Whenever we participate in a game jam, one of the core aspects people always compliment us on is on polish. With the release of Woofice Chair! those compliments came back around and we are very proud of receiving them again!
But what is this dark magical art that people call polish? And what about juice? While both are regarded as something to highlight in jam games, we believe polish is deeply connected with gameplay. Polish not only helps give a game a more complete-feel, but also helps making gameplay more satisfying to the player!
Welcome to my pep talk, fellow jammers. I’m Moski, Whales And Games’ lead artist andI made the artwork for our team’spark protecting game Woofice Chair!
For this Ludum Dare, we assembled a team of four. Two programmers, from Portugal and Brazil, an audio composer currently in the UK, and me, the graphics artist, from Mexico. For three days, we poured our hearts, soul and sweat into making what started as an inside joke about dogs and office chairs into an actual game. That meant, for me, three days of constant work and arm pressure!
But I’ve got a confession to make regarding how I made art for the game. I did not touch the game until a day after it was finished and submitted. Yet, I worked with the team fluidly, like a well oiled and battle-tested machine. This comes as a result of a long time of mutual understanding, following certain guidelines and experience.
I want to make this quick, simple and digestible, so let’s quickly go through some things that have helped my team iterate and implement things fast enough. Whatever your role is in the team, this may be of use to you, and it can help pack and polish as much as possible during a jam!
Teamwork boils down to Communication! 💬
If you’re in a team, you need active communication between each other. It may sound obvious, but you may want to take a moment to think if you’re in the same channel as your teammates! Talk about when to cooperate and when to coordinate!
Our team is all over the world and are busy or sleeping at different times, meaning we need to know what everyone needs from each other as early as possible. Sure, you’ll talk about what the game will be about during the first hours, but the artist’s interpretation of the assets can be very different from the programmer’s plans.
It’s important, then, to only start actually working in the production of the game when there’s a proper agreement of what’s actually being done. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time making assets or concepts that won’t get used or don’t match the rest of the team’s vision.
Our team tends to make very quick ugly doodles to demonstrate what we’re brainstorming. This tends to include perspective, mock up of characters, gameplay screens, mechanics, and so on. These help immediately establish a vision across the team and which leads to my next point.
Total trust! Delegate and have faith! 🐕
Once everyone is on the same page, stay communicated, and share files around as they’re needed. In my role as the artist, my first assets tend to be placeholders for the bare minimum necessary that would allow the programmers to experiment with mechanics and playing area of the game. Simultaneously, they give me feedback on the things that are needed, like the resolution of the assets, the camera size of the area I’ll be drawing, and so on!
But when this inevitably happens and people need to go to work or bed, those that are still available should still have the tools necessary to continue working. Once we had the basic assets, I had the opportunity to work on more dogs, more weapons, more enemies, make changes to the map and even make some UI with little to no input from the other members. Since drawing was my sole role, it meant three days of doing just that.
However, remember that you’re working with a team. Mind other people’s needs and skills, and adjust accordingly. Preferably, make some rules and protocols!
Some mild organization goes a long way in teamwork! 🗃️
There’s really very little time to work with during a Ludum Dare. You should use the opportunity to develop your skills and learn methodologies! With some agreements about file names, adjusting assets to constant sizes and organization, you can save on time that would otherwise be used in tweaking, fixing and finding files!
Our team was able to easily add the assets into the game and tweak them without issues because of our consistency and methodologies. Most files were properly named, organized and sent in batches. All the sprite sheets of the same category had the same size for the panels and canvas. We knew what UI assets we’d need since we’ve done this before. We’ve found out that we can do a lot more when we have basic discipline.
This discipline is learned with time and practice! As you participate in more jams, you’ll find better ways to organize your archives, make folders, share them with your group, and adapt to whichever project is pursued. Talk constantly with your team, learn what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll soon find out that you’re doing plenty of the tasks without even thinking about them!
Working multiple times with the same team has its merits! 👷♂️
There are merits to learning to adapt to different teams. Experimenting is always a good thing! But knowing the people you’re working with is also a fantastic experience and can go long ways! This goes beyond getting along, having fun or synergy. Actually knowing how others work already helps a lot with avoiding common team-struggles, and helps push the project even further.
