Click here to view the embedded video.

As you can see, our fox has been a little bit inconstant since September 2009, but it seems comfortable with his appearence today.
We hope you’ll like it too.

Regardless of the exact number, we are happy that so many people played Tuper Tario Tros. and enjoyed it. Some was inspired by the game and created a little flash movie based on TTT and another mash-up between Tetris and Snake.

Maybe Tuper Tario Tros. will come back at the end of 2010. Who knows ?

> NOVEMBER 2009

We aren’t totally dumbs so we already found another solution.
Our bigger constraint in the development of Seasons is linked to the animation cause the game is based on the changes of seasons and we really want to create living environments. Since few weeks, we was thinking that maybe 2D traditional animation was not a wise choice. We looked for other animation techniques : the one that attracted our attention is similar to vectorial animation and shares some things with the animation technique used in one of our favorite game : Muramasa, the demon blade.

In Muramasa, the characters are composed of many parts (head, upper body, arm,…) linked by pivots (swivels), like 2D puppets.

To make it simple, it’s a great technique cause it allows us to animate characters without being veteran drawers or animators. But there’s still a problem with textures : with our poor skills, it could be really hard to create a whole set of beautiful and consistent textures. So, what can we do ? Use tint areas, that’s it.

> DECEMBER 2009

In order to be sure tint areas could be a good choice, we still have to make backgrounds and animated objects using this art style.

> JANUARY – FEBRUARY 2010

There’s no way we make random choices : we could have continue to chase our 2D traditional animation dream without even being sure of the final result. But it’s important to remember that a game project always have constraints : you need to be flexible and ready to change your plan so you’ll be able to find ingenious solutions to your problems, being consistent with your first intentions. One of us is to make a poetic game, quite like a tale. This intention, you can see it in our first drafts, in the researches Gaël and Samuel made, and we’ll make everything possible to stick to it until the end of the project.

In few weeks, we will show you more animated stuff, but here are 4 mock-ups that illustrate the changes of seasons so you can imagine what Seasons will look like (well, the forest part at least). Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us about the art style !

At the beginning of September, Swing Swing Submarine starts to work in the dining room of an appartment in Montpellier : this is also the beginning of the development of Seasons. Guillaume will program the game and manage technical parts of the project, I will take care of the game and level design, and concerning the graphics… Well, concerning the graphics we thought we could find another captain, a graphist captain, to join the team. Or maybe we could collaborate with another tiny studio ?

We didn’t have the answer at this moment, but Gaël, a friend of a friend, proposed his help and sent us the result of his first researches, including this artwork you may know already :

A fox in the middle of a living nature : this artwork perfectly illustrates our first intention of the project.
Gaël continued his researches, working on the character design of the fox and testing different art styles : realistic, magical, cute, cartoon…

The magical style didn’t match our intentions. But we really liked the cute little fox you can see in the first picture and we wanted to know how it could be if it was more adult.

Thanks to Gaël, we found the character we were looking for : fox 8/9 seemed to be a good compromise between cartoon and realism. Gaël was not really confortable with 2D animation and was already involved in other projects, so he didn’t join us. We still needed to find someone to work with at long term.

> OCTOBER 2009

It could have been Samuel : this 2D artist we met in June in Paris helped us too, making researches around seasons’ colors and a potential comics look.

Or it could have been Caroline, a more experienced 2D animator who already worked on animation movies.

Yes, it could have been Gaël, Samuel, Caroline, or somebody else, but we couldn’t afford their services cause we didn’t (and still don’t) have any money. One month after the project began, we had the confirmation that we will have to manage the project with a team of 2 : Guillaume and I. And the cat.

Next time, the conclusion : you’ll discover the solutions we found to solve this graphical issue, and you’ll also see the (almost) final graphical style of Seasons!

Let’s start with the very early drafts William made before we started working on the game full time. But be careful : the following pictures could make your eyes bleed.

> JULY 2009

This drawing is the very first draft I made when we decided that our principal character would be a red fox. I was really excited and ran outside to bought paper and soft pastels (which I never used before). I wanted to create “a red lightning running through the forest”. When I totally screwed the ground colors, and realised that I had a lot of pastels on my face, I decided to stop drawing and closed the pastels box forever.

Still working at Ubisoft, but sometimes my mind flies away. I wonder how I could learn how to draw a fox with my really bad drawing skills…

> AUGUST 2009

If I want to know how to draw a fox with few colors and lines, maybe the best thing to do is just to try. As I was making this picture, I thought this style could totally be a potential illustration for a child book, or a tale. But even if I liked the style, it was really too flat : that’s why I added this paper texture on it.

