 3 times. There would be no suspense about Odette becoming trapped as a swan, rescued, probably by Derek, and will again becomes the human Princess Odette. It is not really good story telling.We could use good to change Odette into a swan. Once we do that and use magic to do that then she can change back and forth at will. From a storytelling standpoint the transformation loses inspiration and is no longer a vehicle for suspense or for the battle between good and evil.

Read the newest storybook where Odette turns into a swan.

What inspired the Transformation/title sequence?

Towards the end of the original show it came time to introduce the title, The Swan Princess, on the screen without giving away too much about the story. One of the highlights of that first film was seeing Odette transform from a swan into a princess. We decided to do a really neat art version of those special effects swirling up and bringing the title on screen. It is a mirror of the transformation in the show reflected in the title.

Our transformation nail wraps can be found here

Was Swan 3 originally meant to be the final film in the series?

The first 3 films were thought of as a trilogy so when we finished the 3

rd

one it was pretty much felt that it was the end. But what we didn’t forsee was that the fan base grew and wanted more. It was actually the fans that made all the new ones to happen because they clamored for more. Sony heard them and brought 6 more stories to life. It has been such an exciting opportunity to bring new stories and characters to the fans and to feel the love from the following that the original Swan Princess had.

When designing Zelda was she always intended to be as psychotic (and hilarious) as she is or was that a choice by the voice actress?

When we wrote the story for Swan 3 we wanted to have a comic villain and a female because we already had two serious, male villians with Rothbart and Clavuis. It gave us an opportunity to create a really amusing character. So the concept was in the script but the voice actor really brought Zelda’s maniacal personality to life.

Which Villain allied themselves with Rothbart first out of Clavius and Zelda?

The story Zelda tells Whizzer is only partly true. True – She found Rothbart languishing in despair after King William destroyed his power and she inspired him to work again. The part she doesn’t tell is that she and Rothbart were stuck. They needed help. Rothbart reached out to one of his younger rivals, Clavius. The three of them re-conjured the Forbidden Arts together. But after their success Rothbart turned on them both. They didn’t dare challenge his power at that time. After Clavius died in the mountain, Zelda never bothered to include Clavius in the story of the recreation of the Forbidden Arts because there was no one alive to challenge her account. She painted Clavius as an interloper who tried to steal what she and Rothbart developed together.

On the topic of the Forbidden Arts, have we truly seen the last of it in the series? Or is there a chance it might come back?

The Forbidden Arts was a power Rothbart had harnessed. There is a chance that the Forbidden Arts could come back if we discover a new and exciting way to give it additional powers so that it brings something original to the series.

Michelle Nicastro, sadly, passed away, but we were wondering if she were still alive today would you have kept her on as the voice of Odette?

Listen to Rick's answer here

The death of Michelle Nicastro was a real shock and it happened when we were just starting to do Swan 4 and rebooting up the series. It was every intention that we would use her. She was going to come in and we did not know at that time that she had been very ill and very sick. But when the time came in to record she called and said that she couldn’t do it. And she died 3 days later. And It was really a total heartbreak for us. Not because we lost her in the series because we lost an incredible actress and a sweet spirit. She, in her life, was as sweet as the character Odette. And I think that’s why she was able to portray Odette in such an incredible way, is because she actually was that kind of a person. And if she were alive today she would be the voice of Odette for as long as we could use her.

We handed this pin to the attendees of the original Swan Princess film in 1994, get yours here

About The Swan Princess

The Swan Princess is based upon the folk tale and ballet, Swan Lake. The story is transformed into a playfully fun adventure with exciting music, lovable forest friends, and of course, the handsome Prince Derek. The Swan Princess, Odette, has stayed true to original fairy tale princess with her kindness, grace, and loyalty.

Three reasons you should follow us on Facebook 1) Get a behind-the-scenes look as Princess Odette and Prince Derek continue their adventures 2) Be one of the first to be notified when new products are released and 3) Share your Swan Princess stories and tales with other die-hard fans.

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[stewy497]

Stew Reviews - Celeste

So, after a full year of umming and erring over it, I finally gave in to peer pressure and got myself a Nintendo Switch. I’ve got the usual no-brainer titles to go with it; Mario Kart and Odyssey, Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, Rayman Legends, and The Binding of Isaac, curiously enough. But out of all the games I’ve played on this new system, the one that most cried out for analysis was a little indie project from Matt Thorson by the name of Celeste that Nintendo seem to be particularly eager to push.

I didn’t pick up Celeste immediately because from the gameplay trailer I had assumed it to be a slightly generic platformer. When I did pick it up a few days later, I found that mechanically, Celeste can be considered a contemporary of Super Meat Boy which I really like, being a tough-but-fair 2D pixel art precision platformer in the try-die-try-again mould. The gameplay isn’t particularly revolutionary, so I guess in a way I was right about it looking generic, but it is very solid and rarely unduly frustrating. The main innovation here is that you collect strawberries rather than bandages, and your basic move set is enhanced with the ability to climb walls and a short directional dash which you can use to quickly reposition yourself in mid-air. The physics are reliable and the platforming puzzles are all competently designed, being built around the dashing and climbing mechanics, so they always feel central and never like some gimmicky tag-on. Thusly, navigating a screen on the first attempt with a smoothly rattled off sequence of calculated jumps gives a feeling of indescribable satisfaction. Each level is visually distinct and has its own slight variations on platforming mechanics, such as dash extenders or trajectory-altering winds, so the game retains a stable core that doesn’t end up becoming stale. The game suggests that gathering the strawberries is completely optional and in the end grants little more than bragging rights, but it’s entertaining enough that I generally want to go after them while still being challenging without making me break the Switch into three pieces – not in the sense that it’s meant to, I mean – which few games can claim to achieve. There are also secrets to find, B-sides and crystal hearts, and admittedly their function isn’t readily apparent until you reach post game, but they do have one so they count towards something other than meaningless 100% completion. As satisfactory as this all is however, where Celeste really grabbed me was in the story.

Some minor spoilers ahead for the sake of analysis, so you may want to skip the next two paragraphs if you want to go into Celeste fresh.

You play as Madeline – assuming you decided not to abuse the enter-name-here feature – a young red-headed woman who has arrived at the foot of Mount Celeste with the intent to climb to the mountain’s summit. Right off the bat it’s quite obvious that Madeline is dealing with some deep-seated emotional issues, from the way she stubbornly proclaims how much she needs to reach the summit and the occasional cryptic dialogue exchange or dream sequence. One conversation in particular flat out states that she suffers from panic attacks, so presumably it’s some form of anxiety disorder. The thrust of all this is that climbing Mount Celeste serves as a metaphor for Madeline overcoming her problems, which as a writer and as someone who has experienced mental health issues myself, I can appreciate. It might not be the most complex piece of symbolism in the world, but it works and it works well. This theming is complemented by the gameplay itself too in a nice example of ludo-narrative synchronicity, as in the face of your literally hundreds upon hundreds of failed attempts, only your own determination not to give up can propel you onwards.

As you draw closer to the peak, you’ll meet and interact with various supporting characters. They’re all quite reliably grounded and likeable, and each of them strike a chord in different ways. First off is Theo, let’s call him our frame of reference as the most “normal” person in the story; a wanderlusting and aimless amateur photographer who’s also climbing the mountain, occasionally slightly brusque in his manner but also pragmatic and sensible with it. Then there’s a portly and spectacularly neurotic hotel owner who may or may not be dead and tends to overthink and worry to the point of paralysis; a half-mad old woman who lives at the foot of the mountain; and an evil red-eyed palate swap of Madeline representing all of her uncertainty and self-doubt who constantly tries to sabotage her ascent... You know, the usual stuff. Their interactions are well written and touching, with two particular moments close to the summit sticking in my mind.

