Making our first mobile game [From Noobs to DUDES]

davidhmcguire

My name is David and I am the COO of Labpix Studios a small independent gaming company based in London. For the past year we have been working on our first game to be released on Mobile (and potentially Steam or ambitiously Xbox Live???). Our story is quite extraordinary as you could imagine with any startup and possibly will explain that in a video on our Youtube channel one day; when we can scrape ourselves off the computers.

To cut a long story short for the TL;DR guys we came up with a concept of a 2D platform runner based in a 3D world with obstacles to jump and run across with numerous enemies chasing the main character. The main twist of the game which we think will make everyone kind of say "That's different" is that the main character is a 13 year old boy running from the Police as he was wrongly accused of being involved in the 2011 London Riots. As you can imagine the game will be filled with carnage random happenings and cool things that will make us a billion dollars - Alas the game will be free(with in app purchases! BOOYAAA)

I will document the progress we have previously made and ongoing updates on this thread, to inspire, for critisim, praise or too fill up the web with more content?!?!?

So stay Tuned

PogoP

Haha, interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing something.

shotgun

BenHenry

Siiick! I can't wait

davidhmcguire

Ok - I managed to finish the day and put some time aside to fill you guys in on the first chapter of events that unfolded for us. So our genius CPO that We call Dean came up with an idea that would touch on some of the aspects of what we grew up living in London. The clash between the youth and the adults which really was a stew brewing for years and manifested itself through the London riots on 2011. So he wanted to build a game that would encompass all of these nuances with a positive tone and an underline message that would basically be a "don't judge a book by its cover" story.

We started off with trying to identify the character. I started to sketch out a rough idea of Deans visualisation of the character for a model sheet in order to get the model built. Here it is:



Forgive the attempt at a model sheet (my first time)! In order to make it seem as professional as possible I took a pic of it on top of my Laptop, at night, with a flash on my iphone and just to give it the corporate look I chucked a business card on top.

It seemed this wasn't exactly how Dean visualised it. He said David I see what you did there but that isn't it (paraphrasing), so he showed me a pic of the Biebs edited. That's right, he trashed my Van Gogh like work for a photo chop of the Biebs. Here it is:



Anyway - Seems the Character modeler knew exactly what Dean wanted and managed to create the character that he had in mind (after many painful adjustments). This was a breakthrough as we finally had a character for the game.





We also gave him a tight Poly budget which he managed to stick to. We told him every triangle over our requirements will cost him £1 (no we didn't that's just evil)but we made sure that the character was 2000-3000 Poly's in order to meet the standard and stay within the polycount.

I am off to bed now but will fill you guys in with the environment on my next post...

davidhmcguire

I forgot to mention a little bit about the character concept.

So we figured in order to let the masses identify with the character in terms of racial background we gave the character a hue which would remain a mystery to his true racial identity. We went through a stringent process of trying to get the right tone to allow anyone to identify (who would feel the need to - they do exist)

We also decided to dress the character in a generic 'hoodiesque' style outfit. This meant that the character can easily be identified with all the cliche get up that a young urban lad would wear. A typical grey hoody, a pair of washed out denims, high top trainers and for utility the red rucksack. We also wanted to keep him in with the times so we gave him a pair of wayfarers as they are currently in fashion.

The bandana is a Union Jack which clearly (tries) to identify the character with the UK. What do you guys think?

PogoP

I think this is genius!

davidhmcguire

Hi guys this is the promised post of our environment concept (which we are still currently refining). We owe a great deal of credit to our 3d Architect Rumzi who managed to PAWN all specs given to him.

We start with the vision: Our vision was to replicate the scene of the London riots, so we first kicked it off where everyone does, Google. Google street view to be precise. We drew up a plan of locations that we felt were pivotal to let anyone know that this is London that the character is running in. Google street view was definitely an assisting steed however we knew in order to capture all the idiosyncrasies of the areas we would need to go do some recon in the field. So we spent a morning and an afternoon travelling with our two Canon cameras taking shots of textures bins, roads and concrete blocks in some of the roughest estates in the UK.

After this Rumzi mocked up a grey box in order to visualise the view and angle of the game play to confirm that it would look good on screen.



I'm not entirely sure why he used what looks like an old lady to simulate characters on the screen - but the jury is still out on that. After he completed the grey box we went back to the image archive that we had gathered from our photo day out. We chose specific buildings that represented the London architecture. They happened to be Brutalist blocks of high rise flats. Here they are all in a line: ATTENTION!



I'm off to bed now but I will update this thread with the blocks after they were textured. They look awsome!

davidhmcguire

Hi guys I have been very busy so haven't updated this thread. We have all been rushing around trying to prepare screenshots to send to journalists. We didn't hit our deadline so it is a bit manic.

Without further ado I want to present the blocks of flats textured:





















I will have screen shots of us putting the streets together next so stay tuned!

davidhmcguire

Everyday we are edging one day closer to completion (as trivial as that sounds) it is really allowing us to be able to share as much as we can of the game while keeping anticipation and mystery still in jest. Here are some screen shots of us putting it all together. For anyone who wants to know we are using the Unity 3D Engine.



I will soon release the screen shots. The game is in beta but we were able to get screenshots done so we can start emailing journalists and bloggers.

davidhmcguire

Hi guys The game is still in beta but we managed to get some screenshots done. The game will be called Denzel and the game website is now ready Denzel The Game. Let me know what you guys think???

davidhmcguire

Hi guys,

We just finished our quick 404 page with a mini game go ahead and troll the riot police. If you want to play it >>> http://www.denzelthegame.com/404

LANKUS MAXIMUS

that was really enjoyable, even when i got stuck down the alley way for a bit :P

Looks a lot like some of the places where i grew up.

Looking good

davidhmcguire

LANKUS MAXIMUS wrote: »

that was really enjoyable, even when i got stuck down the alley way for a bit :P

Looks a lot like some of the places where i grew up.

Looking good

lol, be careful of Dog shit alley, everyone gets stuck over there... :P

LANKUS MAXIMUS

HAHA, no way! there was a place called dog shit alley in Hackney too, i used to avoid that route on the way home from school.

I look forward to more

davidhmcguire

Ok it has been a while but we have made some good progress. We finally managed to find the right programmer who was apt for the job. We also went from Mecanim to Legacy then back to mechanim animations. What really slowed us down was the fact we had to make all animations from scratch so we couldn't take complete advantage of the off the shelf animation offerings from companies like Mixamo.

So this is our greybox version testing some of the already made animations.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUyN9Jm59Kw