The Tumblehead Blog

Everybody has been hard at work for the past 24 hours to finish the game for the big launch party Friday at 7 pm!

Juliette had to take drastic measures to finish her animations!

The Director overseeing the project

With 2 days until deadline we now have a lot of cool stuff! Our talented interns have been on fire and been very productive - here's a little sneak peek to get you ready for the premiere tomorrow!

This marks the first week of two of our game jam where our goal is to make a ready-to-publish game for iOS in only 2 weeks! The team consists of: Magnus Møller (Director, Unity wizard), Anne Birk (Animator), Ania Nowa (Animator), Lasse Bruntse (Animator), Juliette Viger (Animator) and Cristina Bojesen (Production Manager) - all except from Magnus Møller are soon-to-be 3rd year students at The Animation Workshop in Viborg. The first day we gathered reference and brainstormed ideas - coming up with quite a little original idea if we may say so ourselves!

Above: Part of the white board during the initial brain-storm Next up was designing the characters - without spoiling too much, we can say that it involves a wolf and three cute little animals.

Above: A line-up of the characters from the game The programming and game design is done in Unity with Playmaker and 2D Toolkit. If you want to know more about the process you can read this interview - it’s about another game of ours in the making called “BottleNeck” (see previous post on this blog)

Above: Screen-shot from Unity implementing 3D elements and 2D characters with photos of the background The animation is hand-drawn in Tv-Paint and imported in Unity using a plugin called 2D ToolKit to control the animation. The style is quite limited but striving to be clear and simple. For the backgrounds we have been out and about in our local community of Viborg to take photos of streets and green spaces to fit into the game. The photos are merged with 2D hand-drawn elements and will define the world of the characters.

Above: A still frame from the animation done in Tv-Paint

Above: This picture is a comparison of what one of the characters looks like in its rough state and how it will look in the cleaned up version

"Bottleneck" is a casual puzzle game for mobile and tablets, produced by Tumblehead. We have been working on it for quite some time now and it is a great pleasure to finally be able to show some stills and artwork here on our brand new studio blog!

Above: Artwork for the start screen of the game.

Kristoffer W. Mikkelsen came up with the core idea for the gameplay back in Juli 2013, and from there we (Kristoffer, Peter Smith & Magnus Møller) brainstormed together to figure out how it could work as a complete game with challenges, progression, collectables etc. The plan for the first alpha version was sketched out on a tablecloth at a local restaurant in Viborg.

Above: Magnus I. Møller (left) and Kristoffer W. Mikkelsen (right) brainstorming gameplay features.

After the master plan was laid down, Magnus started to develop the prototype, and Kristoffer began designing the characters and backgrounds. We kept iterating on the game design and graphics for quite some time whenever we had a moment to spare.

Above: Prototype (left) and the current look of the game (right).

Now we are finally getting close to test a vertical slice of the game. We have all the core functions implemented, and the final art work is getting there as well. We plan to arrange a game test event in Viborg in a couple of weeks, to be announced on our facebook page.

More to come soon!