Monday, February 22, 2016

Rainbow's Magical Flower Salon - My First Mobile Game For Kids

First I must say how much I love playing games. I love digital (PC, mobile, X-box) and real world (tangible) games. I love hidden object games, board games, card games, puzzles, first person shooter, cooking, strategy.... yeah, I even love playing guess the shape/color or animal name games designed for babies and toddlers. If I could live of air and feed my family on 'universe juice' I'd play games at least 99% of my time. Got to admit - I'm a procrastinator to the bone ;). 

Enter science in the defense of procrastinators who love (live) to play games - YAY! There are numerous studies that positively tie gaming (of all and any kind) to creativity, imagination, problem solving, better motor skills, and so on and so forth. Here's one such article on creativity in kids. And in my own experience I strongly believe that this is valid for us grown ups as well.

There's only one thing that I love as much as playing games, and that's imagining and creating characters, worlds and stories, and bringing them to life through illustration. And when gaming and drawing combine they become game art.

Bored by the long story? (heart break) Skip to the pretty pictures.
Curious to read on (ear to ear smile), please go ahead. Scroll, scroll...

In the past few years, I created game art only if it was for a client. I had to follow their rules, meet their expectations, and model everything by their liking. Not that I'm complaining, client work is what puts food on my table, and what trains my brain to think in many different ways, and I love every bit of it, but... There are all these ideas swirling and twirling around my brain, formed during the creative process I go through when working for a client. Some of them are good, some ridiculous, some reach the client's eyes some don't, some are accepted only as ideas, others are completely rejected. In the end just the few 'lucky' ones make it all the way to the clients' games.

All these ideas stay in my brain and are very persistent to stay there, no matter how hard I try to chase them to oblivion. Resistance is futile! 

I thought it would be a blast to create my own game, to give this ideas a chance to come alive. The thing is that aside the ideas for the storyboard and the skill to draw, I know next to nothing about programming. And knowledge in programming can't be poured in someones brain through a funnel, nor programmers work for free or on a promise for alleged future payment. Since I didn't had the budget to pay a programmer to follow my every whim, I put the idea on hold in the corners of my brain. And then, out of the blue, a revelation appeared...

About a year ago (and some) I found out about a nifty platform called TutoTOONS. In short - if you create beautiful drawings, but programming is like martian to you, this platform lets you create and publish your own game just by dragging and dropping pretty pictures. 

My reaction was... well it was something like: "MUAHAHA, my game will come ALIVE! It'll be ALIVE! ALI... cough, cough, cough...." Never mind, I'm blabbering.

It was time to let all the ideas to flood my mind. And I sorted them out. And the idea for my first game was born.

The first and most important thing was to create the storyboard. You can't take random stuff like characters, environments, tools, etc. throw them together and hope they'll produce the storyboard for you. But on the other hand without any idea of a character I can't make any story. So this is somewhat a parallel process, brainstorm a little bit about the character, and then a bit about the story. Go back and forth, until you have some solid ground on which you can build on.

At this stage, I also decided on the style of illustration and the media that I'll use. I decided to use Adobe Photoshop, although my digital painting skills at that time were average. For a pro in Adobe Illustrator and vector art, and skilled illustrator in traditional media, digital painting is bit scary, no mater how hard you try to convince yourself, that it is the same as drawing and painting traditionally. This was my first time to paint digitally more seriously, and since it was a pleasure project I had the luxury to learn through actual work and problem solving.

The Creative Process


The storyboard sketch went like this.


The character design was next, use the sketch, do a 'little' color study, and paint. Considering my level of digital painting skill at that time, I was satisfied with this result. Rainbow was born!


I was excited to start drawing the flowers, and backgrounds and everything. But this was a pleasure project and I worked hard for pure pleasure and not a cent to be paid till the game is published and makes its first download and/or purchase. 

Having mouths to feed I had to juggle between "Drawing for pleasure" and "Drawing for food", and it was obvious that this project will be a long run to the finish. I loved and lived for every single minute I was able to squeeze and work on my mobile game. I also had to hone my digital painting skills while drawing the actual illustration that will make my game. There were many days spent in painting something to the tiniest intricate detail, just to be discarded later. For example this background for the intro:


And this instruction screen:


All that going one step forward then several steps back, made my painting skills better and better. And with advancing of the skills I wanted to refine my drawings more and more. Rainbow and her flowers evolved:



And the drawings were not the only thing that changed and evolved. New game types, animations and options were added to the TutoTOONS platform. All the nice things I wanted my game to have, become  available month by month. And so my storyboard evolved. Scenes were changed or added as TutoTOONS added more possibilities.

And a project that could be finished in a month (and a half maybe) took a year and half. But during that time I learned so much that I wouldn't want to be any other way.

In the end I'm satisfied how everything turned out, and i hope that the players will enjoy playing "Rainbow's Magical Flower Salon" as much as i enjoyed creating it.

Here's exclusive pre-release first glance at sketches and finished game scenes:















"Rainbows Magical Flower Salon" will be available for free download on App Store, Google Play and Amazon soon.
Don't forget to subscribe and follow @IrenaGladkova for release anouncement. 


If you read this post from the beginning to the very end, you're a true champion, and I'm beyond grateful.

1 comment:

TutoTOONS said...

Wonderful blog post and beautiful game art, Irena!
We always love to see, read and hear artist stories and experiences how they create games with our game builder, but we think it's probably the first time that someone covered the whole creative process so thoroughly. Thank you for sharing this! :)

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