Junior and Senior animator GET

Hey there, San-Fans!
The team of Out of Line at Nerd Monkeys is now on it's third month of remote work from home.
It took us a while to get organized but we quickly turned it around and managed to speed up and scale production while keeping everyone safe at home.

It was back in March, that Inês Pereira joined us exactly on the week that we moved out of the office and into the safety of our homes. It was an odd position to be in as for a Junior Animator. At the time, the idea was to guide her and help her as much as possible to integrate into the team and the animation pipeline alongside a Senior Animator. Of course that quickly proved to be impossible as we hastily packed our computers and moved into improvised offices at our homes.

Fortunately for us, Inês has proven to be a true professional, not only with her art but also with her commitment and that in turn allowed us to feel confident in giving her more complex tasks and animations and it shows.

Here's what she has to say about herself (we kept her words and made no corrections):

"Hello! My name is Inês and I'm your local Junior Animator! It hasn't even been a year since I left college so this is still baby's first experience when it comes to the real world. It's way more responsibility but also way more rewarding! Besides your typical school assignments, Out of Line is the first project I'm part of. I'm from Almada, but attended high school in Lisbon and college in Portalegre. I've been pretty sure I wanted to be an animator since middle school, and I've been following that path ever since. Whether it was film & TV or games wasn't a choice I was focused on making: I just really wanted to animate. I tend to think of animation as very close to acting, as we are technically acting through our animations. I think that's part of the reason why I love this area so much! I'm a big theater nerd (specially musical theater) and like with acting, I think each animator brings a new version and new life to each character they do and I just think that's really cool. Plus I really like drawing, so these two combined made me end up here. From here on out, my focus is learning and improving as much as I can. That's my main goal! I don't have much else set in stone as of yet, as I'm mostly seeing where life takes me (ugh this sounds awfully hippie, I know). Still, you're not getting rid of me that easily! I still got a lot to show and a lot of work to do, so hopefully you'll see me a bunch around here! See you soon, Inês"

Inês Pereira working on a Cutscene for Out of Line using the Spine software

Meanwhile, and considering the amount of animations that were planned to go into the game, a Senior Animator was already planned to enter the team. We just didn't expect it to be doing it all so... remotely.

An ad was placed on Nerd Monkeys Facebook on the 31st of March, seeking for a Senior Animator. Alongside other personal contacts a few dozens of emails were received from Portuguese professionals here in Portugal and abroad applying for the position. We were super happy to so many young professionals with great portfolios, which in turn made our job that much harder in picking someone that would be the right one.

After doing all the interviews for the potential candidates alongside a few tests, one final person was chosen and, fortunately for us, he accepted our offer.

João Vasco Leal started working as a Senior Animator for Nerd Monkeys, directly from his home in London on the 22nd of April. Being a seasoned professional working as an animator he immediately started working with our characters and rigs and in a few days he was turning over complete and finished animations. Awesome.
 
 Here's what he has to say about himself (we kept his words and made no corrections):

"As a kid he was a big fan of comics, video games and cartoons, nowadays... not much has changed!
With quite a few years of experience both in Portugal and in the UK, he was able to amass a wide number of diverse projects that include childrens illustration, animation for music videos, commercials, video games, VR experiences, amongst others.
He brings with him his passion for entertainment arts and pop culture and that is reflected in his work."

João Vasco Leal working remotely with the Out of Line team

Both Inês and João are using Esoteric Software's Spine animation package to create the in-game character animations and cutscenes, but this you already know since we already covered it in a previous post ;)

You can follow João's work here.

That's it for now. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
And stay safe!

Understand, rubber band?

Remotely working

Working remotely or remotely working?

As the international crisis of the corona virus pandemic takes over the world, we at Nerd Monkeys here in Lisbon, Portugal decided to start our quarantine 1 week ahead of the government imposed one. It seemed obvious that this was the correct course of action as many other companies were already taking the same steps.

So, since the 16th of March, everyone has been officially working from home.
For some team members this is a brand new experience, while for others it is something that has been part of their lives for some years now.

Diogo is obviously pretending to work. You can see in his glasses the cubes from Minecraft reflected.
Also, he is working on the laptop while holding a coffee mug. At least he could have disguised it a little bit better.

 

Francisco is a bit smarter. He decided to take a photo showing his computer screens with Unity and some artwork assets. You would be almost fooled to think he was actually working but then you notice it. Right there. In the left corner. A Nintendo Switch! ahAH! You can't fool us Mr. Santos!

Genebra is a programmer and because of that he thinks he can outsmart everyone else due

to his (supposedly) more logical thinking. Well Mr. Spock, you can't fool us!

If you look closely to his fingers of his left hand, you can perfectly see he is using WASD in conjunction

with the mouse on his right hand! HE IS PLAYING AN FPS GAME!

You see Mr Watson, he thought his Photoshop skills were just perfect enough

to hide the images on his screens, but he forgot to hide the most obvious piece of evidence... HIMSELF!

Filipe doesn't even hide it. Here he is "producing"... with a Nintendo Switch in his hands.

At least he is honest about it even if the photo was taken by surprise by his wife.

Wilson's face says it all.
Nobody believes you dude.
We know you were playing videogames last week.

Mafalda said she didn't want to take a photo.
So we asked her dog to sneak one for us.
Here she is playing in her iPad instead of working.
She has no idea her photo will be on this blog.
Thanks pooch! Woof!

Inês Pereira is our new intern!
We can definitely with all certainty say she is indeed working!
It would be rude to assume differently anyway, so here is a "short" introduction written by her.

"Hello, I'm Inês and I'm from Almada. I've always been pretty sure I wanted to do something related to animation since I was a kid. I attended high school at António Arroio, where I studied Audiovisual Communication with a focus on Multimedia. From there, I moved out and attended college in Portalegre, and now I have a degree in Design and Multimedia Animation. Yay! Now while Nerd Monkeys is my first experience in the area, I did work retail for a little while (super glad I'm not there anymore, considering what's going on). I only spent four days in the studio before this all went down and we had to start working from home, which does make me a little sad because the learning process and getting feedback does become a little tougher. But hopefully all of this gives me a little more time so that when things eventually return to normal, I'll be going full steam ahead~!"

Boring, just like every other intern.

Anyway, have a nice isolation week!
Take care, teddy bear.

The story so far...

Do you like reading?
More than looking at pictures?
Good.
Here we go.

It all started when Francisco was 6 years old.
As a young and excited boy that he was, Francisco would play videogames for hours on end.
His parents still recall that one time when they thought he was crying because some bully made fun of him on the playground. No. Those were 10 hour long CRT videogame tears. The best kind of tears.
Yes. Because back in the day real men (or boys in this case) would play videogames on Cathodic Ray Tube TVs. You know, the glass box with a huge light bulb inside directly pointed at your eyeballs.

 

If you look closely, you can see the tears in Francisco's eyes (he is the one holding the controller)

Some years passed and Francis, now a young man, decided he would take on his life long dream of creating videogames by enrolling on a videogame course.
He decided to go to the best videogame course in Lisbon* where the best teachers taught. The Videogames and Animation HND course. There he met the greatest videogame developer (and teacher) of all time, Filipe**.
Together with Filipe, he learned that making videogames made him no money whatsoever. After all, why was he there teaching videogames instead of making them?
Money.
Obviously.

Filipe teaching... somewhere... something... in very low res

*We've heard it lost its charm recently
**He paid us to say this

During his tenure at Etic, Fran worked on a concept for a new and interesting videogame.
A platformer game about a little boy escaping from a factory. He would use his spear to construct his own platforms and activate buttons and things.
Helped by the greatest videogame course coordinator of all time***, Ivan, Fran and his colleague Vasco from IST, worked on Out of Line for 3 months so that they could apply to the 2018 PlayStation Awards.

Francisco and Vasco at Etic "studying" videogames

***He also paid us to say this

Amazingly and without anyone expecting it, they won the Portuguese PlayStation Awards!
They won the Best Game and the Press Award. They took home 10.000€, a PS4 dev kit and 50.000€ worth of marketing money,

Francisco and Vasco at the 2018 PlayStation Awards in Lisbon

Obviously, F knew that this was not normal as videogames normally don't make any money, so he asked Fil if he and his company Nerd Monkeys could help in organizing and producing the full videogame.
Fil met with Nerd Monkeys co-founder Diogo and Etic coordinator Iv. to discuss if this was a viable proposition.
After pretending for some time that they were not interested and that they didn't need more money or projects, they accepted.

