Hey y’all!
In case you missed it earlier, here’s our Twitching Hour, recorded live on our Twitch channel! We shoot the proverbial sh** about Gibbous, what it’s like for Nicu to stream daily, Cami’s backer portraits, David Hasselhoff, Nicu’s sudden infatuation for one of our backers (oh my!) …and we discuss a possible week-end special Chocolate-making and game-playing stream. Whaaat? Stay tuned for more on that!
GUUUUSTAAAAAFF!!!!
Hey, what’s up everybody, Liviu here bringing you up to date with the latest developments in the Gibbous universe (where universe = an attic in Tirgu Mures, Transylvania, Romania).
In case you missed out on them, Nicu has been streaming every day starting 4 PM. We’ve uploaded his first stream on our youtube channel, but we probably won’t be uploading the rest because they’re kind of spoilery. In case you don’t mind and would still like to see Nicu build the game, tune in every workday from 4 PM and see how it’s made!
Speaking of which, important news: Twitch finally let us change the username for the channel! What was initially my personal twitch channel became the game’s, so we changed it to reflect that: www.twitch.tv/gibbousgame. Unfortunately, Twitch won’t redirect the obsolete one to the new one, so please make sure to update your bookmarks accordingly.
Today’s gonna be a special double header day – Nicu streams development starting 4 PM CET, and then we transition into the Twitching Hour starting 5 PM CET.
And I leave you with a sped-up video of Cami painting two more backer portraits!
See you live.
Liviu
Back to back streams today! Cami from 13:00 CET and Nicu right aftwerwards, as always, on our channel.
In case you missed it, here are Nicu’s streams from yesterday (for some reason Twitch split it in two uneven parts):
What’s up everybody!
Just announcing today’s Twitch streams, both on our main channel.
Nicu will be doing our first game development and programming stream today, starting with 16:00 CET.
And, before that, starting with 14:00 CET I’ll be continuing my “Background from scratch” stream.
Also, in case you missed it, here’s Cami’s recorder Backer Portraits stream from yesterday:
See you on Twitch!
First of all, I stopped capitalizing words in my titles. We don’t do that in Romania, I don’t know how that works, I’m accepting my ignorance with serenity. Let’s move on.
Second of all, Cami will be doing an art stream today at 14:OO CET on our regular channel. She’ll be working on portraits for the Case Files, so make sure to tune in for that.
Third of all, do you want to stay up to date with the development of Gibbous in real time? Or you want to just shoot the proverbial shit with us? Well, it’s crazy times we’re living in, friends, because now you can do it via the friendly (yet unintuitively and not so friendly named) Discord app.
To be quite honest with you, I had no idea what Discord was or what it was good for until literally a few hours ago, but from what I can gather it’s like a… sexier Skype? I think. Either way, you can either use it online, as a downloadable app or on your phone and join our server called Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure by clicking this nice permalink:
It’s free, anyone can join. All we ask is that you be nice to everyone else and try not to spam more cat pictures than us developers do, that is considered a faux-pas around here.
It has the added advantage of me instantly letting you know if something major such as a civil war in Transylvania or myself streaming art is going down, so there’s that.
There might be disclaimers about it to add here but, frankly, I’ve only used it for like an hour tops and I could barely figure out enough of it to change my profile pic. The typing and pasting links part is intuitive enough, though.
Doesn’t discord mean people not getting along or something? Is there an extra layer of irony I’m missing? I’m old. See you on Discord, I guess.
-Liviu
What’s up everybody! It’s Monday, so here I am bringing you up to date with what’s been up in Gibbous land (spoilers: a lot of work!) .
First of all, Friday I did a first-ever stream where I started a background for Gibbous from scratch. I usually start streaming when I’m already in the rendering phase, because usually the sketching, looking up references etc. are not that exciting, but this particular background didn’t really need research so it was a go.
Here’s a very sped up version of that stream for your enjoyment:
…and, if you really want to go in depth and watch the entire 3 hour stream, you can do that over here.
Other than that, I’m still heavy into painting backgrounds. This week-end was the first one I finally took my kick-ass borrowed Cintiq 22HD home, so it was super-productive: took a background from 50% to completion, and another one from about 5% to 30% complete. Good week-end, nice progress!
Cami has since started working on the case file caricatures of the backers, and I’m loving the ideas that people came up with for their dossiers – some of them seriously cracked me up.