Next time, more interesting illustrations to see : you’ll discover how Gaël and Samuel helped us find our graphical style and how we failed to find an artist to work with.

Few weeks ago, a player found a pretty nice glitch that allows Mario to be invincible during the castle building sequence :

Click here to view the embedded video.

- Be sure to have Mario big before you reach the flag at the end of the level
- Stay in Tetris mode and let the scrolling push Mario to the flag
- When Mario runs to the castle, hit him with a Tetris piece
- Mario is now little, can’t be played but he’s invincible !
- Hit SPACE at the end of the countdown to move the Tetrominos again

This glitch made us laugh a lot, so we decided to keep it in the game.
Feel free to use it to make new highscores.

> Thursday 29th January :

[18:10] Global Game Jam is on ! Theme revealed. Now brainstorming.
40 jammers in the entrance hall of Isart Digital, in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. We broke the ice throught two little exercises to learn how to not have too much préjudices eachothers, then it’s time to talk about the organisation of the week-end, watch the GGJ 2010’s video introduction and Ste Curran’s keynote.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[19:44] We think we have the concept, but need more discussions to be really interesting.
We presented two concepts :
- Paris by night : a seduction game the player plays with his ears and takes place in a night club. For each person he wants to seduce, the player has to find the right key on the keyboard to make the npc falls in love.
- AAA : amazing screenshots and catch phrases, an outsanding introduction…then the game becomes more and more ugly and full of bugs. The game always gives the player new achievements to complete to keep him playing even if he knows it is a really bad game.

The jammers were very enthusiastic after AAA’s presentation, but we chose to make the “night club” game cause it was technically and graphically easier to create in 48 hours.

The concept presentation to all jammers

[21:16] The team : 4 guys, one sound designer, one artist, and two programmers. Let’s make a meeting !
The final groups have been constituted quite naturally, by talking about the concepts around a pizza. Matthieu, a sound designer, came to us to offer his help, and we accepted it with great pleasure. Alexis, a programmer, joined us later cause he has no team to work with. And you’ll understand that it has been a real chance to have him with us !

[22:45] The project : a “Disco” game. Mmm, that sounds straaaange.
Now that we were a team, we discussed the project, cause we didn’t wanted to come with a game concept and say to Alexis and Matthieu “we’ll make it as we want it to be, and you’ve got nothing to say, you bitches !”. Making a game is a team work, so is the game design. We tried to find new ideas to add to the concept and to replace previous ones, but at the end of the meeting we simply decided to make it simple : core gameplay first, then we’ll see how to add things.

[23:24] svn server is on fire, let’s make some Flixel
Alexis and Guillaume, the programmers, decided to create a source control serveur so they could avoid a lot of problems by working together. But the SVN website didn’t seem to work. Great… Guillaume tried to use Perforce, but it wasn’t very effective too (maybe because of the free version limitations). Alexis followed a little Flixel tutorial made by Guillaume.

Negotiating groups

> Saturday 30th January :

[02:12] coding coding coding
The project began quite good. Alexis explored the code taking care of the “clubbers” and the characters’ layers. Guillaume started to work on collisions and tilemaps (so we can use Excel to create them), on the character controller and the sound system to fademusics between the night club’s rooms.

[03:28] our music man and additional coder are cool
Our DJ Hero, Matthieu, made sounds at the speed of light with his iMac he loves so much. Alexis didn’t know Flash and Flixel before GGJ, but he has already made a really good job.

[04:30] It’s snowing outdoor, and I’m drawing a pixeled banana in the middle of the night. That’s GGJ.
Through the window of the first floor, we saw snowflakes falling. William has taken a long time to find the art style he wanted to (or could) use, but at this moment he had great fun on photoshop, making the neon banana you can see in the first screen of the game.

[06:46] Want to sleep. What about you @terriblebear ?
Alexis was taking a rest, William slowly closed his eyes. Yes, we were tired. TerribleBear, our favorite twitter bot, made us laugh saying he liked eat living things : “hey ! a mouse !” he wrote.

[11:36] Need a first playable version with core gameplay feature at 2 o’clock.
Ok, here Guillaume was upset by himself : “I’ve got the feeling that I’m not doing anything, and I’am making no progress”. Of course, he’s wrong… We went outside to eat something, and Guillaume stayed in front of his computer to keep working. At this very moment, we already had some interaction with NPCs, but it’s still full of bugs and, if we believe what Guillaume said : “the code I write is more and more dirty”. Sweet.

