Cheese wizard

Pre-Production

How it began

Cheese wizard was born from a month-long Game Jam during May 2024. For those not in the know, a game jam is when you gather a collection of artists and task them to create a video game project with a short turn around window. Sometimes they can be 48 hours, sometimes a week, and in our case it was a month. You can see the video explaining how the months project would be built here:

Pre-production Considerations

Once we decided that we were going to make a side scrolling platformer title, I considered how to ensure that everyone’s art styles could and would mesh well together. 2D artists can differ broadly in the colors they might pick, and the lineweights they might use for any given drawing. Not to mention hand drawn illustrations could be challenging to import into game engines not designed to use them. As a development team, we needed to be quick and scrappy because we only had a month to deliver on a product. Not only that, we also wanted to deliver on a product that looked good and played well.

This is where a software comes into play called: Aseprite

concept art #1

concept art #2

concept art #3

Learning a new software

Aseprite is a animation and illustration program designed solely for the creation and exportation of pixel art animations and illustrations. Prior to cheese wizard, I developed some cursory knowledge of this program using it in college for a small project. I decided to learn this program and put this program in the hands of my teammates and I would lead to the best outcome for our game.

What really convinced me, was the knowledge that many game development engines are designed in such a way to take advantage of systems asesprite has integrated into its foundation. I knew this because of a game development tutorial I followed a week prior to beginning cheese wizard.

I bought aseprite for my team members who didn’t yet own it and we quickly got to work learning it from the ground up.

Developing the Cheese wizard concept and breaking up roles

Developing Cheese wizard

We had the Concept for our game: You’re a wizard powered by Cheese.

We had the Software we were going to make our assets in: Aseprite

But we still needed to learn how to build it out, and structure the tasks amongst the developers we had on hand. We ended up dividing up as thus:

After we had this breakdown of roles, each member was responsible for pursuing how to perform that specific task in our pipeline. As Project lead I made sure to do as much personal research as possible using youtube and Asesprite’s website documentation to pass off tips to my developers. In our development channels, we often post video tutorials on software, but I’ve found the best way to ensure someone on my team knows a skill is to teach it to them myself first and then give them the tutorial I learned the skill from.

Overall project Management:

Tommy

Environments:

Riley

Vivian

Steph

Character animations:

Tommy (myself)

Benny

Carson

Programing:

Tony

Character animations

Character animations first attempts

I was the first person to draw cheese wizard in aseprite, and decided I wanted to keep working on our character animations. It had been a while since I had done 2D animation and I was actually excited to get back into it in a new format. But after sharing my work with my team I noticed that my animations were more flat than my fellow character animators.

Comparing and Contrasting

As you can see, my intital rough animations were looking too static and flat when compared with Carsons.

Carson’s work with the enemies was very inspiring. He and I ended up sitting down in a virtual meeting, and he taught me his technique for character animations.

After seeing work like this, I wanted to improve my own designs.

Making Improvements

The basic advice I got was to go nuts and get more loose with my character animations. "draw some stick guys, and just keep going!" So that's what I did.

Finalizing Designs

A wonderful thing that we discovered during game development was that we really didn't need a whole bunch of frames for our movements to be clear to our players. The Jump animation for instance is a simple two frame animation.

Npc Developement

I ended up creating NPC's for the game. Nothing too crazy to add here, but I enjoyed drawing them

Character Animations Reflected in Gameplay

Building Layouts

Outlining our Buildings Exteriors

Riley would end up working on our building designs, but I wanted to make sure I didn't throw her to the wolves and instead give her an outline for how our buildings work.

I also wanted to make sure I could show her some simple tips and tricks for aseprite.

Below are some of the progressions we made as teammates before I left her to her work

Initially there was this idea of creating small rooms for our players to interface with. Each room would be a room one could find in an apartment: Bathroom, Dining room, Staircase.

As we continued to develop the idea, we attempted to simplify the concepts, above you can see we started to only use even numbers.

Above you can see how Riley and I collaborated. I made outlines to scale with our main character and she overlapped it with art.

Demonstrated Above is a tiling technique that sped up our illustration work for our game. Riley and I both learned this skill.

This ended up being our final Design for the interiors of the buildings. We decided that due to time constraints, doing multiple rooms was too complicated of an idea. So we decided to create two rooms. 1) a staircase 2) a main room

Creating our Buildings Interiors

Vivian, Steph and Riley would end up taking over designing the interior assets, (I ended up only designing our fridge) but I wanted to include their work below to show how cool it is moving from concept art into a more finished product.

How it ended up looking in Gameplay

Cheese Wizard™ Side scrolling platformer where you play as a cheese crazed wizard

During gameplay, you'll break into homes, fight against the law, and generally be a menace to society. All the while stealing as much cheese as possible.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse