chichiland

My wife asked me for help with some product photography for her ChiChiLand postcard series. After fussing around with a camera and lights for a bit, I decided to go the CGI route.

What can I say… I freakin’ love Octane Render.

My most recent project took me into a new, unknown and unexpected territory. There was no motion design, no vfx, no gaming, interactivity involved. Just some machining and a whole lot of power tools.

I was invited to participate in the collaboration with Kiki's Cocoa and ChiChiLand, to create a set of 27 exclusive chocolate sets accompanied by a block-printed bandana. Using official "agency terms" I guess I served as a technical director and craftsman. To put it simply - I used a combination of vector illustration, laser etching and wood shop tools to produce linoleum stamps based on the original designs by my Chi Michalski.

It's been a while since I updated the progress, and I totally skipped any mention of alpha 0.0.7. Now we are at 0.0.8 and although I will be rolling back on some features, I think it's time to show the progress.

I have been working on two main areas of the game: NPC VI and Level Generation.

ChiChiLand Adventure will use procedural generation for many of its elements, including zones within the levels. Within these zones, the entities (zone citizens) will be simulated based on simple sets of rules. In the garden, for example, I am planning to have some animals and some trees. Every x amount of time, each tree will have a chance to bear fruit. The fruit will fall down and roll in a random direction until stopping. Each animal in the zone will have a hunger meter - as they get hungry, they will seek out fruit and eat it. There will definitely be more behaviors, but that's the basic logic.

I would not go as far as calling it Concept ART, but as I was working to develop a number of idle animations for the player sprite, I realized how little I understood about what I am drawing.
I use pixel art is an abstraction, a simplification of an actual form - but I never really stopped to think about what this actual form may be. Needles to say, abstracting something that does not exist was quite tough.

With the look of the character worked out, I begun the basic animation for the sprite. The ChiChiLand Adventure will use a mostly top-down perspective (slightly off vertical), popularized by many Nintendo titles such as Pokemon or Zelda (especially the handheld versions).
I wanted the character to have a cute, bold, slightly stumpy way of walking. Here's a first pass.