They Don’t Know About Black Pearls, But I Will Show Them

Silverback Stacks, jumping out the jungle

Blowing tiger stripe bubbles with "Go To Hell" bubblegum

When I was younger space shuttle got hung in front of everyone

And grandmum tells me to stay humble but do not un-der-stand

One of these mumbles will make 'em throw up they arms and hands

Now stumble and they will know I put on my pants

One leg at a time, like they do, pay us no mind

But everybody look at why we do it, it take us more time

Say-Hey, good Bala folks! It’s David Houston, concept artist extrodenair, checking in this week on the big blog. As usual I hope everybody has been well! If not, then I’m sorry about that. Just take it one day at a time and eventually the rough patches will be behind you. Sending positive waves across the interweb baby!

Anywho, the Bala squad has had its attentions focused in on E3 prep for Prisma, so we haven’t had much in the ability to advance our game to much; but that doesn’t mean we’ve been doing nothing. The Overlord thought that now would be a good time to eek out some promotional stuff and let the world know about the awesomeness that is Bala.  So that’s pretty much what we’ve been on! Angelica came up with some nice stickers and business cards (I believe she showed those last week) that have all the good Bala info on it, and I’ve come up with a nice style piece to help plug the game, which I will share…right…now!

Behold the fruits of my labor! What we have here is Life Witch facing off against our first level boss time witch (coming soon!).This is a basic take on both of their default attacks, as they stand within a twisty time void of sorts. The style of this piece is a little bit more to how I draw personally, which leans more towards realism than the actual style of the game itself. But that’s basically what Angelica wanted, she told me to do what I do, and thus I did! I’m also a sucker for dynamic, action type sequences so I went there to make it look cool!

I tried my best to capture the nuances in both their personalities within the piece so that the viewer could get a good idea of who these cats might actually be! Time Witch is a very reserved and reluctant combatant, so I tried my best to make her appear as she is unsure about what she’s doing.  Her face is tensed up as she pulls away from the battle, while peeking out from one eye. Her body is also in an escape like pose too, as if she would rather run away then engage in conflict.

Life witch on the other hand is a bit of a whack job, she comes off as the aggressor despite being the one who was “wronged” by the other witches. I tried to give her a very strong pose with good balance, to help drive that home. I also gave her scarf the raised arc position that is common in animals with hostile intent to add to the aggressor feel. She also is sporting a nasty smile, that helps to point out that despite the danger of the situation, she is amused by it all.

Well that’s what we’ve got for now, next week there should be more movement on the game itself so look forward to it. 

So until next time kiddies, wishing you wealth, health, and insight!

multitasking is hard

I found some time to give Bala some love this week, though the things I've done are all over the place.

I want to start this blog off right with the most exciting and pretty stuff!  First off is the Bala promotional sticker!

I've sent in her design to Stickermule and approved her design just yesterday, so she's currently being printed!  I wanted to wait on sending her in until after I bought a website for Bala (which is witchesofbala.com) to decide if I wanted to put the website on the sticker or not.  I decided not to put the website on the sticker because I've never liked stickers with their affiliated website on them.  It makes me less likely to use the sticker because of the out of place text.  Additionally, working the text onto her cloak or sock (or somewhere in her design in general) wasn't working out.  So I said screw it!  I want this to be a cute sticker that people will want to use, even if they don't know what she's from!  Anarchy!  And she's huge!  She's 6 inches tall and wants to be seen!

Whew.  Next is the Bala business card, which shares the same illustration as the sticker, but Life Witch is in her natural game colors.

Sweet and simple and to be handed out with the stickers.  These business cards are being done at Moo and will have beautiful rounded corners.

On to game stuff!

We've begun to plan for upgrades, which means that Khoa has been getting the framework ready for that to be possible.  To help him, I did a mock up of the screen where the upgrades would go.  The idea is to have them fit on one screen so the player knows exactly how many are available to them.  The motif we are going for is pages within Life Witch's spell book, so the layout will be something like this:

Khoa has also been working on little cutscene setups where Life Witch can talk to other characters!  In motion!  Regretfully, I do not have any screenshots or footage of that, so maybe Khoa can make a post about it soon!

Another thing I worked on this week is coming up with a battle plan to update textures for the terrain of Bala, which also included coming up with a smaller color palette.

I don't currently know how well this color palette will work, but it's a point of reference that we are starting from.  And in order to more clearly come up with a plan, I took screenshots of the tutorial and blocked out a path that will go through the forest.  Hopefully this path will prevent players from getting lost, and also make the ground much more interesting than a flat color.

Next, I made a document containing the types of textures I'm going to need to make to really bring the floor of the forest to life.

I'm hoping to do 5 different types of textures.  The base texture will be a base color (with a little bit of noise) that will cover the entire forest floor.  In order to break this up, there will also be dirt patches so everything isn't saturated with grass.  In order to make the base texture more interesting, there will be moss patches.  On top of those things, paths or groups of rocks will be placed.  The rock patterns are going to be supernatural in nature so that they look like they were purposefully placed in circles and other such shapes.

Below, I've already begun working on the above plan for testing:

This screenshot shows progress on the cliffs, and how our floor is constructed in tiles.  This screenshot also shows that we can't afford to have small details like the moss everywhere, which is why we are going with a base texture, and moss scattered here and there.  It needs a lot of work, but we are making progress!

One last thing!  Since Khoa has already set up the groundwork for the boss battle with Time Witch (dang that was quick!  Khoa write a post about that too!), I did a formal concept piece/turnaround for Time Witch.  So far, I've only been able to do the front view.

I feel like I need to do something with her face.  Perhaps rounding it out a bit more will help her look more childish.  Anyway, there is her design, and below, here is a comparison to her size relationship to Life Witch:

I am hoping that Hank will have time to model her so we can hand her off to our rigger and animators.  She might see the light of day before long!  But that's all for now!  We aim to bring more and more updates every week...starting probably two weeks from now!

Too many things!!

It's only week two of the quarter and things are already very crazy for us.  A majority of the Bala team has been working on another game called Prisma (please excuse the very dated site).  We've been working very hard to try to send it to E3, so hopefully we can make it!  Because getting to E3 with Prisma is so important to us, Bala, unfortunately, has fallen to the wayside.  But do not fear!

Working on Prisma so hard these past two weeks has enlightened us with a pretty good pipeline.  I guess all the pressure made us get our act together and crank out stuff like clockwork, which inadvertently is very good for Bala.  Production on Prisma should die down a week and a half from now, and then we can start managing Bala more closely than we have been able to in what seems like a long time.

That said, please accept this text-only blog post, and please support Prisma in the meantime!

You can like both games on Facebook where there will be regular updates in the near future!
Bala  //  Prisma