Speaking of characters and their interactions, one object of note is that while the majority of the game is, as I mentioned earlier, presented in low-detail pixel art, for dialogue and key story beats the visuals employ cute, hand drawn illustrations. On their own they’re quite enjoyable to look at, but being spread out by large expanses of pixel art makes each one feel far more special and worth savouring. I found myself taking screenshots of the ones I particularly liked just so I could go back and look at them again later.

Overall, I can find very little to complain about with Celeste. About the only recurring issue I could name would be that the input for the left joystick might be a bit unforgiving; it seems like half of all my deaths could be attributed to Madeline dashing a different direction to the one I wanted. You can mitigate this to some degree by switching to the directional buttons, but good luck if you need to change direction more than once; while all other controllers use a single cross-shaped button because it makes it easier to find the direction you want, the Joy-Con’s four individual buttons mean that my thumb keeps getting confused and prodding the space between them. Yes, the Pro controller has a more traditional D-Pad, but it’s positioned below the analogue stick rather than above it like every other controller, so reaching for it feels unnatural and off-putting. And besides, I played most of the game in portable mode anyways, so it’s a moot point. I suppose the easiest fix for this issue is to simply play a different version of Celeste, since it’s available across all platforms, but I can still recommend the Switch version because, like The Binding of Isaac, this game’s model is well suited to being portable, and I enjoy being able to have my pick with how I play it.

Secondly, for a game with such strong writing, I get the feeling that the writers neglected to proof read their final draft. The end of the second level hints at something or someone in Madeline’s past, but after she wakes up from the dream sequence where this happens, that particular story beat is never brought up again. If you’d hoped I would forget about it, Matt, perhaps it would have been worth coming up with another level or two to pad the runtime and improve the odds of that.

The last incredibly petty thing I have to say is that it’s often unclear whether or not Celeste’s mechanics are diegetic – that is to say, whether they exist within the context of the game’s story or purely for the sake of gameplay. Yes, I know that I’m probably the only person who cares about this, but it got on my nerves and it pads out the word count so I’m going to talk about it anyways. Part of the reason for this is that Mount Celeste is established as a supernatural setting that brings certain qualities out in those who scale it, but it’s hard to see where the dividing line is. Is Madeline actually capable of dashing in mid-air? A feat like that should be physically impossible without generating the force of a nuclear blast, but it’s demonstrated in cutscenes multiple times so I suppose she must be? What about the dash-extending space voids in the second level? The whole game it seemed those were simply part of Madeline’s dream, but then during the final climax when the game’s throwing everything it has at you, they return alongside everything else. But like I said, I’m the only person who cares about this so it’s hardly a deal breaker. I digress.

So, bottom line: a narrative triumph with solid and entertaining core gameplay. To be enjoyed by anyone who can face a challenge, and a must-play for those in the indie market.

[aurelliocheek]

Monster Boy: Intro and Ending Full Motion Video

It’s costly, has no influence to the gameplay and changes everything.

We’re all fans of awesome opening and ending cutscenes as they set the right tone and create an amazing atmosphere. With Monster Boy, we wanted to create something special, so we started an extensive Full Motion Video (=FMV) production in 2015, and worked with a talented team of French ­animation specialists Marco Nguyen (The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales), Bertrand Piocelle and Ulysse Malassagne. The result was a beautifully animated 2:30m cartoon which brought to life the game world and main characters from our story outline. Amazing to see, but at the same time a big mistake. There were still 3 years of game production ahead which we didn’t know back then. The further we went on with development, the gap between the content of the game and the content of the animated cutscenes became larger every day. In 2017 we changed the entire character designs in the game and went full-on Japanese Anime. We started a cooperation with Japanese Animation ­Studio NOMAD which was introduced to us by Ryuichi Nishizawa. NOMAD helped us get the ­character design right but we ­realized that the existing FMV scenes ­needed to be redone entirely. The problem with 2D hand-drawn animation is that you can’t just ­exchange models like in 3D Animation scenes. Everything had to be redrawn from scratch.

We separated the FMV production tasks between Game Ateliers lead animator ��Matthieu Godet who worked on an animated storyboard and NOMAD who directed the scenes and created the final animation. The production took another 6 months and we spent a lot of time to fine-tune the scenes so it would fit the updated character and game design perfectly. We also produced two new songs for the intro: one in English by Tee Lopes (Sonic Mania) performed by Leandro Fonseca, and another one in Japanese composed by Motoi Sakuraba (Tales Of, Dark Souls, Star Ocean) and performed by Haruka Shimotsuki. The intro song will change depending on the language setting in the game but both songs are included in every version of the game that’s available worldwide. Players can manually set the audio from within the game’s options menu.

Make a tv show of this!? The reception of the FMV was amazing and many players asked us to make a tv show of this. When showing the game at various trade shows around the planet, the intro was always an eye catcher. Many people who actually didn’t really intend or notice the game when walking around have been attracted by the opening. So, also from the marketing point of view, the rework of the FMV was totally worth it. Who knows where this adventure will lead us? Maybe one day a TV production company decides to continue the adventures of Monster Boy in a TV show, we’d love that!

Fabien Demeulenaere Studio Director Fabien joined the video game industry in 2005, working as a Lead Artist for Vivendi Games and Konami before co-creating Game Atelier in 2009, operating as the Studio Director.

The post Monster Boy: Intro and Ending Full Motion Video appeared first on Making Games.

Monster Boy: Intro and Ending Full Motion Video published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[reneeacaseyfl]

How a small team of artists conceived Sony’s Concrete Genie

Concrete Genie is a kind of psychological journey, played out on the canvas of a video game. A young artist named Ash escapes his troubles by painting spectacular living landscapes in his abandoned hometown of Denska.

But the neighborhood bullies menace him and ruin his work. Ash’s internal drama is externalized as he fights to restore color to the drab world of Denska.

This heartwarming parable comes from an unlikely game studio, Pixelopus, a small team that has been working for 4.5 years on the title at Sony’s studio in San Mateo, California. I played the action-adventure game, which comes out on October 8 for $30 on the PlayStation 4.

You use the motion controller to paint the world, interacting with dream-like genies who live in the concrete and wood of the walls of Denska. It is a unique art-driven video game where you can express your own creativity. You can also enjoy a virtual reality version with the PlayStation VR.

After the demo, we got a tour of Pixelopus’ offices at Sony’s U.S. game headquarters in San Mateo, California. I interviewed Pixelopus creative director Dominic Robillard and art director Jeff Sangalli about the making of the game. They told me that the idea was born in their art department, from a visual effects artist named Ashwin Kumar. They were tossing around ideas after they shipped Entwined, and they came up with this concept of a young boy artist being bullied. And Sony liked it so much that they let the team run with it, and now here we are.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Concrete Genie creators Jeff Sangalli, art director, (left) and Dominic Robillard, creative director.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: How long have you been working on this now?

Dominic Robillard: We started the very first concept in the beginning of 2015, so four and a half years. Just over four and a half years by the time it comes out.

GamesBeat: Is the VR element part of your work, or is that another team?

Robillard: That’s a different team. We invited some friends of ours to come in a couple of years ago and look at the game. We had wanted to do VR, but at the time we had to make that decision, there were only 12 people on the team. It was too much for us to take on along with everything else that’s in the game. We showed these friends of ours, Jeff and Dave, the game, and they had this awesome pitch for what they would do if they had a chance to work on a VR version. What if I could paint and then step into the painting and go into the world of the genies and paint in 3D all around me in VR?

