Hey, I’m Alec! My work on the team largely consists of pixel art and design work for the enemies you’ll be encountering.
The Mother series has featured a very big, very colorful cast of enemies. I do my best to follow in those footsteps with my own enemy and character designs, letting the characters be expressive through their shapes and forms.
For example, let’s look at this bull. When working on an enemy that’s grounded in reality I’ll study imagery and video footage of the subject matter in question. Next I’ll create a rough sketch to get the size, shape and proportions of the design as a base for cleaning up and coloring.
Everything starts with a sketch, so it’s kept loose for now. Sometimes it’s just scratches in MS Paint.
An cleaner, inked outline follows and allows for easier coloring in the next step.
Look at him! Isn’t he cute? Keeping the nature of the character, their intentions and the world around them in mind when designing all our enemies is important to the overall feel of things..
The sprite process is very similar.
Start with a clean outline…
Add the basic colors…
And shade everything! Some changes to the lineart are made in the final step as well.
The final sprite may vary a little bit from the initial design (the bull is a lot more bulky than it’s original concept drawing), however the concept is fully realized and fleshed out visually. Even if some small revisions could be made, the sprite is ready to be used!
As you might be aware, Pleiades is populated by a bunch of thugs and animals and mundane things to get in your way. Whether they have no legs or twenty, they all start out this way. Even these things:
Hey folks, Dave here. In this update, I’m going to give you the lowdown on the battle backgrounds. A lot of people are curious about them, so the team and I figured we’d clue you all in. It’s a little mathy, so if you aren’t the type who finds formulas interesting, you might want to skip to the end. (But you could at least give the rest of the post a glance over!)
Hello, everybody! This is the first of our blog updates which will be posted every other Wednesday.
Instead of a major teaser trailer or music upload, we’re more posting updates on the things we personally are working on. It might be updates on past features, elaborations on things, or behind the scenes trivia type stuff. We plan on doing these up until release, so we hope you like them!
This time I’d like to talk a bit about our revision process and standards. Before we said we delete and start over, and that certainly does happen in some cases it’s not a rule. “Graphics creep,” IE never being satisfied with our style or the fidelity of our graphics is a real concern here, and we go out of our way to avoid it. Most of the things we change are things that either we know we didn’t spend as much time on as we could have, or things that we get feedback on (see: our battle UI). These two are examples of the latter! We’ve been hearing about the hotel and its impossible floors since they were first visible, so the change there has been drastic.
It’s more in line with the time period, too
The cave graphics are another place we’ve received feedback on - things like the floor textures, the color, the rims… basically, there was a lot of room for improvement! We agreed and took a look at it. Hopefully you like the changes.
The background was a big help.
Not everything needs or gets this treatment, but we think the changes are worth the small time spent. We go out of our way to avoid it by making sure things are done in one or two revisions. We’ll see you again on July 8th!
Here’s how updates will work: Every other week, a member of the team will post an update of what they’re working on. I’ll start this first one off, since it involves the whole team.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS: This video shows off a lot of new content, so if you’d prefer not to see it, do not continue reading.
What you’re looking at is Mother 4’s attract mode - these are carry overs from the arcade days where games would play an automatic demo to entice people into playing them. Maybe it will do the same thing here.
Shane also made the song available on his Soundcloud, and its available for download. It’s called Chattering World. Enjoy!
EDIT: Thank you to the hundreds of people that applied. We’re going to go through each one of them over the next two weeks.
Mother 4 is facing significant development challenges. We can’t work fast enough. Despite our best efforts, we can’t complete the game by June.
We always prioritize quality over speed. We throw away NPCs. We scrap songs. We redesign the UI until it’s right. We add more content. Work and create, change and edit, toss and delete. Start again. That has been our process and will be until the game is ready.
But because of this, we’ve missed every public deadline we’ve set. It’s always a let down, especially for us. More importantly, it’s unfair to all of you. We’d like to change that, effective immediately.
Starting now, we won’t set a release date until we’re done. Instead, we’ll update every other week with a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Less secrecy, more transparency. You will receive more updates, and we can continue to work without feeling like we’re cutting corners.
The first update comes next Wednesday. It has something to do with this:
Ramping Up Production
Over the past two years, we’ve been tracking how much time volunteers put into this project. As school ramps up or new jobs begin, productivity plummets. With a rail-thin staff—one developer, five artists and two musicians who are all part-time—things like this sometimes bring us to a halt. We’ve been actively trying to fix this by bringing on more team members.
We recently added James, a PhD candidate in English literature who has made the game’s story and script even better. We’ve also added a spriter, Ollie, to help us perfect our maps. But it’s not enough. We need your help. We want you to join the team.
If you want to help make Mother 4, email finish.it@mother4game.com with the subject “Let’s finish the game - [desired position]”.
