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Gallery Update!

Hi everyone! We just wanted to share a quick update on Fara's development progress. Things have been going great and we currently have a build of the game that we consider Beta. We are really excited that things are moving along so quickly and we'll be announcing the official launch date of the game, as well as our trailer (made by the awesome Graham Dunn) very soon!

Also, the Fara media gallery has been updated with current images from the game. We've also added some previously unreleased areas/gameplay to the screenshots, so be sure to check it out!

Kickstarter Shout Out! - We Did It!

Hey everyone! We wanted to update our blog with a big thank you to everyone who supported our Kickstarter campaign. You guys were incredible and helped us exceed our goal! So here's a shout out to everyone that backed us (sorted by Kickstarter name):

Iron Tier:
Cindy Au, Adam, Adrian K.

Copper Tier:
Craig Snyder, Ben Crowley, Andy Thorington ,orangeman, Curtis Melroe

Bronze Tier: 
Colin Foote, jonkrusell, Rathanak Loeung, Gruesom Grimp, timothy locke, Justin Ng

Silver Tier:
Derek Rundgren, Andy Cope, Brian, Daniel Ragusa, Benedikt Betz, Julien Feraud, Debby Fleming, Josias Valdez, Sarah, Chad Woyewodzic, Kirt Dankmyer, Alan Gerding, lannie.poo, Benjamin Seiler, David Lovely, Jeff Martini, Chuck Lawton, brian papa, Stephan Szabo, Jasmine Choinski, Robert Smith, Chris O'Connor, Rob Klingenberger, Michael Ryan, Payne Eifert, mwuenschel, Ryan Mock, Steve Wilson, Jeff Snider, Martin Tuxen Grandeville, Michael Jacob, Patrick, Kyle McLauchlan, AndreasH, Peter Por, Jonathan Morris, Michael David Johas Teener, Michael Atchison, Tom Hollett, Tom Meier, Masa, James Schirmer, Kent O Hudson, jwalk2515, Shola Akinnuso, Steven King @madrogue, Justin Brede, Palenoue, Brian Jardine

Gold Tier:
Matt Johnston, Heath Morrison, Ben Lewis, Graham, Anne, Lauren, J. Kyle Pittman, Billy Nolen, David Johnson, James Layfield, fbrocks, Joshua Beale, Cynthia Shotwell

Platinum Tier:
David Pittman, Kim Pittman, Jah Raphael, Mary R Proctor, Lane Roathe, Symptomless Coma, Mike Edwards, Sarah Edwards, Justin Cash, Karen D Edwards, Susan K Edwards, Justin Lloyd, Ken Tabor, Skip Hirvela,  Elaine and Gary Wilson

Rare Earth Tier:
William and Mariette Estabrook, Will and Nicole Estabrook, Pam and Richard Strickland, Robert Edwards

Kickstarter and Official Game Title!

As the end of development nears, we decided to put together a Kickstarter page to help us secure a bit of additional funding and push to the end. For those that don't know, Kickstarter is a great site that helps small companies or individuals get creative projects off the ground. The neat thing about the program is that people who help fund a project receive special gifts for their support. In our case, people who help us out will receive things like a poster, original art, soundtrack, special thanks in the credit, or, of course, a copy of the game!

We are really excited about the opportunity to get people more involved with the development process and hope that you or someone you know chooses to partner with us! The other big news today is that we have decided to use our Kickstarter campaign as a platform for officially announcing the title of our game:

That screenshot is from the in-game title screen, and is also a first peek at the art style that will feature in the game's cinematics and character portraits. The name "Fara" is derived from Old Norse, meaning "to travel", and plays an important part in the game's story. If it sounds strange, don't worry! We will reveal more about the world of Fara soon! Also, we'll be sure to give several updates regarding our Kickstarter progress, as well as an outtakes video revealing just how many takes it took Texel and I to make the video for the site. So stay tuned!

What's Old is New: Finding the Retro/Modern Balance

Recently, The Smithsonian American Art museum unveiled the winners of a 2012 exhibition that will display videogame art. Out of the 240 nominees, 80 were chosen, and, for the most part (uh....I'm looking at you Battle for Middle Earth II) the choices were sound. Because videogame art seems to be getting a lot of press lately, I thought it would be a great time to discuss the art style for our forthcoming game.

Before starting our project, I thought a lot about how our game should look. We knew it was going to be 2D and I knew that I wanted it to have retro inspired look. However, with Texel's engine, we could do a lot more than simply draw sprites or tiles (as I mentioned in one of our earlier posts), so I also knew that I wanted to incorporate some more modern aspects (like particle effects). The final piece of the puzzle was the fact that the entire game world would be one, large single canvas.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the world should be a highly rendered, painterly environment. With the ability to work on such a large canvas, and no need for repetition, this was a natural choice. Next, I needed to determine the look of the painting. The past few games I've worked on focused more on layer styles in Photoshop, mixed with clean design and occasional cartoon exaggeration. I love this sort of style, but I knew for our game I wanted to try something different, so I opted for a super saturated, detailed oriented look. Also, I made sure to paint from a predetermined palette for each world area, so all of the colors would feel unified. Working in this way has been really enjoyable, and I've loved trying to pack as much detail into every screen as I can.

Once my first area (a beach and a forest) were complete, I began to think about how the characters in the game should be portrayed. My initial impulse was to paint them in the same style as the background, but this yielded terrible results. The main issue was that the characters meshed too much with their surrounding environment, and the whole thing started to feel muddy. Without the ability to easily tell environment from character, I worried the gameplay would suffer.

At this point, I started thinking about past games I've played, in particular The Secret of Mana (which can be found in the gallery at the top of this post). This Super Nintendo classic used outlines around all of its character sprites to differentiate them from the world. As a test, I took my test character, drew a hard black outline around him and placed him on top of my world canvas. The effect was a success, as an easy distinction between the character and the world became apparent. The only remaining issue was that the highly painted character looked out of place with a black outline, which was more reminiscent of classic games (try this site out for great examples of old school pixel art). I tried redrawing him with a more retro inspired flavor and found it not only unified him with the black outline, but the different style helped him stand out from the world even more.

As time wears on and I draw more characters for the game, and look at my completed environments, I feel that I have developed an art style that is beautiful without intruding on gameplay. Because in the end, the game's art style should compliment the game design. After all, that's what makes a video"game" fun, and video"art" something you were forced to talk about in your college art history class.