For example, I know what my team is looking for when they need animations, or when they need particles, elements for UI, the project resolution, and many more. In the same vein, they know the kind of assets I can make, how I can deliver them, how to ask me for tweaks in small mistakes and the like. I didn’t need to play the game to see if my assets would work because I know what to send them to experiment with. In bigger projects, I may need to have a direct input on how things are being used, but on jam games, this connection with the team works great!
But one may think, a bigger team should be able to make a bigger project, right? Well, not necessarily.
Too-many-cooks syndrome! 🍳
Our team of four has done wonders. I’ve even experimented with another short team at one point and had a great time! But the one time I joined a larger team, things didn’t go so well.
Communication is very important in teamwork, but it’s more difficult to manage on larger teams! I thought that a big number of programmers with plenty of artists would result in a lot of artwork being made and implemented. However, there were clashing styles, mixed ideas and people went missing for long periods.
I’d recommend being practical and sticking to a smaller team for jam games! While a big group can make a lot more content independently, when put together, there can be a lot of miscommunication, overlapping and it becomes harder to control scope. To some, working with bigger teams may be fantastic, but I would suggest sticking to smaller ones for your first few jams!
Wrapping this post up! 💪
This was likely the jam where I had the best balance of quality and quantity of assets, and it was only possible because of fantastic teamwork, mild organization and methodologies!
I believe that these things I’ve mentioned before can do wonders to you regardless of your role in the team. Not everyone needs to be doing everything and constantly supervising at all times. There may be moments when “all hands-on deck” may be necessary, but constantly needing everyone’s input will reduce everyone’s independence!
While this post was more about team experience rather than my usual actual art insight, I’ve posted in the past about artwork design before! Consider giving them a look!
Now that it’s all said and done, in behalf of my team, Whales And Games, I would like to invite you to hang out with us at our Discord server! Come share your game, your experiences, and maybe prepare for the spookiest time of the year! Cheers! 🐳
Welcome to Goodboi Park! A dog haven so good that it’ll make the best friend of man bark for the park! In fact, it’s so good that it even attracts the wrong audience. I swear, those body-builders really are a pain in the tail.
But the park is not without its defenders!Hoop, Lupe and Carlare up to the challenge! And since Goodboi Park so happens to be next to an office chair disposal, they’re not without mighty chariots!
So pick a pal, get on the chair, and spin faster than a dog can chase its tail! Throw your very buff enemies for a loop!
Our team had a great time making this game happen. As we always like to do during Ludum Dare season, Woofice Chair! is playable in Windows/Mac/Linux and Web, so you can pretty much play it anyway!Make sure to take it for a spin!
For those of you that participated in Ludum Dare, and would like to leave a comment or rate the game, you can check our game’s page there as well!
If you wanna hang out, chat or share your games, be sure to give our Discord server a visit!Cheers! 🐳
Hey there! It’s hard to believe that this year passed so fast that we have already participated in an Art Fight event again!
Just like last year, we want to offer some artist insight, and since I, Moski, am the lead artist that’s in charge of the art-side of things around here. I’ll be telling you all about Whales And Games’ participation in Art Fight 2020!
In last year’s post-mortem, we explained what the Art Fight event is, our reasoning to participate and our overall experience taking part in it. But things changed a lot with Whales And Games since last year, which in turn affected how spicy things got this past July! Let’s get into it and see, shall we?
Starting from the top and recapping from last year, Art Fight is an event where artists get selected into one of two different teams, submit their own original characters and score points for their team by drawing characters belonging to artists from the rival team. It’s two teams drawing characters from each other for a whole month, which results in one of the most wholesome art-trading wars that you can participate in on the internet!
‘Y2K’ by Akumanorobin
This time around, since we wanted to take the opportunity to wrap up some of the ideas from Whales And Games and Bunny Copulation, we decided to participate in the event by updating our character sheets as well as creating some new ones for characters from both brands. I also wanted to improve my skill on my new drawing program of choice, Clip Studio Paint, which I had recently switched to from Krita for both promotional and game artwork.
At some point, we thought about a twist to wrap up the event and, well, things went off the rails in the best way possible, merging both our artwork and game development prowess together!
In this year’s edition of Art Fight, the teams to choose from were between Sugarand Spice. I opted to draw under the flag of Spice out of preference, and, before I knew it, I was creating art left and right!
Character Sheets and Artwork! Just the usual…?
