Production, bugs and inspiration

Hey there, "Out of Liners"!

Just like the title says, this blog post brings you an update on production, bugs and inspiration!

"Ahhhhh! Inspiration!" says the artist, "I thrive on seeing the work of other artists..."

"Ohhhhh! Money!" says the producer, "I thrive on smelling money..."

"Ehhhhh! 000101001!" says the programmer, "0101011101010101110010100101..."

Production

Getting money is obviously important to get a game released with a minimum degree of quality. Even if you are an indie developer working from home or have a fixed means of support, it comes a time when some outsourcing is needed, like translation, quality assurance, music rights, etc. etc.

Our Nerd Monkeys, producer, Diogo Vasconcelos, has been for the last year and a half trying to get a nice flow of cash so that we can establish a fixed road map for launching Out of Line with the quality it deserves.

It hasn't been easy, Diogo has talked with investors, publishers, platform holders and many other people trying to assess the interest, opportunities and getting much needed feedback from fellow studios and developers about what we need to get a to an excellent launch.

But we think he is almost there. We have some very interesting propositions that will fund our little game just enough so we can make it the best it can be. We can't obviously talk about it here, but keep your digital fingers cross, we are definitely almost there.

Diogo answers 2 phones while listening to music and pointing to pie charts

 

Bugs

Programming is the art of creating bugs, some would say. The more you code, the more potential bugs will arise. It's part of the job to write code and bring life to a videogame and then to go back and re-write that same code so it doesn't turn the CPU into a supernova.

João Genebra is constantly going back and forth with everything that he creates for Out of Line. But to help him out with bug hunting and code cleaning, he only uses the classic tools like MS Visual Studio, his trusty debugger and a notebook to keep track of all the bugs.

Genebra code from Out of Line

 

Inspiration

We talked before in the old blog about Francisco's inspiration for Out of Line, but has kept him moving lately? Is it some weird Dragon Crown's furry fanart or does he get high on Picasso's cubism?

This is what Francisco had to say more than 2 years ago in an old blog post:
"I always try to find inspiration outside the media of vídeo games. In movies, short-films, music, or even classical or modern art, and taking all that into consideration I try to converge it to one single product.
For San, the main character of Out of Line, I found a lot of inspiration in Hayao Miyazaki animation movies. In movies like, My Neighbor Totoro, Grave of the Fireflies or Spirit Away where you can find as a main character, a young kid - in contrast with American animation movies, but that can stay for another topic). And I think that has a lot of power as a narrative component or even as an icon for the audience to relate to. "

Here is what he has to say now:
"I ́m always looking for inspiration to Out of Line, either with styles of animation, color palettes, character personalities, environment moods, etc.

Right now I'm looking at a lot of different stuff:

Genndy Tartakovsky style of animation. He is one of the gurus of animation and I really like his animation style, and I wonder how could it work in a 2D game animation without breaking up the gameplay too much.

In the game Gris, I really love the tone of the narrative and the way the story is shown to the player. That kind of subtle emotion storytelling is something I wanted for Out of Line since the beginning of the project, and it is really cool to see a game pull that off, as well as Gris did.

The Knights and Bikes loose and extravagant feel, gives the player a really interesting main characters. They manage to capture very well the childish personalities of these kids.

The Legend of Hei, it's a Chinese animated movie that has a really compelling main character. A strong but curious kid as a main protagonist that has a journey full of challenges to complete. And really inspiring to see how different stories work so well with a younger protagonist.

Le College Noir by Ulysse Malassagne, it's a comic book where - you guessed it right - the main characters are also adventurous young children that fight monsters and explore cool stuff.

And there are a lot more stuff that I could talk about, but I leave that for another awesome post.

The Legend of Hei

That's it for today!

Keep it in the tub, Bub.