[14:33] The deadline expired… and we are still working on it
Guillaume, who didn’t want to sleep at all this night, was sad. It’s 2 o’clock and we still didn’t have the core gameplay mechanic integrated. Well, he was learning that when someone is tired, it’s really difficult to be effective at work.

[21:07] I really don’t know if we wil succeed to finish the ggj game this year. Suspense…
Now it’s William’s turn to be pessimistic. We forced Guillaume to go to sleep even few hours. He went downstairs and chose to lie down on the air bed near the radiator cause it’s really cold in the basement.

Groups at work

> Sunday 31st January :

[01:55] After a little snap and fat eating, the team is workig better than ever.
Guillaume re-appeared at 1′oclock and started being awake 30 minutes later. Alexis made a great job on the integration of graphic elements made by William : it was really a hard work cause every sprite had to be placed manually, one by one. Guillaume intregated the “post-process” animation to simulate light effects.
Now that everybody was on the bridge, we were making progresses. The team’s power was back again ! Hope was gleaming in the middle of the night.

[04:56] I wrote “snap” but I mean “nap”… Anyway, the game is better hour after hour. We’ll probably have to make big choices but that’s ggj.
When you’re tired and french, you’re bad at english even more then usual. Anyway, the project was on the right way, but William was thinking we would have to take big decisions and cut parts of the game near the end. But making games is all making choices. Especially in 48 hours. So…
Matthieu figured out his iMac screen was burned by his wallpaper : a logo of World of Warcract – Cataclysm. We laughed a lot about his new screen tatoo. He decided to relax by playing Call of Duty.

Our fox puppet going worldwide !

[09:22] Few hours left until the end of #GGJ10. The difference between an interesting concept and an interesting game is a matter of time.
The last hours of the event ! Guillaume tried to fix some bugs he created during saturday afternoon when he was really tired. Alexis searched for the last bugs in the following system of NPCs, put a score screen ar the end and added a progressive difficulty to Guillaume’s pattern recognition of the dialogs.
Our DJ took a nap in the entrance hall of Isart, hidden under his coat. He has been wake few hours later by a journalist that wanted to take a picture of him cause “it’s exactly what GGJ is”.
At the end of the morning, Guillaume started to worki on the state machine (very lite) of the NPCs’ dance behaviors cause William suddenly saw that the night club ambiance was too boring. About bloody time!

Then, it’s over : we had no time to update Twitter anymore.

One hour before the end of the event, there were still a lot of bugs to fix and graphics to integrate. We had all the music we needed, Matthieu really worked fast and well since the beginning of the project, so he decided to make the intro and credits screens. Alexis quickly finished the score screen, Guillaume replaced the right collision map for the first screen, and William walked in the room, a list of things to do (that would never be done) in the hand.

At 3′oclock, we sped up and uploaded the game on the Global Game Jam website. The jammers removed the table and cleaned the room so we can make a little presentation of the finished projects to friends (and journalists). Each 7 projects created this year were playable, so Paris had a 100%succes rate for the second consecutive year. Well, there were still some bugs, sometimes it’s the sound, for another project the animations, but it’s part of GGJ experience.

At the end of the day, everyone expressed what he learned during this week-end : it’s all positive as you can imagine. But to really understand that, you had to be part of the jammers.

GGJ 2010 in Paris : the jammers

> Monday 1st February :

[00:21] and we are back to the submarine! thanks Olivier and Isart staff for the organization. Good night every #GGJ10 jamer
Back in Montpellier, Guillaume took the time to add a conclusion to our story in Twitter, before he went to his bed. William was already sleeping in his.

Swing Swing Submarine was not open this day.

Photos source : Olivier Lejade’s Flicker

Global Game Jam is a great event to meet some new friends, that’s why we made this game with 2 other guys : Alexis BAUCHU (programmer) and Matthieu MORIZET (sound designer). Thank you guys, it was a really great week-end. See you at the third GGJ edition !

More screenshots :

Even Buster, our marketing manager cat, is helping us as a living model so we can fix the fox’s head animations.

We will reveal more serious things about Seasons in February so don’t forget to suscribe to our rss feed and our twitter account to stay well informed.

The question you had to answer was :
“How many screens, made by Nicklas Nygren himself, does Knytt contain ?”
Did you all found the answer ? Just to let you know, so you can go to bed tonight being a little bit less ignorant then yesterday, Knytt contains 378 screens. Nicklas did 358 screens and the 20 others have been made by Ville Kallio.

Interesting, isn’t it ?