We loved that so much that we actually managed to hire them and built a small team around them. They’re just around the corner from the studio. They’ve been working on that for about two years now.

GamesBeat: I saw that first last time, the VR version. It looked very different from this more story-based adventure.

Robillard: It’s funny. When you have to describe all the painting in the VR version, it gets a bit confusing. But when you’re painting on the walls in VR, that’s all our tech. As we’ve been building the brushes in the main game, that’s piped through, because we all use Unreal and we share all the tools and the tech. That’s all the same. Also, in the free painting, as you get all the free paint locations in VR, all the brushes you find in the main game are the ones you can use in the VR free paint. It’s connected like that. But stepping into your painting and into the genie world, that’s all the new parts they’ve built, all those 3D VR brushes.

Above: Ash has to deal with the negativity in the town of Denska.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: Are the environments very different than the town you’re in, or where you’re out in the fields?

Robillard: When you’re in the world of the genies? That’s when you’re in their work. If you remember, where you start the VR version, it’s the lighthouse. In the bit you just played, where you picked up the brush, that’s the location where the VR begins. Then you step into their world, essentially. That’s why it looks so different.

GamesBeat: Where did the original idea come from? It seems like the kind of pitch that you couldn’t communicate to somebody in words.

Robillard: You’re on the money. It literally didn’t begin as a traditional pitch. When we finished Entwined, we had a moment to spend some time concepting what we wanted to do next as a team. One of our favorite things about working in small teams is you can have a completely flat hierarchy. We had a chance to say to everyone on the team, “Everyone come up with game ideas for what we want to do next.”

The original idea for Concrete Genie came from Ashwin Kumar, who’s our VFX artist. That’s why he’s called Ash in the game. The first thing he did to communicate this idea was painting a picture of a small boy being bullied and painting these huge characters in a wall. He was imagining that they were sticking up for him. That was the very first beginning. It wasn’t a written document or anything. It was just that picture. This concept — the bullying and the idea of an artist using art to cope with some of the things happening to him — was there from the first moment.

GamesBeat: What influenced how it came to look and play?

Jeff Sangalli: After Ash generated that first piece of artwork, the whole art department started to build imagery around that concept. At the same time we had decided that we would use Unreal as our game engine. We started to use more complex lighting in our concept art, trying to come up with a style that would be more dramatic lighting-wise and have, hopefully, a better emotional connection because of that.

Then we started thinking about — we were all inspired by the lighting in stop motion. We wanted the world to feel handcrafted. We tried to break down what we were responding to about stop motion. That was another big inspiration for the 3D world. That inspired some of the stuff you had a chance to see today: the keyframe animation, the face illustrations. The 2D world was really inspired by children’s book illustration, and by urban artwork as well.

Above: Ash’s face is hand-drawn on a flat piece of paper, and then wrapped around a 3D object.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: Cleaning up the city, is that something like Flower, or other games that are out there?

Robillard: We love all of those games. The other thing that was connected to that, there was an environmental theme in some of the other concepts that we’d developed when we were looking at doing Concrete Genie originally. It was the moment when Jeff and I realized that that group, that team, has a natural instinct for expressing ideas that have a heart or a message or a meaning to them. Every single — we came up with seven or eight different game ideas, and Concrete Genie was one. But all of them had that in there, which was really interesting, that there was this intuition for that from this group of kids. Or I shouldn’t call them kids anymore.

GamesBeat: You mentioned you have a pretty young team, though.

Robillard: Yeah, yeah. Most of that team, this is their first job in the game industry. But there was an environmental theme in one of the other ideas. When we were developing the painting mechanics, of which we did several iterations — the version you just played is the third version of the painting mechanics.

GamesBeat: With the motion controls, being the center of it?

Robillard: That was a part of it. The other versions were interesting, but they didn’t go far enough in terms of expression. We had some basic versions of stenciling. There were ones where you threw paint splats on the wall. But it wasn’t until we did this version where you could much more carefully author exactly what you wanted and grow that into something beautiful that we made that connection for players, to feel connected to their artwork.

The other thing that came with that was the ability to paint anywhere. That only came in the last version. This idea that suddenly everyone’s version of the town would be unique and different was where we started connecting it to an environmental aspect as well. Using that ability to paint everywhere and bring some of it back to life came from that. It was a natural fit for the story and the level progression in the game.

GamesBeat: Painting is, by itself, fun for some people. But how to you make painting fun all the time in a game like this?

Robillard: Nobody’s phrased it like that, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, make it fun all the time for everyone. From the moment that we wanted to try to have art as a mechanic, the idea that we would try to make anybody feel like they could be an artist has definitely been our central gameplay fantasy. In terms of how it’s meant to feel, we just knew that if we could use the motion controllers to let anyone make marks and gestures in the wall, and then just get the amount of assistance that the game gives, just the right amount so that it doesn’t feel like it’s doing too much — if you do that, it doesn’t feel like your artwork anymore.

Getting that balance from the gameplay, agency versus assistance, getting it in just the right place, and then having a lot of sophisticated stuff under the hood that layers everything correctly for you, or tries to connect the elements you’re painting together — we draw ground around the things that need ground. There’s a lot of light touches in there that help compose the image for you, but never change it or add too much so you feel like it’s not your artwork.

Above: Concrete Genie has spectacular art.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: It’s hard to mess up your art. It reminds of Spider-Man that way, where it was hard to mess up swinging around.

Sangalli: We wanted to make sure you didn’t feel like you were being penalized for painting the way you want to paint. We’ve seen some kids that just want to paint rainbows all over the entire city. It looks really beautiful, actually. Who are we to judge their paintings?

Robillard: The game never judges you. That’s why we have the light strands, because that’s just to say, “We want you to paint here.” We don’t tell you what to paint or how to paint. We never judge it as good or bad.

Sangalli: We spent a lot of time tuning the city as a palette, so that the paintings really look dynamic. The glow we spent quite a bit of time on, to make sure that they feel like they’re really an allegory for Ash’s imagination. They should be as dynamic as what he would see through his own eyes.

GamesBeat: At some point, I don’t know which act, all of this switches into something ugly and dark. You kind of start with something ugly in the beginning, but you get to darker creatures and stuff like that. Why did you want to make that kind of transition.

Robillard: That transition, that twist at the end, was there from the very first prototype we ever did for this game, all those years ago. We’ve been working on it ever since then. I think what happened when we decided that we were going to try and tackle bullying as a theme — we researched it, and we knew we wanted the finale, the climax of the gameplay and the narrative, to be focused on the darkness, that negativity itself. We wanted a way to synthesize and personify the emotion as a thing that you could tackle and deal with.

We always wanted to get that in there as a way of tackling the negativity, and not about the kids. One thing you’ll see when the game comes out is we do show the backstories of those kids as well, to try to explain some of the reasons why they’ve turned into the kids that they’ve become. That twist is really about keeping it focused on the darkness itself.

GamesBeat: It reminds me of Sea of Solitude, if you’ve seen that.

Robillard: We’ve been following that, but it was released while we were in Europe last week. I can’t wait to play it.

GamesBeat: It’s a unique name. How did you come up with that?

Robillard: It was there from the beginning as well. Originally it was a working title, but we fell in love with it. It does still describe one of the key things in the game, which is the moment when Ash touches the walls and the genies come to life. That was where that came from. It just seemed like — it’s catchy, and we liked it. We became very attached to it.

Credit: Source link

The post How a small team of artists conceived Sony’s Concrete Genie appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/how-a-small-team-of-artists-conceived-sonys-concrete-genie/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-a-small-team-of-artists-conceived-sonys-concrete-genie from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186652375672

[velmaemyers88]

How a small team of artists conceived Sony’s Concrete Genie

Concrete Genie is a kind of psychological journey, played out on the canvas of a video game. A young artist named Ash escapes his troubles by painting spectacular living landscapes in his abandoned hometown of Denska.