(We searched for a photo of Ivan but couldn't find it. Maybe next time.)

Meanwhile, V. decided to pursue other cool projects and a new programmer was brought in.
João Genebra, or as we like to call him, J. worked on a brand new build and started everything from scratch with F.
After that, F. spent an entire year with F., J. and D. at N.M.working to get O.L. into a reliable V.S.

This is the strangest photo we could find of the team working

Nevermind, maybe this one is stranger

Finally and after almost 1,5 years of developing, showing, pitching and producing the team managed to get a deal with a publisher to get the game out the door.

But since we can't talk about the deal, the money or the publisher yet, the "story so far" ends here.
In its due time, we will get back to this and tell you the rest of the story, hopefully after a successful launch.

Until then...
Chop chop lollipop.

Production report = The boring post

Production report!
To all those of you out there waiting on more art and animation (or even code... argh) today is a sad day. Well for most of you anyway, there is always that one person that loves to hear production reports. So this post... is for you... with all our love (xoxo)

Weekly meetings = Boring stuff

One of the most important things we do every week is the weekly meeting.
We gather all the team in one place and discuss the work that was done last week, and the work we will be doing on the next. Kind of like a cult, except we make videogames instead of killing ourselves.

These meetings usually start at 10am and can stretch for an hour or two. Not everyone stays until the end. Normally it starts with everyone discussing general problems and then smaller and smaller groups to discuss specific problems related to code, design, art etc.
Usually whenever we start discussing code, somebody falls asleep. We can't blame them, really.
Code is boring. That's why everyone leaves and goes back to work.

A typical meeting at Nerd Monkey's office. In the photo, Diogo and Francisco discuss design.

Also, at the start of each month, the entire team plays the latest build and gives feedback on everything. Even if everyone has played the build lately, it is always important to voice everyone's opinion as most of the times, some new idea or solution pops up from the most unexpected team member.
Except for Diogo. Nobody likes ideas from Diogo.

Organizing production = More boring stuff

The start of the week also signals the start of a sprint. We do weekly sprints and keep everything tied to these tiny focused loops of work. For keeping track of current and upcoming sprints, tasks, objectives, milestones and everything else we use Altassian Jira.

Old Jira promotional screenshot. What? You thought we would take a screenshot of our own work?

Up until recently we were using Gitlab on our own server. But due to the growing team and the need for a more dedicated tracking, we decided to jump to Jira. The IT guy wanted to kill us when Filipe told him we were done with Gitlab and all that work implementing it in our server would be thrown out. Oh well. We hope he learned his lesson. Also, our budget just increased! Cool.
Yeah, he should have studied something else. Back to school with you, boy!

Jira is an interesting piece of software. It can be used online or downloaded to be placed on our server (we won't be doing that, now. Obviously). Currently there is a free version with a 10 person limit which is perfect for most indie teams. It allows for connection and sharing with other tools like Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Trello, and many others.
NO, it does not connect with Microsoft Messenger, MOM. Jesus!

We are also currently placing all our bugs there, but when we get to Beta we will probably move that to a more dedicated platform for bug reporting.

We continue to use Gitlab for many other things including our own dedicated Wiki.
And our wiki contains a big outline of... Out of Line... hehehe. Yes.

Files and online meetings = Even more boring stuff

We are always all online in Hangouts. Even though the entire team works in a physical office, this way if someone was out for one day of work or decided to stay home to work from there, can keep track of any important announcements. Also: memes.

For overall trips, vacations, days off or any other events, we use Google Calendar. This tool is very useful as it can be easily implemented on your phone (Android or iPhone but not Windows Phone) and synced to notify you of upcoming events. We can also all see at a glance the most important milestones without having to login to Jira or Gitlab.

Alongside the company Google Suite (nerdmonkeys.pt) we also make extensive use of Google Drive, mainly Sheets, Docs and Slides for all our documentation. We usually write in English to make sure that anyone on the team can read them. They are also usually very useful for pitches, presentations and any other occasions.

Yeap, another promotional screenshot. Easy to tell by the Cortana search still on in the lower left corner.

Production Repor-BOOOORRRRRRIIIIINNNNGGGG!

Finally the production report. Every month an email is written where a breakdown of the production with all its achievements, decisions and on-going production is det-BOORRRIIIINNNNGG!

