Category: I Don’t Give a Craft

  • Small Update

    Well today was semi productive. I was able to get the ground work in place for the main I Don’t Give A Craft page. Unfortunately, Val’s computer had to be sent in for repairs, so it might be a little while before we have graphics for the page 🙁

    Even though Val is unable to work on digital art, we got a set of physical tools to help her make more detailed assets for the game.

    Thanks to these fancy blades, she can make crazier trees!

    And here’s a nice picture of lady parts

    That’s all for today. We’ll try to get something really special posted for tomorrow. Until then, follow me on twitter to keep up to date!

  • I Don’t Give a Craft Art Update

    Hi everyone, today is the day when you get to see the art style for I Don’t Give a Craft!

    Before we get to the images, I thought I would talk a little bit over what I was imagining for I Don’t Give a Craft. For this game, I wanted to give players the experience of playing in a pop-up book. So the game world will be 3D, but people, creatures, and objects will be popped-up 2D animated images. I already have some great ideas planned to really give this pop-up feel to I Don’t Give a Craft and I look forward to sharing it with you all in the next day or two.

    [nggallery id=3]

    There is the awesome artwork from Valerie (my lovely wife 😀 ). We’re going with construction paper assets and my plan is to use programatic motion tweening to animate individual pieces of characters and to build more complex objects with multiple art assets. For example, look at the tree with leaves (Image #6), it’s just the tree without leaves (image #4) with a bunch of green bushes (Image #5) pasted on it. Then look at all the goblin images (#7 – #10), it uses the same set of images, but positioned and angled differently. By going with this route, we can have heavily animated characters without leaving a large memory footprint, which allows us to include even more graphical assets!

    That’s it for today. Please share this, ask questions, leave comments, and follow me on twitter for more updates. Tomorrow, I plan on giving a special update about how these images will be displayed in game.

    Bye for now!

  • Menu Prototypes

    A coworker of mine occasionally uses a program called Pencil to prototype websites. I decided to give it a try and create prototypes for the menus in I Don’t Give a Craft. The great thing about prototyping tools is that i get to structure UI’s without worrying about the details of how it should look, which is great for me since all I typically know I want is rounded corners.
    [nggallery id=1]
    So obviously not perfect, but I got those finished in far less time than it would have taken me to create 9-patch images, draw up some buttons, come up with a color pallet, and write up the code to display the menus. Those menus are probably my fifth revision, and I will definitely be modifying the structure more as my requirements continue to take shape.

    But now an explanation for the above images. In order to help players become immersed in I Don’t Give a Craft, I’m putting a lot of work into making sure the whole experience is cohesive. Part of what makes a game cohesive is how it uses menus. The menu I show above is one that will be used for many purposes, but to give some examples I have provided prototypes for what a Blacksmith would see when practicing smelting or crafting items. The common parts are outlined in the following image.

    By defining the areas specified in the image above, I am setting standards that I will follow when creating all in game menus, and by sticking to these standards, I will end up providing you all with a much more cohesive and immersive gaming experience.

    So this is a very small update, and probably not very interesting to most people, but I want you all to know that I’m not just trying to slap something together here. I’m planning, prototyping, and diagraming. Speaking of which, check back tomorrow and watch for my tweets as I will be giving an update regarding how the game will look!

    Thanks again everyone, and as always, leave a comment and tell me what you think!

  • I Don’t Give a Craft

    I Don’t Give a Craft is #myouyagame focussed on crafting, adventuring, and leveling. You just finished learning from a master craftsperson and it’s time to open up your own shop! Keep your store stocked by purchasing raw materials and crafting a variety of items, increase the quality of your items by playing minigames based on your trade, and learn to make new items by taking special job requests.

    Money is going to be a main factor to how much you can do in this game. If you want to make better items, you have to purchase pricier materials. Before certain items can be added to your repertoire, specialized equipment needs be be bought. If you want to increase your shop’s inventory space, you will need to pay for an expansion. The primary way to make money in I Don’t Give a Craft is by having items on your store shelves. So purchase raw materials, craft a plethora of products, and place a selection of them on display. Durring store hours, people will offer you money for an item, and you can decide to sell at that price or hold out for more money.

    People are willing to pay more money for quality products. So if you want to gain more money, the best way is to improve what you make. This is done through Cooking Mama-esqu minigames where you try to craft as quickly and accurately as possible. As a blacksmith, you will need to keep your iron hot enough to hammer into shape. As an alchemist, you will need to stir your potion as it cooks to keep it from boiling over. Your best attempt will be saved, and that product will now be higher quality and bring in more money when sold!

    You start the game with basic crafting knowledge and a small amount of items in your repertoire, which is enough to keep your store afloat, but you won’t see anything neat in the game that way. Every so often, someone will come into your store asking for an item that you don’t know how to make. You can tell that person “tough luck, I only sell basic items” or you can ask them where they heard about this item. This person might run an apple orchard and they heard about how a goblin tribe out east uses a special tool to harvest apples much faster than the conventional methods. So you go on an adventure to find this goblin tribe and when you get there, you have a question to answer: how do you get a one of those goblin apple pickers from the goblins? Do you slay goblins in the apple grove until they drop an apple picker? Do you sneak into the goblin camp and steal the apple picker? Or do you offer an item to the goblins as trade for an apple picker? Either way, when you acquire the item, you will have to play the minigame in order to create your first apple picker. After you create it, the customer who requested the item will show up in your store the next day to purchase whichever item they wanted.

    I Don’t Give a Craft will also have skill levels, equipment for adventuring, cities to move to, romantic interests, puns, and much more that I will talk about at a later date.

    I’m announcing this right now because OUYA is giving away developer consoles to people who tweet about the game they would make for OUYA’s launch in March. So I wanted to share this with everyone, hopefully get a small group of people following the growth of this game, and get a bunch of people favoriting or retweeting about this game using hashtag #myouyagame.

    Thanks much, everyone, and please ask questions and leave comments.