But the neighborhood bullies menace him and ruin his work. Ash’s internal drama is externalized as he fights to restore color to the drab world of Denska.

This heartwarming parable comes from an unlikely game studio, Pixelopus, a small team that has been working for 4.5 years on the title at Sony’s studio in San Mateo, California. I played the action-adventure game, which comes out on October 8 for $30 on the PlayStation 4.

You use the motion controller to paint the world, interacting with dream-like genies who live in the concrete and wood of the walls of Denska. It is a unique art-driven video game where you can express your own creativity. You can also enjoy a virtual reality version with the PlayStation VR.

After the demo, we got a tour of Pixelopus’ offices at Sony’s U.S. game headquarters in San Mateo, California. I interviewed Pixelopus creative director Dominic Robillard and art director Jeff Sangalli about the making of the game. They told me that the idea was born in their art department, from a visual effects artist named Ashwin Kumar. They were tossing around ideas after they shipped Entwined, and they came up with this concept of a young boy artist being bullied. And Sony liked it so much that they let the team run with it, and now here we are.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Concrete Genie creators Jeff Sangalli, art director, (left) and Dominic Robillard, creative director.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: How long have you been working on this now?

Dominic Robillard: We started the very first concept in the beginning of 2015, so four and a half years. Just over four and a half years by the time it comes out.

GamesBeat: Is the VR element part of your work, or is that another team?

Robillard: That’s a different team. We invited some friends of ours to come in a couple of years ago and look at the game. We had wanted to do VR, but at the time we had to make that decision, there were only 12 people on the team. It was too much for us to take on along with everything else that’s in the game. We showed these friends of ours, Jeff and Dave, the game, and they had this awesome pitch for what they would do if they had a chance to work on a VR version. What if I could paint and then step into the painting and go into the world of the genies and paint in 3D all around me in VR?

We loved that so much that we actually managed to hire them and built a small team around them. They’re just around the corner from the studio. They’ve been working on that for about two years now.

GamesBeat: I saw that first last time, the VR version. It looked very different from this more story-based adventure.

Robillard: It’s funny. When you have to describe all the painting in the VR version, it gets a bit confusing. But when you’re painting on the walls in VR, that’s all our tech. As we’ve been building the brushes in the main game, that’s piped through, because we all use Unreal and we share all the tools and the tech. That’s all the same. Also, in the free painting, as you get all the free paint locations in VR, all the brushes you find in the main game are the ones you can use in the VR free paint. It’s connected like that. But stepping into your painting and into the genie world, that’s all the new parts they’ve built, all those 3D VR brushes.

Above: Ash has to deal with the negativity in the town of Denska.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: Are the environments very different than the town you’re in, or where you’re out in the fields?

Robillard: When you’re in the world of the genies? That’s when you’re in their work. If you remember, where you start the VR version, it’s the lighthouse. In the bit you just played, where you picked up the brush, that’s the location where the VR begins. Then you step into their world, essentially. That’s why it looks so different.

GamesBeat: Where did the original idea come from? It seems like the kind of pitch that you couldn’t communicate to somebody in words.

Robillard: You’re on the money. It literally didn’t begin as a traditional pitch. When we finished Entwined, we had a moment to spend some time concepting what we wanted to do next as a team. One of our favorite things about working in small teams is you can have a completely flat hierarchy. We had a chance to say to everyone on the team, “Everyone come up with game ideas for what we want to do next.”

The original idea for Concrete Genie came from Ashwin Kumar, who’s our VFX artist. That’s why he’s called Ash in the game. The first thing he did to communicate this idea was painting a picture of a small boy being bullied and painting these huge characters in a wall. He was imagining that they were sticking up for him. That was the very first beginning. It wasn’t a written document or anything. It was just that picture. This concept — the bullying and the idea of an artist using art to cope with some of the things happening to him — was there from the first moment.

GamesBeat: What influenced how it came to look and play?

Jeff Sangalli: After Ash generated that first piece of artwork, the whole art department started to build imagery around that concept. At the same time we had decided that we would use Unreal as our game engine. We started to use more complex lighting in our concept art, trying to come up with a style that would be more dramatic lighting-wise and have, hopefully, a better emotional connection because of that.

Then we started thinking about — we were all inspired by the lighting in stop motion. We wanted the world to feel handcrafted. We tried to break down what we were responding to about stop motion. That was another big inspiration for the 3D world. That inspired some of the stuff you had a chance to see today: the keyframe animation, the face illustrations. The 2D world was really inspired by children’s book illustration, and by urban artwork as well.

Above: Ash’s face is hand-drawn on a flat piece of paper, and then wrapped around a 3D object.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: Cleaning up the city, is that something like Flower, or other games that are out there?

Robillard: We love all of those games. The other thing that was connected to that, there was an environmental theme in some of the other concepts that we’d developed when we were looking at doing Concrete Genie originally. It was the moment when Jeff and I realized that that group, that team, has a natural instinct for expressing ideas that have a heart or a message or a meaning to them. Every single — we came up with seven or eight different game ideas, and Concrete Genie was one. But all of them had that in there, which was really interesting, that there was this intuition for that from this group of kids. Or I shouldn’t call them kids anymore.

GamesBeat: You mentioned you have a pretty young team, though.

Robillard: Yeah, yeah. Most of that team, this is their first job in the game industry. But there was an environmental theme in one of the other ideas. When we were developing the painting mechanics, of which we did several iterations — the version you just played is the third version of the painting mechanics.

GamesBeat: With the motion controls, being the center of it?

Robillard: That was a part of it. The other versions were interesting, but they didn’t go far enough in terms of expression. We had some basic versions of stenciling. There were ones where you threw paint splats on the wall. But it wasn’t until we did this version where you could much more carefully author exactly what you wanted and grow that into something beautiful that we made that connection for players, to feel connected to their artwork.

The other thing that came with that was the ability to paint anywhere. That only came in the last version. This idea that suddenly everyone’s version of the town would be unique and different was where we started connecting it to an environmental aspect as well. Using that ability to paint everywhere and bring some of it back to life came from that. It was a natural fit for the story and the level progression in the game.

GamesBeat: Painting is, by itself, fun for some people. But how to you make painting fun all the time in a game like this?

Robillard: Nobody’s phrased it like that, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, make it fun all the time for everyone. From the moment that we wanted to try to have art as a mechanic, the idea that we would try to make anybody feel like they could be an artist has definitely been our central gameplay fantasy. In terms of how it’s meant to feel, we just knew that if we could use the motion controllers to let anyone make marks and gestures in the wall, and then just get the amount of assistance that the game gives, just the right amount so that it doesn’t feel like it’s doing too much — if you do that, it doesn’t feel like your artwork anymore.

Getting that balance from the gameplay, agency versus assistance, getting it in just the right place, and then having a lot of sophisticated stuff under the hood that layers everything correctly for you, or tries to connect the elements you’re painting together — we draw ground around the things that need ground. There’s a lot of light touches in there that help compose the image for you, but never change it or add too much so you feel like it’s not your artwork.

Above: Concrete Genie has spectacular art.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: It’s hard to mess up your art. It reminds of Spider-Man that way, where it was hard to mess up swinging around.

Sangalli: We wanted to make sure you didn’t feel like you were being penalized for painting the way you want to paint. We’ve seen some kids that just want to paint rainbows all over the entire city. It looks really beautiful, actually. Who are we to judge their paintings?