For Art Fight 2020, we wanted to update a lot of our characters to properly reflect how we’ve evolved since our first participation. Last year, we had plenty of sheets for people to draw built from previous promotional and game art, but we hid them all at the beginning of the event to make new versions of them.
These new versions, featuring completely original new art created just for these sheets, took a lot longer than expected, eating away the first two weeks of the event. However, despite the delay, they allowed us to introduce some brand new and freshened up designs for several of our mascot characters!Whalechan and Dapperchan are now officially looking nicer and dapper than ever!
Once we finished the character sheets, it was finally time for me to create some awesome art. Since we needed to make up for the time lost, we decided to start strong, picking characters from pending revenges from last year and bookmarks (found by randomly hopping around users) that we thought looked striking. My first piece of art featured an animated background, and as soon as we uploaded the attack, we started getting attacked as well, which was great! We liked the final result of the first attack so much, we made it a goal to animate every attack from there on out.
‘Y2K’ by Akumanorobin, ‘Mr. Crow’ by Kun (Ceshoh), ‘Prisma’ by Greteh and ‘Ahvi’ by Wearepopcandies
Halfway through the event, we had finished 6 attacks. We roughly had around 15 by the same time in the previous year. I originally intended to continue making standalone artwork until we were done, but then, we had a wild idea.
Art Fight Duel, an actual playable game?!
As we were midway through the event, we conceptualized an actual playable card game based on Art Fight. Art Fight Duel, with a pitch document written and all.
I didn’t sleep that night. It was just the perfect mix of, well, everything! We’re game developers and artists, it was a game that involved both Art and Fighting, it could feature over a dozen artists, put some of our own characters into a new game, and it could be just the thing we needed to reignite our game development spirit!
From the moment we had the concept down, we decided to make the game rather than to continue making artwork for several reasons:
A game jam sounded like a very innovative idea for the event, since it’s usually reserved for finite pieces of artwork. Turns out, it was very novel, since more people made games about Art Fight this year too.
The game pitched card game mechanics mixed with auto-battler mechanics. This resulted in the possibility to add as many characters as we could and putting them in a setting where they were actually fighting. Thematically, it made perfect sense with the event.
It made use of a lot of concepts from the history of the event. Art Fight Duel is team based, just like its namesake. We also added affinities based on previous event themes and a few nods to things that are well known by the event’s community and past participants.
We had the opportunity to put some of our new character sheets to use. Finally, we were able to give Whalechan (and Dapperchan) a proper participation in a game!
‘Dapperchan’ by WhalesAndGames, ‘Ricket‘ by Nights2Dreams and ‘Penny‘ by CuckyUncle
The execution of the development didn’t go flawlessly, but the result speaks for itself. By spending every single day of what was left of the event in developing the game, we managed to feature 20 artists, with animated sprites for all the 24 featured characters. We took heavily into consideration their designs and bios when creating their sprites, attacks and stats.
We submitted the first version of the game in the last two minutes before Art Fight was over. No stress! After the event, we spent some extra weeks tweaking and adding in audio, a proper title screen and our usual settings and credits, bringing the game right up to our jam-standard!
Art Insight, Learning and Results
We wrapped up Art Fight, and I was finally convinced that switching from one drawing program (Krita) to another (Clip Studio Paint) was the best thing to do at this point in my artist career.
‘Hoshiri’,‘Jax’ and ‘Makuru’by PurplePlatypus73
While I didn’t learn as much as last year, I still tried to innovate in my style in some aspects:
Layer Clipping – There are many methods to mask and group across different drawing programs. Due to the limited time, I needed one that could be easily organized and managed quickly. In Krita, I used Alpha Inheritance to create shadows, but it required pesky layer management. In Clip Studio Paint, Layer Clipping does similar results in a more simple fashion.
Airbrushing–I had practised with airbrushes before, but I wanted to experiment with it here too, with great results. Turns out they get along great with Layer Clipping and help give a nice-finish oomph to my pieces!
CSP’s Asset Library – My new drawing program comes with a community-driven marketplace where people can create tools and assets. In a few situations, I wanted to make use of some brushes from there, and so I learned how to properly download and install them.
