Alternalien Planning Part 8: Midterms

Midterms have arrived once again, stressing everyone out.  I have been sick with a cough and congestion, and part of me thinks that it's aggravated by the stress of midterms.  We were told that if continue to get questions wrong with Agile, we would be re-rolled, which means that we'll have to retake the whole program, starting again with freshmen courses.  If I get these questions wrong, I'll probably get re-rolled, or worse, my whole team will get re-rolled.

Alternalien Planning Part 7: Sick Days

I was out sick today because of a really bad bug that's been going around the school.  There's not much else to report as I finished with the all the task assigned to me this week.  Here's some art for this game that I worked on.

Alternalien Planning Part 6: Frozen

After I finished with Temper's hot form, I was asked to finish the animations of his cold form as well.  The animations for the icy Temper are much easier because they don't have many moving parts.  I edited the original animations by recoloring them and adding ice spikes instead of flames.  The whole process took less than an hour, it's more efficient this way than creating a new sprite from scratch. Don't work hard, work smart.

Alternalien Planning Part 5: Extra Spicy

I've begun to work on the animations for the Temper alien.  Temper is an alien that can control the temperature of its body, either becoming a fiery ball of plasma, or a frozen popsicle.  It was originally concepted that all the aliens would be able to level up their abilities, the Temper could turn into ice, the Sumo could become weightless.  This idea, however, was scrapped early on for scope.  But the Temperature's ice form lives on as a relic from this early period of development.

The original character design and sprite were done by Jose Flores, I did the keyframes and tweens.

Alternalien Development Part 4: The Sundering

Today I was officially demoted by the rest of the team.  I was acting like a Product Owner when I wasn't one, so I officially stripped of my title as CEO of the company.
I don't necessarily agree with this decision, because while I do admit I was acting like the PO, I wasn't warned about this.  This was a sudden demotion that completely took me off guard.  Second, I me acting as a PO doesn't equate to being a terrible CEO, Chief Executive Officer and Product Owner are two different positions, one being a product development leader and the other being the head of a company.  Both are leadership positions, but have entirely different job duties.

Other than that I worked on a thumbnail for a what a jungle level might look like.

Alternalien Planning Part 3: Labor Day

Although we had the day off, I continued to work on the Art Bible that I was developing.  It mostly consists of various pixel art techniques.

I also have the whole art team studying Super Mario World sprites, and replicating them so that they can get a better understanding of pixel art.

Alternalien Planning Part 2: The Cave

I decided to paint a cave background for the arctic levels.  Its purpose was to hep me estimate how long and how much effort it would take me to create a background for the level of detail the PO asked for.

I determined that this style of background was impractical for many reasons.  First, it was way too big and too time consuming.  Doing a full-sized 1000px by 640px painting took around two hours of work.  Which was too long for the amount of matte backgrounds that was asked of me.  Second, it doesn't fit the game stylistically.  The art style is very minimalist and reminiscent of Super Mario World.  The background I painted would fit more in with a King's Quest game.

Continued