Robillard: The game never judges you. That’s why we have the light strands, because that’s just to say, “We want you to paint here.” We don’t tell you what to paint or how to paint. We never judge it as good or bad.

Sangalli: We spent a lot of time tuning the city as a palette, so that the paintings really look dynamic. The glow we spent quite a bit of time on, to make sure that they feel like they’re really an allegory for Ash’s imagination. They should be as dynamic as what he would see through his own eyes.

GamesBeat: At some point, I don’t know which act, all of this switches into something ugly and dark. You kind of start with something ugly in the beginning, but you get to darker creatures and stuff like that. Why did you want to make that kind of transition.

Robillard: That transition, that twist at the end, was there from the very first prototype we ever did for this game, all those years ago. We’ve been working on it ever since then. I think what happened when we decided that we were going to try and tackle bullying as a theme — we researched it, and we knew we wanted the finale, the climax of the gameplay and the narrative, to be focused on the darkness, that negativity itself. We wanted a way to synthesize and personify the emotion as a thing that you could tackle and deal with.

We always wanted to get that in there as a way of tackling the negativity, and not about the kids. One thing you’ll see when the game comes out is we do show the backstories of those kids as well, to try to explain some of the reasons why they’ve turned into the kids that they’ve become. That twist is really about keeping it focused on the darkness itself.

GamesBeat: It reminds me of Sea of Solitude, if you’ve seen that.

Robillard: We’ve been following that, but it was released while we were in Europe last week. I can’t wait to play it.

GamesBeat: It’s a unique name. How did you come up with that?

Robillard: It was there from the beginning as well. Originally it was a working title, but we fell in love with it. It does still describe one of the key things in the game, which is the moment when Ash touches the walls and the genies come to life. That was where that came from. It just seemed like — it’s catchy, and we liked it. We became very attached to it.

Credit: Source link

The post How a small team of artists conceived Sony’s Concrete Genie appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/how-a-small-team-of-artists-conceived-sonys-concrete-genie/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-a-small-team-of-artists-conceived-sonys-concrete-genie from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186652375672

[weeklyreviewer]

How a small team of artists conceived Sony’s Concrete Genie

Concrete Genie is a kind of psychological journey, played out on the canvas of a video game. A young artist named Ash escapes his troubles by painting spectacular living landscapes in his abandoned hometown of Denska.

But the neighborhood bullies menace him and ruin his work. Ash’s internal drama is externalized as he fights to restore color to the drab world of Denska.

This heartwarming parable comes from an unlikely game studio, Pixelopus, a small team that has been working for 4.5 years on the title at Sony’s studio in San Mateo, California. I played the action-adventure game, which comes out on October 8 for $30 on the PlayStation 4.

You use the motion controller to paint the world, interacting with dream-like genies who live in the concrete and wood of the walls of Denska. It is a unique art-driven video game where you can express your own creativity. You can also enjoy a virtual reality version with the PlayStation VR.

After the demo, we got a tour of Pixelopus’ offices at Sony’s U.S. game headquarters in San Mateo, California. I interviewed Pixelopus creative director Dominic Robillard and art director Jeff Sangalli about the making of the game. They told me that the idea was born in their art department, from a visual effects artist named Ashwin Kumar. They were tossing around ideas after they shipped Entwined, and they came up with this concept of a young boy artist being bullied. And Sony liked it so much that they let the team run with it, and now here we are.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Concrete Genie creators Jeff Sangalli, art director, (left) and Dominic Robillard, creative director.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: How long have you been working on this now?

Dominic Robillard: We started the very first concept in the beginning of 2015, so four and a half years. Just over four and a half years by the time it comes out.

GamesBeat: Is the VR element part of your work, or is that another team?

Robillard: That’s a different team. We invited some friends of ours to come in a couple of years ago and look at the game. We had wanted to do VR, but at the time we had to make that decision, there were only 12 people on the team. It was too much for us to take on along with everything else that’s in the game. We showed these friends of ours, Jeff and Dave, the game, and they had this awesome pitch for what they would do if they had a chance to work on a VR version. What if I could paint and then step into the painting and go into the world of the genies and paint in 3D all around me in VR?

We loved that so much that we actually managed to hire them and built a small team around them. They’re just around the corner from the studio. They’ve been working on that for about two years now.

GamesBeat: I saw that first last time, the VR version. It looked very different from this more story-based adventure.

Robillard: It’s funny. When you have to describe all the painting in the VR version, it gets a bit confusing. But when you’re painting on the walls in VR, that’s all our tech. As we’ve been building the brushes in the main game, that’s piped through, because we all use Unreal and we share all the tools and the tech. That’s all the same. Also, in the free painting, as you get all the free paint locations in VR, all the brushes you find in the main game are the ones you can use in the VR free paint. It’s connected like that. But stepping into your painting and into the genie world, that’s all the new parts they’ve built, all those 3D VR brushes.

Above: Ash has to deal with the negativity in the town of Denska.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: Are the environments very different than the town you’re in, or where you’re out in the fields?

Robillard: When you’re in the world of the genies? That’s when you’re in their work. If you remember, where you start the VR version, it’s the lighthouse. In the bit you just played, where you picked up the brush, that’s the location where the VR begins. Then you step into their world, essentially. That’s why it looks so different.

GamesBeat: Where did the original idea come from? It seems like the kind of pitch that you couldn’t communicate to somebody in words.

Robillard: You’re on the money. It literally didn’t begin as a traditional pitch. When we finished Entwined, we had a moment to spend some time concepting what we wanted to do next as a team. One of our favorite things about working in small teams is you can have a completely flat hierarchy. We had a chance to say to everyone on the team, “Everyone come up with game ideas for what we want to do next.”

The original idea for Concrete Genie came from Ashwin Kumar, who’s our VFX artist. That’s why he’s called Ash in the game. The first thing he did to communicate this idea was painting a picture of a small boy being bullied and painting these huge characters in a wall. He was imagining that they were sticking up for him. That was the very first beginning. It wasn’t a written document or anything. It was just that picture. This concept — the bullying and the idea of an artist using art to cope with some of the things happening to him — was there from the first moment.

GamesBeat: What influenced how it came to look and play?

Jeff Sangalli: After Ash generated that first piece of artwork, the whole art department started to build imagery around that concept. At the same time we had decided that we would use Unreal as our game engine. We started to use more complex lighting in our concept art, trying to come up with a style that would be more dramatic lighting-wise and have, hopefully, a better emotional connection because of that.

Then we started thinking about — we were all inspired by the lighting in stop motion. We wanted the world to feel handcrafted. We tried to break down what we were responding to about stop motion. That was another big inspiration for the 3D world. That inspired some of the stuff you had a chance to see today: the keyframe animation, the face illustrations. The 2D world was really inspired by children’s book illustration, and by urban artwork as well.

Above: Ash’s face is hand-drawn on a flat piece of paper, and then wrapped around a 3D object.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: Cleaning up the city, is that something like Flower, or other games that are out there?

Robillard: We love all of those games. The other thing that was connected to that, there was an environmental theme in some of the other concepts that we’d developed when we were looking at doing Concrete Genie originally. It was the moment when Jeff and I realized that that group, that team, has a natural instinct for expressing ideas that have a heart or a message or a meaning to them. Every single — we came up with seven or eight different game ideas, and Concrete Genie was one. But all of them had that in there, which was really interesting, that there was this intuition for that from this group of kids. Or I shouldn’t call them kids anymore.

GamesBeat: You mentioned you have a pretty young team, though.

Robillard: Yeah, yeah. Most of that team, this is their first job in the game industry. But there was an environmental theme in one of the other ideas. When we were developing the painting mechanics, of which we did several iterations — the version you just played is the third version of the painting mechanics.