Masking– Similar to Alpha Inheritance and Layer Clipping, Masking allowed me to work with each artwork in non-destructive ways, delimiting the areas where some layers could be visible. While one would think that they’re all just different ways of doing the same thing, it turns out that combining either of the two with Masking allows for fantastic results.
Special Layers – For some pieces, I needed to experiment with things that I could easily do in Krita which I had not been able to replicate on CSP yet.
One of those was halftones. While not the same, I found out that CSP has full functionality for Tone Layers, which allows making layers filled with simple patterns and which helped me create some fancy effects.
I also learned about Object Layers, which are like Photoshop’s equivalent to Smart Objects. These allowed me to put files in a layer and be able to resize them without destroying their properties.
‘Mr. Crow’by Kun (Ceshoh)
Beyond Art into Game Development!
Beyond the standalone artworks, Art Fight Duel represented equal opportunities to learn differently. It helped me understand things I could do better on Krita before, like the character sprites and the use of mirroring tools. However, I did end up using pretty much the same techniques for the duration of the development, as there were not as many opportunities to try new styles.
Aside from its artistic point of view, there are some takeaways to explore too when it comes to the development of the game. While we had previously discussed considering making a game for Art Fight, it didn’t become a serious consideration until late into the event. Yet, once we got started, we couldn’t stop.
We did as much good to Art Fight Duel as it did to us. It had been a long time since we last made a short self-contained game, and it felt fresh to go back to that.We chose a genre we have never challenged and went with mechanics we had never used. Since Art Fight is an endless ocean of characters, designs and concepts, we rarely had troubles in finding any particular thing that could fit any of our design’s needs.
As a result, Art Fight Duel became one of our most ambitious games, mixing strategy, fast-based mechanics, a distinctive style, and plenty of cards. Plenty of the people who had their character featured in the game have been pleasantly surprised. Given the circumstances, we’d say that the game was quite popular among the social circle it was made for, and it has plenty of opportunities to grow!
However, since it had been a while since we last developed a short self-contained game, we heavily under-estimated the implementation of some features. As a result, we had to spend some extra weeks following the end of Art Fight implementing quality-of-life inclusions such as settings and audio without otherwise would make the game feel lackluster.
With us participating in Ludum Dare 47 in the coming week, and with Bunny Splash Casino resuming development, it’s important we take these short-comings into consideration, and make sure we prepare in advance. For example, features such as re-usablesettings menus can be prepared ahead of time of the event to avoid spending precious jam time adding basic quality-of-life features.
Numerical Feels-Good
Spending so long in making character sheets and changing gears from making artwork to making a game jeopardized our opportunity to receive cool artwork a bit, and ended up receiving less artwork than last year. However, the game was fantastically received to the point that it even got featured!
Aside from that, and just like last year, there are still numerical results we’d like to evaluate, and which help us gauge our participation and performance in the event:
My account has 1124 followers at the time of this post. It had 401 last year, so that’s a massive leap! It helps that this year we knew about the event in advance, which allowed us to network ahead of time.
This year, I made 6 drawings and one Mass Attack in the form of Art Fight Duel. Last year, I made 26 drawings. While I had less to show than last year, all of it was animated, and the game was a great success!
We updated 6 of our 12 character sheets from last year. Aside from that, we finally closed-off Whalechan’s new design, formalized Dapperchan and showcased a bunch of new Bunny Copulation designs!
We received 42 defences. That’s lower than last year’s 60. This is the result of roughly being “active” for a lot less than last year, since we were busy with the character sheets and the game. But the notoriety of making the game should cause some interest in 2021!
Of those 42 defences, the Whalechan redesign was the most popular, getting 15 defences, with Buns Buns following second at 11 defenses.
Bluessom triumphed over Jazzy this year, with 5 versus 3 defenses.
While other participants were quick to fall-to-love with Whalechan’s new design, Dapperchan still needs to warm up to people, as she only got 3 defenses overall.
Some characters which we didn’t even do new sheets for, such as Caffie and Mr. Woofman, got 1 defense too!
‘Dapperchan’ by Orange-Kiwi, ‘Whalechan’ by Tianmasaki, ‘Buns Buns’by Minimep, ‘Cheqmate’ by Reinsroom, ‘Autumn Whalechan’ by Amuerion, ‘Cheqmate’ by Sosha, ‘Whalechan’ by Akumanorobin and ‘Jazzy’ by Sckookum
Feelings and Emotions
While the experience overall was fantastic, Art Fight occurred in a very tumultuous moment for us. At times, it was difficult to grasp that the expectations and the reality didn’t match up perfectly. However, it was also proof that some of the best things in life are not really planned, and that even when plans don’t match expectations, one can have a great time.