You’ll have an impact across the board, from choreographing boss battles to hiding easter eggs. You’ll also get your own staff sprite (plus some extra stuff).
Here are open positions that we’re looking to fill:
SPRITERS
We’re looking for pixel artists who are comfortable duplicating and elaborating Brownie Brown’s pixel art style, artists who are big fans of the Mother series (you’ve played a few times, just for fun) and can create assets from scratch using simple sketches and reference photos.
Wondering if you’re a good fit? Do you have good aesthetic sense and a solid grasp of color? Have you made intricate pixel art before? Would you like PM'ing our Slack robot, Starman Deluxe, philosophical questions about your life? If so, we’d love to hear from you! Don’t forget to link or attach your portfolio.
DEVELOPERS
Want to make a game? OK! Just go ahead and apply. Have experience with C# and Mono? Great! You will need that. Familiar with SFML, FMOD, or GLSL? Also great! Please include portfolios and/or code samples. Starman Deluxe, our Slack bot, welcomes you with open arms.
Over the last two years, we’ve received thousands of messages of praise, critique and some amazing fan art. That feedback has kept us going. As a way to say thank you to early supporters, we created the invite list.
Today we’re announcing the invite list for Mother 4 is now full.
What if I’m on the invite list?
Early supporters will receive the game before any one else. We’ll send out an email with your own download link. We’ll have some behind the scenes stuff, messages from the team and other goodies.
How can I confirm I’m on the list?
EDIT: If you have the “please confirm email” then click the link and you’ll be automatically confirmed. You’ll then see this screen:
Then you’re confirmed to be on the list. If you didn’t receive this email then you didn’t complete the process (set up to prevent SPAM). Which is okay! Keep reading.
What if I’m not on the Invite list?
If you didn’t make it on the list, that’s okay. Mother 4 will still be completely free. You simply won’t receive an email and will have to wait until we release the game publicly.
Why is the limit +55,000 people?
We initially set the limit at 15,000—half of what the Mother 3 translation petition received in 2003. But it seems the Earthbound community has grown substantially, because we overshot that quicker than we anticipated. By the time we had checked the list, we had surpassed the 50,000 mark.
The Mother 4 release has been postponed until 2015. Here’s an explanation, the new plan and new Mother 4 goodies.
Many know this project started over five years ago, but most don’t know how many times the project has been reworked and rewritten. Mother 4, in its current form, has only existed for about two years.
Travis’ sprite throughout the project.
These past 5 years have allowed team members like Dave, our lead developer, to create some amazing modules for the Mother 4 engine. The battle background module, for instance, is incredible.
What isn’t great, despite how much the quality has increased, is how much further behind schedule we’ve become than we realized. Yet, as Mother fans, we will only be satisfied with the highest quality of work. That has led us here. Today, we’re announcing that Mother 4 will be released in 2015. In a few weeks, we’ll post a specific release day.
There’s even more news, however.
Updates:
NEW TEAM MEMBER! Boris, a new developer who is working along side Dave to help speed things up.
NEW CONTENT! New screenshots, new music, new copy… there’s quite a bit to go through so visit the Mother 4 homepage if you’d like.
NEXT:
In a few weeks, we’ll announce a specific release day.
In the meantime, we’ll be posting a new video next month of some of the gameplay.
TEASER trailer for Mother 4 went up today! Come to think of it, this is the first time it’s been seen in motion, isn’t it? We’ll talk more about it later, but for now you see some snippits of battle, various places, and a single mode of transportation. Zack was saying something about certain things, but for now we glazed over it.
First off, welcome to the new blog! Next, that didn’t go asn’t as expected. After our servers took a hit, we moved everything alright only to experience one of the most obscure Apache errors I’ve ever run across. Hours later, we figured it out only to sit through some of the longest time ever for domain propagation. What a week! The good news is there’s lots of news to discuss.
A Better Blog Experience
We’ve moved our blog to Tumblr. Traffic on Andonuts.net has slowly risen these past few months which has negatively impacted the site, as I’m sure you all have noticed. Most of that server stress comes from the traffic we received on the blog. By moving, this should (mostly) alleviate it so you won’t be seeing any more downtime.
More Ways to Connect
There are two new channels to receive Mother 4 news. Along with the increased web traffic, we’ve been slammed with email and comments. To make it easier for us to engage with you all, and for you all to engage with each other, we’ve opened up the Twitter handle @Mother4Game. For those that have used the #MOTHER4 hashtag, I’ve always responded to your questions, but will continue to do so from that handle now.
Perhaps even more exciting, is moving the large comment threads from our blog posts to the r/Mother4 subreddit. Reddit is suited perfectly for in-depth discussion on the game. (Note: The community controls that subreddit. None of the staff are mods.) You can still comment on each piece of news, but if you’d like the theorize and discuss, the subreddit is the place to go.
Travis’ sprite throughout the project.