GamesBeat: With the motion controls, being the center of it?

Robillard: That was a part of it. The other versions were interesting, but they didn’t go far enough in terms of expression. We had some basic versions of stenciling. There were ones where you threw paint splats on the wall. But it wasn’t until we did this version where you could much more carefully author exactly what you wanted and grow that into something beautiful that we made that connection for players, to feel connected to their artwork.

The other thing that came with that was the ability to paint anywhere. That only came in the last version. This idea that suddenly everyone’s version of the town would be unique and different was where we started connecting it to an environmental aspect as well. Using that ability to paint everywhere and bring some of it back to life came from that. It was a natural fit for the story and the level progression in the game.

GamesBeat: Painting is, by itself, fun for some people. But how to you make painting fun all the time in a game like this?

Robillard: Nobody’s phrased it like that, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, make it fun all the time for everyone. From the moment that we wanted to try to have art as a mechanic, the idea that we would try to make anybody feel like they could be an artist has definitely been our central gameplay fantasy. In terms of how it’s meant to feel, we just knew that if we could use the motion controllers to let anyone make marks and gestures in the wall, and then just get the amount of assistance that the game gives, just the right amount so that it doesn’t feel like it’s doing too much — if you do that, it doesn’t feel like your artwork anymore.

Getting that balance from the gameplay, agency versus assistance, getting it in just the right place, and then having a lot of sophisticated stuff under the hood that layers everything correctly for you, or tries to connect the elements you’re painting together — we draw ground around the things that need ground. There’s a lot of light touches in there that help compose the image for you, but never change it or add too much so you feel like it’s not your artwork.

Above: Concrete Genie has spectacular art.

Image Credit: Sony

GamesBeat: It’s hard to mess up your art. It reminds of Spider-Man that way, where it was hard to mess up swinging around.

Sangalli: We wanted to make sure you didn’t feel like you were being penalized for painting the way you want to paint. We’ve seen some kids that just want to paint rainbows all over the entire city. It looks really beautiful, actually. Who are we to judge their paintings?

Robillard: The game never judges you. That’s why we have the light strands, because that’s just to say, “We want you to paint here.” We don’t tell you what to paint or how to paint. We never judge it as good or bad.

Sangalli: We spent a lot of time tuning the city as a palette, so that the paintings really look dynamic. The glow we spent quite a bit of time on, to make sure that they feel like they’re really an allegory for Ash’s imagination. They should be as dynamic as what he would see through his own eyes.

GamesBeat: At some point, I don’t know which act, all of this switches into something ugly and dark. You kind of start with something ugly in the beginning, but you get to darker creatures and stuff like that. Why did you want to make that kind of transition.

Robillard: That transition, that twist at the end, was there from the very first prototype we ever did for this game, all those years ago. We’ve been working on it ever since then. I think what happened when we decided that we were going to try and tackle bullying as a theme — we researched it, and we knew we wanted the finale, the climax of the gameplay and the narrative, to be focused on the darkness, that negativity itself. We wanted a way to synthesize and personify the emotion as a thing that you could tackle and deal with.

We always wanted to get that in there as a way of tackling the negativity, and not about the kids. One thing you’ll see when the game comes out is we do show the backstories of those kids as well, to try to explain some of the reasons why they’ve turned into the kids that they’ve become. That twist is really about keeping it focused on the darkness itself.

GamesBeat: It reminds me of Sea of Solitude, if you’ve seen that.

Robillard: We’ve been following that, but it was released while we were in Europe last week. I can’t wait to play it.

GamesBeat: It’s a unique name. How did you come up with that?

Robillard: It was there from the beginning as well. Originally it was a working title, but we fell in love with it. It does still describe one of the key things in the game, which is the moment when Ash touches the walls and the genies come to life. That was where that came from. It just seemed like — it’s catchy, and we liked it. We became very attached to it.

Credit: Source link

The post How a small team of artists conceived Sony’s Concrete Genie appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

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[mi5016natalielam]

Analysis

The purpose of this reflective essay is to discuss the skills and attributes I have for the animation industry and what I need to do in order to pursue my goal in the industry. I will also explain how the module helped me to explore the study of ethics and health and safety.

Firstly, I would like to talk about my skills and attributes. I have developed my own art style. I have tried to make the style to project the feeling of something childish and pure. I think that having a personal style makes me more competitive with other people. The style can help me build a reputation by being more memorable due to its uniqueness. I like using warm colours in my artworks, such as orange and coral pink. I believed that using warm colours can express a happy and energetic feeling to the audience. I created a character called Strange nose in 2014, which was used as inspiration for my logo. Strange nose is a boy who has orange hair, black eyes, and always a wide smile on his face. I have created a Facebook page for “Strange nose”, and attracted a good a number of people who showed appreciation towards my work. The vivid colours, whimsical art style and the patterns in my artwork create an interesting visual to the audiences and makes the work appear more dynamic.

Through this course, I have also found that I am a flexible person. I am willing to make changes to work in response to constructive criticism. I understood that working in the industry is completely different from studying in the university, and that I will be working with different teams and individuals. Customers ideas might change every day, I believe that I am able to take direction and have good communication with the customers. I have worked for Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department last year, and created an opening video for their opening ceremony. At the beginning of the project I introduced them to a storyboard with cute characters in it, and at the beginning, the clients seemed happy with the idea. However, midway through making the animation they have changed their minds, And I had to restart the animation. The final work was a lot simpler than what I originally planned, but the clients were satisfied. This was a precious opportunity for me to prove that I am able to respond to customers based on their opinions.

I always had passion for drawing since I was little. The very first animated movie I watched was One Hundred and One Dalmatians. I really loved the plot and the characters. I had always wondered how animation was created, and as I was getting older I got to research a bit on the process and was very amazed. I was impressed by how traditional hand-drawn animation was made frame by frame. 2D animation was what attracted me to study animation at Northumbria University. In my 1st year, I have created a 2D animation called Papillon for the module 'Introduction for motion graphic'. I was not interested in 3D animation until the second semester, I needed to create a 3D animation for the module 'Introduction for 3D animation'. I realised that creating 3D animation can be very enjoyable too. It felt really magical to be able to model a character or an object from scratch. I also found creating materials and textures interesting. I can adjust the brightness or roughness of the object, and make it look realistic. Which was very useful in another module, ‘Compositing for animation’. I gained knowledge on how to composite 2D and 3D objects with real-life footage. I was also given an opportunity to further develop my personal art style in this module. My career goal in the animation industry is to work on character design, concept art, advertising, and illustration. In order to become a concept artist, I would be required to create designs of characters, environment, and different assets in order to visualise the idea, which is very interesting to me. Darek Zabrocki is one of my favorite concept artist. He works for different companies like DreamWorks, FOX, and Sega. I admire how his works are able to capture the essence of the past, and also build a believable futuristic scene.

In addition, I have a passion for drawing illustrations. My continuous interest in illustrating helped me to develop my drawing skills, design skills and taught me about various things, including colour theory and how to project well my ideas into drawings. I think it is crucial for an illustrator to have an ability to tell a story with their artwork. In order to improve myself in illustrating, I thought of starting to draw comics. I love reading comic books, and I have a preference for physical copies of comics over the online versions. However, the usage of online comic books has been increasing in this decades due to environmental issues and the improvement of technology. Webtoon is a global digital comics service platform. It provides a space for artists all over the world to share their work, and has attracted a lot of readers as well as creators. I think I could start writing comics throughout my summer holiday, as it would help me improve my skills in scriptwriting, storytelling, and narrative writing. One of the advantages of online comics book is that it allows us to put sound effects and animation in it. As I have gotten more knowledgeable and experienced in creating animations and sound effects, I am excited to add some animation into the comics I create. I believe it would allow me to attract more followers and readers that will gain an appreciation for my work.

