Devlog #1: A lobby, some creeps and an engineer. And how to make a pencil doodle 2d game character walking animation. That drove me crazy…

Hi. It's @truetibo, the human working on this game. Check out this amazing trailer before continuing to read:

The first fifteen seconds, straight out of the game. Sound on.

The story

So the idea basically is an expression of my own fears and frustrations around AI. I'm sure I'm not the only one. As of today the outlook for our jobs is pretty grim, AI can do everything faster and better. The company I work for shrank in size significantly last year and we are not hiring anymore. Because there really is no demand, the few remaining engineers can now tackle the work of previously a huge team. The job also shifted from being hardcore coding and brain muscle flexing to just telling AI what to do and reviewing it. The irony couldn't be bigger: previously I was working as a manager of few teams and what I missed most was hands on coding. So I switched company and role. Just to find a a few years later that I'm back at managing but this time managing AI instead of humans, which is… Meh… Funny how life works sometimes, isn't it? Anyhow, let's talk about the game!

The idea came to me last Christmas. I kept refining it in my head for months and only started actually working on it recently. Focusing on it maybe a bit more than I should :D

The lobby

The game features the last engineer in a company, he's only there because the courts rules that a real company needs at least one employee to legally exist. The AI however wants to deprecate him (aka kill him, as legally they have no way). So it starts with his desktop being sabotaged and exploding. He is on floor 0 and the AIs mastermind super-head boss is on the 20th floor above him. So he has to fight through every floor, waiting for the elevator to be able to move higher up in the building, becoming more and more challenging.

You're a pencil doodle

Everything regarding the game's AI environment is AI generated pixel art. The robots, the office. Everything that is supposed ot be AI in the game, is actual AI. The human however, is a pencil doodle. That's the whole joke, the human stays human. So everything that is human in the game is actually humanly created (as much as this is still possible in todays day and age).

Started as a page of sketches. Different poses, different styles. I kept drawing until one of them looked like he had almost given up:

The one I liked I re-traced using Adobe Illustrator (AI, not AI hahaha). Then, to animate him, I cut him into pieces: head, face, two arms, two legs. Every piece on its own layer, so in theory he can move like a puppet.

The walk that broke my patience

I spent way too many hours cutting him into layers and rigging him in after effects using a tool called 'puppeteer'. What I couldn't wrap my head around is how to do these seamless movements while keeping the thick outline.

I even asked Threads for help. Some people replied. That's how I ask for help these days: post it and hope strangers are kind.

One stranger answered with a drawing: leave the outline open where the limbs meet the body, so an arm can rotate without showing a seam. It's obvious once you see it.

So, I tried myself in after effects with that puppeteer plugin:

The robots can render a perfect pixel-art terminator. The human can't figure out how to walk. Fitting.

In the end, after hours spent trying to rig him properly, I was not able to come up with something really good. So I decided to revert to drawing multiple frames and just modifying it digitally a bit.

There are four frames of him standing there typing, each with a slightly different head and hand. For walking, a small rig takes each of those four and bends only the legs, ten steps per frame. So four typing frames, four walk clips, and the game switches between them.

The walk is driven by distance, not time, so his feet always match his speed. Then a few lines of code add a lean, a sway, a bounce on every step and a little squash on landing. It's simpler, and it finally looks more right.

The laptop is the weapon

He holds a laptop now, because the engineer fights with code and the laptop is his weapon. The sketches for it are a mess..

The one that won is the little guy typing, with a smile. Pencil first, then clean lines drawn over it.

The plan: you write your weapon. As a small scripts that can be purchased and then stacked together. For example you could buy a 'for' loop script and a 'shoot' script, and stack them to shoot periodically. Something like:

• ✎every 1s: shoot three times
• ✎on kill: maybe drop a turret
• ✎when hit: fire a shockwave

Right now there's one starter script that shoots on a timer. It's basic. The rest is coming.

The sound

There isn't a single sound file in the game. Every effect is synthesized by a small script: noise and sine waves shaped by a fade-out. The monitor click, the mains hum, the explosion rumble, the elevator ding, the pop when a robot bursts, the blip when the laptop fires. Each one is a few lines, generated by AI and tweaked by ear until it sounds right.

Here they all are. Press play, or download them. Anyway I might replace/fine-tune them later, let's see.

• Monitor clickdownload
• Mains humdownload
• Explosiondownload
• Engineer appearsdownload
• Camera whooshdownload
• Elevator dingdownload
• Elevator doorsdownload
• Robot popdownload
• Laptop firesdownload
• Bullet landsdownload
• Engineer gets hitdownload

What's next

• ✎Killing, weapons, money, shop. For now all you can do is run away

100k views, 30 followers

One thing I did not expect: my posts on Threads reached about 103k views in the last 30 days, and I have 30 followers. Most of it came from one controversial post. It seems to be pretty straight forward and it seems that this whole what is 'real art' and who owns AI generated stuff debate is wild right now and leads to a lot of views. Unfortunately that doesn't translate into real followers, so yeah it's cool but not sure ho useful..

So if you like what you see or are curious, how about following me on Threads @truetibo or subscribing for the newsletter. I'll send one email per devlog, no more. Triggered by a real human, me. Robots already spam you daily and read all your mails anyway.