My Night Job - Dev

Hello guys and girls , how are you doing?

On 2015 January I stared working on a project called My night job. We had 3 programmers, one main artist, one art intern and me.
My role on the project is Interface design, UX stuff. But also i'm working on art/assets integration, additional art and color grading. Also making some fx and additional animations and art.
I wanted to create this topic sooner, but the we're in crunch to get stuff done So i was unable to write a decent post. I think we still have about 30 days of development.

Overview:

A mix of 80’s horror flicks and non-stop score-driven arcade games of those same years, My Night Job features a massive mansion that must be defended, explored and exploited.My night Job is a score centered game, like arcade games from 80's and 90's. You'll walk through the Mansion, killing monsters and rescuing people. On MNJ you can carve your initials (like TOM or RIC) and put it on a local leaderboard, or compare it online with friends or world players.

Some screenshots, i just took, last build This is not final yet. Anything can change for the final version of the game.

So, my idea with this thread, is to showcase some of MNJ's development

I'll post material about the process and comment about my part of development.
And of course, we're open to comments and feedback. Mapcore community always provides valuable feedback and suggestions on game art. So i'm pretty sure we can enhance stuff based on this

thanks for your time !

Cya Soon

Working so much lately! didn't have time to post news on the project. But now i'll try to post some stuff about the process

about the logo process:
[Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5442600/mnj_logo_evo.gif]

Also some progress on the main menu screens. from the first, until the latest
[Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5442600/mnj_mainMenuEvo.gif]

Most time, i do animated mockups on After effects, to figure out how interface will move, transitions, etc.
And yet, sometimes stuff looks good on after effects, but makes no sense when in game... But most part of time, mockups help test stuff

whoa, time flies...!!

Effects
So, i was wondering if it's interesting to post some of sfx i made for the game. Amost (maybe) all of the them i made using after effects, photoshop and illustrator. I believe some techniques could be useful for other people who are doing pixel art or cheating at it.:)
I'm a pixel art "cheater".
*There is an illustrator/animator working on My Night job. He's responsible for characters, animations etc. His work os more like pure pixel art and stuff.

The cornerstone of most of effects is "HD index painting" technic, by this amazing pixel artist, Dan Fessler: http://danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop
I believe this technique could be adapted to other situations, like realtime shaders for instance.

Wiggle:

Here i used a looped wiggle ( http://motionscript.com/design-guide/looping-wiggle.html ) expression on after effects to create a firefly swarm. I made it reusable, slider controller (attached wiggle variables to those sliders) so i could customize different swarms to use across the mansion. At end, i just used once in game, but learned how to use slider controllers on after effects :))

Fake 3d Extrude
The original idea was to extrude a 2d key into a rotating object... Inside a composition, when i duplicate layers, the script will change the Z-offset to distribute those layers equally, making the illusion of extrude.

this key wasn't used at the end, but i made some rotating debris cluster to be used when a room is demolished ingame. Metal slug use this trick to have dozens of moving objects onscreen using few particles.
debris cluster are vector images, extruded, with posterized color and AA turned off

Dither Patterns
I assembled a mini library with different dither patterns, to be used with HD painting trick

Lighing Shaft

Extruded profile made on illustrator, later on blur, color posterize, dither pattern...

On the final version, i added a ripple effect to deform light shaft's base

Clockwork

At first, i made the gears rotate, but after effects was having soume trouble to render the edge pixels correctly, so on the second try, i made the holes to rotate (using inverted alpha stencil). Using images was considerably harder to achieve a "soft" pixel-circle, so i made most the shapes on Illustrator. Used a radial blur+noisy texture to add some grain on the gears. Chains are moved with Offset filter. The smaller have half size of the big one, so i can fit both on a animation cycle.

Skull Smoke & Explosion

This smoke was made to be used in the intro cutscene, but later i used on a background
When i discovered Gradient Wipe on after effects, i just went crazy! As we can imagine, this filter makes possible to animate a transition based on value, from a given image. For instance, i use vale to make skulls appear and dissapear. Then i mapped those textures into a sphere, to give some volume to them... and added ripple, to make it more like steamy
       

This explosion is similar. Used the same gradient wipe to make stuff dissolve, added particles on the background (grey matter). On dust layer, added two twirl effects The color was made possible with Colorama, (works similar to gradient map, on photoshop).

Uploading Survivors into the rescue helicopter.
Used when you're rescuing survivors from the mansion. A texture with pattern dither + gradient ramp is used to make survivors appear. Walking animation is a very simple wiggle expression ( "wiggle(2,3)" )

Well, this is what i have to show for now. Next post, i'll talk about interface and typeface on the game Also, interface animations were prototyped on after effects before implementing on (harsh) unity timeline.

Released!!

Last week, My Night Job was released on Steam :)! http://store.steampowered.com/app/437100/

After more than a Year, we've been working on MNJ. Thanks for all the support and comments on this thread. Unfortunately i wasn't able to post lots of content here, but i may add more making of stuff here soon, since now i'm a little less busy working on the game itself PS4 Version will be released sometime on may!Oh, and also we have a Steam community Leaderboard :) Cheers!!