This module taught me that having followers and links within the industry will help me in finding a job after graduating. We were also encouraged to create an online presence, which is why I have created accounts on Linked in, Instagram, Vimeo, and Facebook. The pages should help me to create connections with people in our field and attract potential clients or employers. These create a great opportunity for me to promote myself for employment in the animation industry. This course also allowed us to meet people from the industry. I got a chance to listen and interact to different speakers every week sharing their experiences and the difficulties they faced in their journey. This allowed me to know better how the animation industry works. James Taylor was one of the guests who came. He is the co-founder of the Arcus studio and when he shared about how their studio works and I grew interested in working for them. Their studio focuses on 2D and motion design. Their works are mainly, really cute and I think that my art style would suit their studio. It would be easier for me to adjust and blend in. It would be great to have an opportunity at working in this company.

Unfortunately, I have found that it is hard for an international student like me to work in the United Kingdom due to the visa problems. A tier 4 visa, would only allow me to work for 20 hours maximum per week. I would need to earn at least thirty thousand pounds per year in order to work in the United Kingdom. There is a very small chance for new graduates to get that high of a salary. That is the reason why I would prefer working in Asian countries rather than European countries. I would not need to face the visa problems and any language barriers.

This module also has made me more aware of the health, ethics and safety in the workplace. Carpal tunnel syndrome is a very common illness among animators and illustrators. I got serious neck and back pain recently because I always sitting in front of the computer. I learnt that it is important to have time to exercise and avoid overtime work to prevent myself from getting ill. Mental health is really important too, artists usually express themselves only by art, and they get limited social interactions with people, and this is very unhealthy. To prevent from getting depressed, it is nice to have time to communicate with friends and family.

Furthermore, It is very important to understand ethics such as equality of gender, race, and sexuality. I have seen animations with bad character design which have made me feel uncomfortable. For example, ‘Scrub Me Mama With A Boogie Beat’, the black people in the animation got big thick lips and were

made to look like monkeys, which is wrongful stereotyping of African-American people . I think that as an animation producer, we have got responsibilities to respect every person’s culture, beliefs, skin colour, and sexuality. ‘Class of 3000’ is a good example of how culture and race and current society could healthily intermingle together. There are different races and genders involved, characters are each talented in their own way and play an important role within their school band.

In conclusion, this module has taught me how to prepare my portfolio, showreel, and Cvs in order to get into a company in the future. It also made me realise and think about what I want to become in the animation industry. This let me focus on the content of my future work, so that I could better prepare more for the job. My awareness on health and ethics and safety also improved because of this module. I now definitely think more about ethical problems before making the animation and designing the character. Lastly, I learned to prevent myself from overworking, and allow some time to communicate more with friends in order to have a healthy lifestyle.

[barbosaasouza]

Super Mario World 2 ROM

Yoshi takes control over the game

Even the most proficient gamers all around the world must have been once excited for playing the Mario game. It’s almost like their gaming experience started with the Mario. It had been a trendsetter for the side-scrolling platform games. A free download of our Super Mario world 2 rom will take gaming to the next level.

The victory of these games had encouraged many other companies to come up with their very own 2D platform games. Starting from the very first game in the series it kept on evolving with more advanced features. The graphics continued to entertain the fans of Mario games.

When the advanced gaming consoles have been invented, the creators started coming up with versions that are supported in those consoles. The Super Mario world 2 rom is the sequel of the famous Super Mario World.

The origin

The sequel name as Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island released in 1995.

This game was developed by Nintendo just like its prequel for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In this game, hand-drawn style of graphics was implemented instead of the computer pre-rendered graphics.

This style was initiated by the creator Shigeru Miyamoto. After its first release in Japan, it was released worldwide after two months. The special effects of this game were powered by Super FX2 microchip.

Just like its prequel, this game is an immediate hit. It holds a selling record of over four million copies worldwide. Especially the new design of this game has garnered so many positive reviews encouraging the developers.

Some critics called it as one of the most loved SNES of all time and referred it as a masterpiece. Later, the game was rereleased several versions to support the advanced consoles. Those consoles include the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3Ds, and the Wii U virtual console.

Development

The idea of creating a sequel sprouted up on the creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s mind while he was working on the Super Mario World itself. While he came up with the new character Yoshi, he decided to make it the sequel’s hero.

This sequel had been under the development for nearly four years that served well on improving the game’s features by including a lot of magic tricks. They included an extra chip in the game’s cartridge to enable the rotation of the game and also for the other special effects that include changing of the game’s sprites.

This game is enriched in graphics and it can be noted in various scenes like the fall of the drawbridge in one of the scenes.

The plot and gameplay

Just like its prequel, this game also contains a strong and intriguing storyline. Since the previous game had introduced this character Yoshi to support the Mario and Luigi, the Yoshi became the main playable character in this game.

The game progresses as the Yoshi takes the Baby Mario through around 48 challenging levels. He has to handover him to his brother Luigi as he was imprisoned by the villain Kamek. Each level passes with Yoshi solving the challenging puzzles and destroy the enemies coming his way.

Each level consists of a different colored Yoshi. And at the end of each level he will hand over the baby Mario to the other Yoshi. And that Yoshi will take control of Mario from there until the end of the level.

48 Levels

It continues through all the forty-eight levels. Yoshi confronts the enemies by using its tongue to capture them and put them in its mouth. Just like the previous game, it can use the shell to shoot the enemies. In addition to that it could swallow them to turn them into an egg. That egg can be used for an attack at a certain angle that would even bounce off walls to attack the enemies on the other side.

Well, the Yoshi can carry up to six eggs at a time. In this game, Yoshi would also eat watermelons on its way to shoot the seeds at the enemies. The creators have introduced a flutter jump in this game that would enable Yoshi to jump to a long distance by kicking on the mid-air. This jump can also be used for a downward attack on the enemies.

Mission of the Game

The mission of this game is to safely escort the baby Mario to his brother Luigi. And when Yoshi is attacked by an enemy, the baby Mario will fly in the air wrapped in an air bubble. As he slowly floats away on air, a timer will run and if Yoshi fails to recover Mario within the timer stops then he loses a life as Mario is captured by the Koopas.

Initially, the timing to save the baby Mario is ten seconds and the Yoshi could collect stars to increase the timing count on the timer. When Yoshi accidentally falls into the pits or come into contact with sharp spikes or lava, he will lose a life then and there.

And all through the game Yoshi would encounter several obstacles and enemies that increase the difficulty level of the game gradually. As much as the difficulties, there are lots of additional power-ups available in this game just like the Starman.

Super Baby Mario

When Yoshi collects the starman on certain levels, the baby Mario will get transformed into a Super Baby Mario that is undefeatable for some time.

When it happens, the players can take control of that Super Baby Mario and cross the certain distance of the level without difficulty. On certain places that can’t be passed, Yoshi turns into a helicopter or a digger for a short period and cross that area.

In super Mario world 2 rom, each world consists of eight challenging levels. And the players would confront boss villains in every fourth and eighth level of a world. Each level consists of twenty red coins and five flowers. The red coins are hidden throughout the level.

Bonus Levels

Players try to land on the open flower jumping through the end gate. They do that because they get to play bonus levels. There they would collect extra lives and some bonus items that are used to facilitate the gameplay.

For example, a magnifying glass will help the player to find the location of the red coins that are hidden. Depending on the number of flowers and red coins a player manages to collect throughout the level and the number of stars remaining, their final score is calculated.