ARGH! - sigh - Well, that's it, I can't take much more of this anymore.

We are done here.

Hope that one person that we love so much actually liked reading this blog post. Next time we will be going back into the things that matter like art, animation, music and such... except for code.

Catch us on Twitter!
Don't panic, flight mechanic!

After Holidays!

So the holidays are now in the past and the new decade is here.
The team took some time to get ready for 2020 and also to shift gears into maximum warp as we start this new year at full throttle (yeap, lot's of car parts metaphors in this one, also, a Start Trek one).

So to keep the holidays spirit intact and bring the joy and happiness that only exists when you spend time with your family (or not), here are some photos and quotes from all our Out of Line team members.

Having said that, you may notice that we are getting bigger! Some new (and old) team members have join (or rejoined) the team. Also, a few of them never actually left and kind of hang around backing the team and waiting for the right moment to step in. But this is a story for another post... maybe.

Francisco Santos - Designer, Artist of All-Things, Pro-Biker

Francisco in Dublin wearing a fence

Francisco says:
"I went in to the cold of Dublin to spend my year's end.
And, in the middle of all that Guinness, I took the opportunity to visit an interactive museum about the vikings and Dublin's medieval era. There I could try out replicas of gear worn in those days.
It's funny to think that swimming caps have evolved so much!"

You think you are so clever and funny, Francis. But you aren't. At least now we can smash you with a pipe in the head and you won't feel a thing. GET BACK TO WORK!

João Genebra - Programmer, Unity Master, Mechanics Tinkerer

João fake photo of him riding a horse

João says:

"It was a good holiday break.

Between spending time with family and friends for Christmas and new year I also went to West Elizabeth to work for a few days on a family ranch.

This is me on a break after feeding the chickens and going for a horse ride."

Our programmer thinks he can trick us by doing some Photoshop magic and bashing a real photo with a photo of his head. BUT HE CAN'T. We can totally see this is fake! Nice try though. NOW, GET BACK TO WORK!


Diogo Vasconcelos - Producer, Boss, Late

Diogo was yet again late at sending his photo and comment so...

Mafalda Claro - Associate Producer, Diogo's Life-line, Woman

Somebody else's dog. Photo probably stolen from Facebook

Mafalda says:

"This year the holidays were a time to enjoy family, relax and plan the new year (and the new projects ahead).  

I had a great family Christmas, full with cheese, ham, good regional wine and that typical "too much food" Portuguese table, but it was particularly special because it was our puppy's first Christmas: behold Tyr, The Lawgiver!"

Mafalda sent us a photo of her dog in a bed wearing fake antlers. Not only is the photo in a vertical super slim fashion (causing terrible design anxiety to everyone) but is she really expecting us to believe that she would own such a cute pup? I don't think so. Stealing photos from other people is horrible and you should know better! NOW, GET BACK TO WORK!

Filipe Duarte Pina - Co-Producer, Project Manager, Ex-Boss

The worst sleepers you could wear

Filipe says:
"Got a lot of really cool presents, but these sleepers that my wife gave me are really something else. I love Rick and Morty and actually owning such a silly thing as these oversized things just warms my heart, and my feet! Hahahaha!

This is horrible! You are happy because you got presents? Your family is not that important, huh? Also you are wearing sleepers shaped like the heads of two characters, does this mean your feet are constantly inside their bodies? ARGH! YUCK! ...GET BACK TO WORK!

Wilson Almeida - Designer, Breaker-of-things, Joke Master

Thank you Wilson, we totally won't have nightmares now

Wilson says:
"Squeeeeeeeak! Squeak..."

 Another team member who thinks we can't spot the terrible Photoshop mash-up. Listen, WE KNOW YOU ARE NOT A MOUSE. Now, stop this nonsense and go do your job... 
...wait
...that's not right.
...AH! GET BACK TO WORK!

Barna Nemes - Animator, Intern, magyar

Yeap, a Christmas tree. How original.

Barna says:

Tessék itt egy kép az idei rohadt nagy fánkról, ami alig fért be a nappaliba. De azért nagyon szép volt. Köszi a családomnak a sok finom kaját :D Puszi mindenkinek!

Really? How nice of you, Barna.
If you don't mind, would you please continue your work related affairs?
Thank you.


Happy holidays from the team!
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter!
Make it snappy, Pappy.

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.