And while all this is going on, Nicu is continuing to implement complete rooms into the game, adding custom light and shadows and tweaking them, and we’re putting in the puzzles together. Gibbous is becoming more and more of a real game each and every day, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Well, that’s about it for me. I only slept around 10 hours this week-end, so it’s time for me to go get my 3rd big-ass cup of coffee for the day and return to doing what I love most.
But before I do that, there’s a blog I wanted to mention. If you’re a fan of adventure game art -‘course you are! – you’re probably a fan of the excellent Wadjet Eye Games, makers of the Blackwell Legacy and so on.
Well, Ben 304, their super-talented artist, has a blog of his own where he features and analyzes adventure game art. I think it makes for a fascinating read, be you an artist or a player of these games, and I’m thankful he’s taking the time to research and write it. Don’t miss out on it, it’s great stuff.
See you guys next post!
Hey guys! Quick post just to bring you the VOD of the Twitching Hour we did yesterday night, in case you missed it live on our Twitch channel.
Enjoy!
Ok, actually, this has nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, it just happens to be tomorrow and I thought I’d mention it in the title. We don’t really celebrate it over here, either, it’s just an excuse for bars to have themed parties, so let’s get back to the business at hand: za game!
Last week has been pretty much business as usual: me painting backgrounds, Cami animating, Nicu polishing the lights and shadows shaders and re-testing the former demo area. Other than re-painting the backgrounds and adding shadows to the former demo area – I mean what is playable in the demo – we’re also altering the puzzle design slightly, namely moving some objects around and changing the way some dialogue and interactions work.
See, here’s the trouble with the demo: it’s the first thing that I’ve ever designed for the game, so it carries certain 1st time blemishes. We’ve also launched it without it having been tested by anyone but ourselves, so a weird thing happened: our so-called play-testing sessions were watching people play it on youtube and screaming at the screen “noooo, you were supposed to–“… and, of course, realizing it was our fault, not theirs, that they were stuck.
It wasn’t necessarily major stuff, but we learned that signposting and making what is happening as clear to the player as possible is crucial. So if you got stuck during the demo, don’t worry, you won’t run into the same problems in the final game. By the way, here’s someone who didn’t get stuck :
What else have we been up to – well, I made this:
https://www.facebook.com/GibbousGame/videos/567703123427908/
Which got 4,000 views on facebook. Happy about that! It’s a stream I did on our Twitch channel and compressed down to 5 minutes from 3 hours.
And this week-end I fiiiinally finished one of the most demanding backgrounds yet. Here’s a sneak peek:
And that’s that for this post! Back to painting and going over puzzles again.
Have a butt-kicking great week!
– Liviu
I think I spent upward of 30 seconds wondering whether the “and” in the title should be capitalized, I can never remember that kind of stuff. Anyway, here’s a Gibbous blog post! Yay.
Maybe I mentioned it in my previous post (did I?), but this blog is supposed to be a little something to tide you over information-wise in between the big Kickstarter updates, if you want to stay up to date more often. So here’s our current status report:
Production is going really well. My main output for months now has been (predictably) background art, and spending so much time rendering the places you’ll visit in Gibbous payed off. They take slightly less to produce and look significantly better, to the point where I now also go back to previously finished ones and try and get them looking as good as the new ones.
As with any living work of fiction, there are small part that get added or cut. In our case, it’s a helluva lot more likely for stuff to be added rather than removed. That’s great for the game, but it also means spending some extra extra hours in the office.
Cami’s been doing some work on idle animations for Kitteh and Don, and next week she’ll be handling some more special, plot-related animations. It feels good being able to just send some frame by frame work her way and let her handle it entirely. It’s a great load off my chest.
Nicu’s been adding rooms that we’ve finished, and also going back to the demo rooms, replacing old art with the updated one and adding dynamic lighting and shadows.
We’re good. We’re doing great work, only staying inside because of the horrible weather, getting a lot done.
Man, I should finish writing that Kickstarter update!
Hope all’s well with y’all. Stay pointy and clicky!
-Liviu
Mic check, testing, testing, 1-2, is this thing on?
This is a quick test post for our brand spanking new blog. Remain calm and stay inside, there is nothing wrong with your receivers, the Old Ones are coming just as it was prophesied.
Fhtagn.