‘Prisma’ by Wearepopcandies
Last year, I came to the conclusion that I really enjoyed drawing characters. And I still do, perhaps even more, but the experience came around with the idea that I’ve also got to grow in maturity. The novelty of having this brand-new event was gone, and we needed to up the ante. This resulted in us participating in the event as if it was a self-imposed opportunity, and wanting to make the most out of it across character sheets, thumbnails, animation and even a game. Rather than treating Art Fight as a leisure, as we probably should have, we ended up feeling fatigued as the days went by.
However, doing art leisurely or for the sake of improvement are not necessarily contradictory statements. The saying says “find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life”. I’d say that’s partially true, but one has to also cope with things like health and fatigue, and adjust accordingly. But even when things go dire, I really do like drawing. I may be older than the average participant and have been doing art since my teens, but drawing fun, interesting characters is still part of my DNA.
Final Remarks
Applying my artistic skills to make an actual game really opened up the possibilities of what I, and we can do during Art Fight. Regardless of making regular artwork, animations or even games, it’s important to play to one’s strengths at times, but also to take risks in others. I don’t feel so bad about having missed out on doing more character artwork when I see that people really enjoyed playing the game.
‘Ahvi’by Greteh
We have evaluated the possibility of making it a tradition to update Art Fight Duel every year, with new mechanics, adding content to match the new themes, and, of course, even more characters from more artists! We still need to make more character sheets, and, if things go right, we’ll be plenty busy with Bunny Splash Casino alongside it. For now, we’ll wait and see, but it’d be a fantastic time to update it going forward!
‘Whalechan and Polite Whale’ by Sweetkooky, ‘Bluessom’ by Mantiskin, ‘Buns Buns’ by HammyandFriends and ‘Whalechan’ by Esmahasakazoo
For the time being, I’ve got a whole year ahead of me to further polish my skills so that, if I do join Art Fight next year, I am even better than I was this year! Even if fatigue or personal worries get in the way, I still see myself creating artwork for the foreseeable future and I’ll do my best to enjoy it.
That will be something to look forward to! For now however, we have to prepare for Ludum Dare 47, and the challenges our new commercial projects bring us! Thank you for reading and I hope you join us along for the ride!Cheers! 🐳
It’s been practically a month since our Discord Server’s Creative Festival server event has ended! Before we celebrated everyone’s creative efforts, we wanted to properly finish-up and release Art Fight Duel, and while it took us a while, now it’s the time to commemorate the end of the festival and our high-scoring Creative Champions for 2020! 🏆
The Creative Festival has been our most successful server event yet, clocking at 37 participants and a community total of 618 points, with all participants keeping a permanent Creative Initiator 🎨 role on the server! 11 participants also made it to at least 20 points,and will keep an additional permanent Creative Hero 🏆 role!
However, four participants raised the stakes even higher and scored a whopping-total of 54 points across all the event, leading to an incredible four-tie! Huge congratulations to Dark, NoovaMulticolors, Tanooki Jon and VampyrOfSwords for being our Creative Champions for 2020 🥇!
Nevertheless, we felt it’d be a bit disheartening to miss the champion commendations for a mere 1-2 points of difference. As such, we also want to congrats Pinballkittyfor the 2nd Place 🥈 at 53 points, and Esmahasakazoofor the 3rd Place 🥉 at 52 points!
All these six members, beyond receiving these incredibly-neat digital art trophies, will get the perk of having a unique color-customizable role up until the end of next year’s festival!Creative Champions for 2020 will also have the additional perk of being pinned to the top of the server (just underneath Server Boosters) as well! Wowie! 🖌️
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this big creative-season! There’s a lot we have to learn from this first Creative Festival and community-server-activity, but it was incredibly fun to organize! Bellow you can find a gallery of some of our favourite highlights (of many) that were submitted for the event, and the final leaderboard with all the participants and points on it!
Thank you to everyone that has participated, and we look forward to surprising you with events like these on our Discord Server, as well as our upcoming games! Cheers! 🐳
