Hello everybody! We're currently making a game for university about a giant chicken destroying the city to save her little chicks.

I didn't realize itch.io had a devlog forum before - we are in the last days of the project - but I thought I still might post learnings and timelapses from the project! :) My posts will be about making the art of the game. If you're more interested in the programming side of things, you can find the coding counterpart on our programmer's blog: http://acribic.com/category/trash-chicken/ (he's still 2 weeks behind, new updates will come :))

But back to art! Here is a timelapse, where I drew the fox (our enemies) and the chick (you want to save).

I used GIMP to draw it and then the Layer export plugin to export the different body parts. Those body parts I imported into the bone-based animation tool Spriter. I then "rigged" it/created the skeleton for animation. Spriter is a pretty nice tool, even has IK features in the non-premium/free version. Saved me a lot of time with the animation :)

That's it on this. I hope you found it useful! If you want to get updated on the rest of the devlog, you can follow me here on itch.io: https://tinyworlds.itch.io/ or Twitter @tinyruin.

Besides characters and animation I also created the sounds for our game.

www.sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc2016/ has been a really helpful resource for that. It's a huge, free-to-use, high-quality soundpack. Especially the gun sounds were really good! Other than that I recorded my own chicken to get some sounds for the main character chicken and the little chicks you want to save as player, which were captured by foxes (yes we had cute little chicks at that time!).

Troughout editing the sounds I used the free Audacity. I want to switch to a different non-destructive Audio workstation at some point, but Audacity was fast to use for me and made it easier. And we had rather little time (5 weeks), so I didn't want to learn too many new tools.

For the music I just looked trough soundcloud for Creative Commons tracks and ended up using this track by Aritus: https://soundcloud.com/aritusmusic/aritus-spirit

Beware it's Future Funk! (kind of) I liked the contrast of a game where you destroy a lot of shit with something more upbeat and funky. And a happy mood was also what we were aiming for, so this song did fit really well in terms of pacing and mood.

Hope you found this useful! I'll post some more devlogs later on, about making weapons for the game and also a bit of PR.

 If you want to get updated on the rest of the devlog, you can follow me here on itch.io: https://tinyworlds.itch.io/ or Twitter @tinyruin.

EDIT: Oh also for your Linux users out there, here is a little script to remove the silent parts in any mp3 files in a folder. Saved me a lot of work :)

for f in *.mp3
do
    sox $f $f silence 1 0.1 0% reverse silence 1 0.1 0% reverse
done