If a player completes all the levels in the world with a total score of 100 then additional two levels are unlocked in the world. The character Yoshi gained a massive response among the gamers.

Yoshi Island

And the Yoshi Island was almost considered as the successor of the Donkey Kong Country game. The fame of Yoshi led to several other games that used Yoshi as the protagonist.

At first, the Nintendo’s ‘Yoshi‘s story’ failed to attract gamers on contrast to the expectations. Then Nintendo came up with several other spinoffs based on Yoshi. But most of the games that followed the Yoshi’s Island somewhat failed to uplift the ability of Yoshi in their games.

For example, Artoon came up with a sequel to the Yoshi’s Island titled Yoshi’s Island 2. The game was based on the same story as the Yoshi’s Island game that the Yoshi has to escort the babies. Here, a lot of baby characters were added that incredibly suppressed the ability of the Yoshi when compared to the babies with special powers.

Not Multi-Player

This game is not a multiplayer like its prequel. Its unique hand-drawn graphics, the intriguing storyline, and the sublime gameplay made it a real masterpiece. Critics have been praising it for years.

Again the real success behind the game was the captivating character, Yoshi. It also holds the record of being the last 2D game designed for the home consoles. It remained so until the creation of New Super Mario Bros. that has been developed fourteen years later for the Wii virtual console.

Download the Super Mario World 2 ROM files now and have fun!

The post Super Mario World 2 ROM appeared first on Mario ROM.

Super Mario World 2 ROM published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[superworldrom]

Super Mario World 2 ROM

Yoshi takes control over the game

Even the most proficient gamers all around the world must have been once excited for playing the Mario game. It’s almost like their gaming experience started with the Mario. It had been a trendsetter for the side-scrolling platform games. A free download of our Super Mario world 2 rom will take gaming to the next level.

The victory of these games had encouraged many other companies to come up with their very own 2D platform games. Starting from the very first game in the series it kept on evolving with more advanced features. The graphics continued to entertain the fans of Mario games.

When the advanced gaming consoles have been invented, the creators started coming up with versions that are supported in those consoles. The Super Mario world 2 rom is the sequel of the famous Super Mario World.

The origin

The sequel name as Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island released in 1995.

This game was developed by Nintendo just like its prequel for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In this game, hand-drawn style of graphics was implemented instead of the computer pre-rendered graphics.

This style was initiated by the creator Shigeru Miyamoto. After its first release in Japan, it was released worldwide after two months. The special effects of this game were powered by Super FX2 microchip.

Just like its prequel, this game is an immediate hit. It holds a selling record of over four million copies worldwide. Especially the new design of this game has garnered so many positive reviews encouraging the developers.

Some critics called it as one of the most loved SNES of all time and referred it as a masterpiece. Later, the game was rereleased several versions to support the advanced consoles. Those consoles include the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3Ds, and the Wii U virtual console.

Development

The idea of creating a sequel sprouted up on the creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s mind while he was working on the Super Mario World itself. While he came up with the new character Yoshi, he decided to make it the sequel’s hero.

This sequel had been under the development for nearly four years that served well on improving the game’s features by including a lot of magic tricks. They included an extra chip in the game’s cartridge to enable the rotation of the game and also for the other special effects that include changing of the game’s sprites.

This game is enriched in graphics and it can be noted in various scenes like the fall of the drawbridge in one of the scenes.

The plot and gameplay

Just like its prequel, this game also contains a strong and intriguing storyline. Since the previous game had introduced this character Yoshi to support the Mario and Luigi, the Yoshi became the main playable character in this game.

The game progresses as the Yoshi takes the Baby Mario through around 48 challenging levels. He has to handover him to his brother Luigi as he was imprisoned by the villain Kamek. Each level passes with Yoshi solving the challenging puzzles and destroy the enemies coming his way.

Each level consists of a different colored Yoshi. And at the end of each level he will hand over the baby Mario to the other Yoshi. And that Yoshi will take control of Mario from there until the end of the level.

48 Levels

It continues through all the forty-eight levels. Yoshi confronts the enemies by using its tongue to capture them and put them in its mouth. Just like the previous game, it can use the shell to shoot the enemies. In addition to that it could swallow them to turn them into an egg. That egg can be used for an attack at a certain angle that would even bounce off walls to attack the enemies on the other side.

Well, the Yoshi can carry up to six eggs at a time. In this game, Yoshi would also eat watermelons on its way to shoot the seeds at the enemies. The creators have introduced a flutter jump in this game that would enable Yoshi to jump to a long distance by kicking on the mid-air. This jump can also be used for a downward attack on the enemies.

Mission of the Game

The mission of this game is to safely escort the baby Mario to his brother Luigi. And when Yoshi is attacked by an enemy, the baby Mario will fly in the air wrapped in an air bubble. As he slowly floats away on air, a timer will run and if Yoshi fails to recover Mario within the timer stops then he loses a life as Mario is captured by the Koopas.

Initially, the timing to save the baby Mario is ten seconds and the Yoshi could collect stars to increase the timing count on the timer. When Yoshi accidentally falls into the pits or come into contact with sharp spikes or lava, he will lose a life then and there.

And all through the game Yoshi would encounter several obstacles and enemies that increase the difficulty level of the game gradually. As much as the difficulties, there are lots of additional power-ups available in this game just like the Starman.

Super Baby Mario

When Yoshi collects the starman on certain levels, the baby Mario will get transformed into a Super Baby Mario that is undefeatable for some time.

When it happens, the players can take control of that Super Baby Mario and cross the certain distance of the level without difficulty. On certain places that can’t be passed, Yoshi turns into a helicopter or a digger for a short period and cross that area.

In super Mario world 2 rom, each world consists of eight challenging levels. And the players would confront boss villains in every fourth and eighth level of a world. Each level consists of twenty red coins and five flowers. The red coins are hidden throughout the level.

Bonus Levels

Players try to land on the open flower jumping through the end gate. They do that because they get to play bonus levels. There they would collect extra lives and some bonus items that are used to facilitate the gameplay.

For example, a magnifying glass will help the player to find the location of the red coins that are hidden. Depending on the number of flowers and red coins a player manages to collect throughout the level and the number of stars remaining, their final score is calculated.

If a player completes all the levels in the world with a total score of 100 then additional two levels are unlocked in the world. The character Yoshi gained a massive response among the gamers.

Yoshi Island

And the Yoshi Island was almost considered as the successor of the Donkey Kong Country game. The fame of Yoshi led to several other games that used Yoshi as the protagonist.

At first, the Nintendo’s ‘Yoshi‘s story’ failed to attract gamers on contrast to the expectations. Then Nintendo came up with several other spinoffs based on Yoshi. But most of the games that followed the Yoshi’s Island somewhat failed to uplift the ability of Yoshi in their games.

For example, Artoon came up with a sequel to the Yoshi’s Island titled Yoshi’s Island 2. The game was based on the same story as the Yoshi’s Island game that the Yoshi has to escort the babies. Here, a lot of baby characters were added that incredibly suppressed the ability of the Yoshi when compared to the babies with special powers.

Not Multi-Player

This game is not a multiplayer like its prequel. Its unique hand-drawn graphics, the intriguing storyline, and the sublime gameplay made it a real masterpiece. Critics have been praising it for years.

Again the real success behind the game was the captivating character, Yoshi. It also holds the record of being the last 2D game designed for the home consoles. It remained so until the creation of New Super Mario Bros. that has been developed fourteen years later for the Wii virtual console.

Download the Super Mario World 2 ROM files now and have fun!

The post Super Mario World 2 ROM appeared first on Mario ROM.