Switching from pixel art to vector art

I've been making pixel art since I started game development, and I love the style. It's a tedious process though. Creating all the frames and animating them correctly takes a lot of time. Recently I gave vector art a shot using Inkscape. It took me a couple days to get used to the new way of drawing but I really like how vector art looks. One nice thing about it is you can make "pieces" of objects and characters, which are a lot easier to animate. No more frames for each part of the animation, just one set of pieces that gets moved around.

Here's some examples of my pixel vs. vector art:

Each frame of an animation has to be defined.

The "pieces" of the cowboy character are in the bottom right. 

Game Jams

I joined GBJAM 3 and got 84th out of 248 submissions. Here's my scores in each of the judged areas:

I thought my graphics were awesome and the gameplay was boring and had been done before, but that's not what everyone else thought! I'm going to be working more on graphics and animations for a while to sharpen my skills. I'll be doing Ludum Dare 30 with a small team and I'll be able to get some great practice in. I'm also planning on taking my GBJAM game and turning it into a mobile game with better art and animation.

First published game and new gamejam

I've published my first game Thug Busters! It's not much, but it's free! I wanted to learn Unity and publish to Android so I gave it a shot and it only took three weeks.

I'm also participating in an online game jam GBJAM. My idea is a game where you rotate the world around the player to get them to the end. Check me out on Twitter for more frequent updates!

New schedule

I started a 2 hours per night schedule to work on games (after work) and it's been great so far! Check out this video of an early build of my new mobile game Thug Buster! I've started using Unity and I'm loving it. I'm testing out the Android market with this game just to see what's possible.

Holy Split! Finished!

Our game Holy Split! won us 3rd place out of 17 teams at Wolverine Soft's 48 hour game jam. We got a trophy and medals (plus Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm)! It was awesome.

The way the competition works is at 7pm on Friday they give you a theme, ours was 'separate', and by 7pm Sunday you have to have it running and ready to play. At that point everyone in the competition plays each others games and votes for their 3 favorites. There are also 4 judges that play every game, tally the votes, and come to a decision.

My team consisted of me, my two brothers, and my girlfriend. Everyone contributed great things and the game would be holy shit without them. The amount of time that I put into the game was close to 18 hours which left plenty of time to sleep, eat, and play Magic.

Here's the download link, try it out!
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gukbqltbug0d5de/A_5VQUgz5J

Watch the video of the final version:

Holy Split! Almost there...

Here's a quick video of the game 2 hours before the competition ends:

Holy Split! Day 2 Update

Here are a couple videos of our development today:

Enemy movement and spawns

Aiming and firing

Wolverine Soft 48 Hour Game Jam 11

Wolverine Soft's 11th 48 hour game jam started last night with the theme of "Separate" which was awesome because two years ago the theme was "Combine". I like both of those themes a lot because they are mechanics of games. Last year the theme was "The End". It isn't really a mechanic so it was hard to come up with ideas for.

Our idea is going to be a roguelike top down shooter that gets crazy fast and is all about time management. I won't go into details until the end but here's a video of the prototype so far:

Also, I like the characters a lot so here they are scaled larger: