A Kickstarter Project – Working on the Guess Poo Characters

Kickstarter is a new experience. At Satzuma we launched our first ever campaign and it has indeed been a learning experience. I have had the opportunity to work on the wacky poo characters which will go into the poo game design should the project get backing necessary to get it off the ground.

So, what is being launched on Kickstarter?

Guess poo is a humorous potty-brained table game that parodies and pays homage to a well-known children’s toy, which has been around since the 70’s. Guess Poo is brown, nutty and lumpy game brimming with flavour and taste. It's aimed toward people with a daft sense of humour.


If this sounds like your thing, feel free to show support :

Guess Poo Kickstarter

EDIT ******** 12 July 2018 ******************

Sadly, Guess Poo didn’t get its funding. At a glance we can see so me massive holes in the project – strong on visuals, video and messaging, weak on outreach outside of the kickstarter platform.

Simple Custom Cursor For Your Stencyl Game

The following block shows a simple method for making your own custom cursor.  Please refer to the Stencyl community help section for further details on coding blocks.

General Gist : this little 'how to' covers some basics for making a custom cursor in Stencyl. In a nutshell, you need to hide the default operating system cursor and swap out for your own custom cursor, which will be an actor type.

Part 1 : Graphics
1 ) Firstly you will need to draw your one custom cursor in graphics program of your choice. I used Adobe Illustrator to draft up this pointer and exported it as a .PNG – Dims 29px 27 px, remember to save your .PNG in logical place in your project folder.

Part 2 : Importing a Cursor As An Actor Type

1 )Open Stencyl and navigate to your game project (assuming you have already made a project)

2 )In the upper left corner press on the “Actor types”and create a new actor. You will then need to add a frame and import your newly created cursor!

Part 3 : How To Make it work

1 ) Click on 'actor behaviours' and create a new behaviour! This will be a basic behaviour to make your Cursor work in your game.

2 ) Click “add event” in the top of the panel. Add > When updating

3 )You can either navigate through the code blocks manually or you can search for them. Using the image shown. Thats how to make a basic Cursor in Stencyl! Don't forget to attach the block to the Cursor Actor, the green button in the top right will allow you to do this - “Attach to actor”

Block for making custom cursor

Run game!

Bug with cursor full screen * untick fullscreen mode!

Please take into account that the flash player from Stencyl ( when tested from the game ) game glitches in full screen mode. The main default operating system mouse will still be visible despite having the cursor hidden.This could be an apparent issue with the flash player. - Dated from May 2016. Try unticking the full screen mode... Not the best

Notes : this bug happens on a iMac OSX i5 10.9.5

#stencyl #flashplayer #cursor #simple #pointer #codeblock

E-Learning Game: Artwork & Design of Blossom Tree - play my game for free

Screen shot

Screen shot from early levels

Sammy the Snail

Talk about selling old rope! I designed Blossom Tree on my Multimedia Design and Digital Animation course back in Cumbria Institute of the Arts - now Cumbria University. This project opened a new path for me, I illustrated, animated and coded an E-learning game aimed a teaching young children to engage with simple maths quizzes and spelling puzzles. One of the biggest learning curves was learning to code in Actionscript, a language I had a no prior (serious) knowledge of using - so was thrown straight into the deep end!

The Art
To break the project down further I needed to set the scene and make the game appealing too a young audience taking into account: colour, simplicity and whether the children would actually be able to complete the game. Each illustration started out as a pencil sketch before being fully rendered in Photoshop, this was in the days when I would do the colouring with a mouse! Nutter! or perhaps I perhaps just ignorant...

The Plot
The story is based on two lads playing in the woods when suddenly the youngest is snatched by a stereotypically dastardly villain! (Children, watch out for dastardly villains) - not just any old dastardly villian – Victorian dastardly - Now that is most dastardly indeed! Anyway, you plough through the puzzles to rescue him. I have to admit, I watched at some stages as even fully grown adults could'nt answer the questions.

The project is quite dated now but I still felt it was worth a show after digging out the artwork for the launch of my illustration and ANIMATION site. See my illustration services here.

Artwork produced using markers pencils and PS, game animated and built in flash.
Looking back, I still despise the intro I had to add on… ergh!



Or play the old game http://jdillustration.jimmsdesign.co.uk/flashpages/e-learning.html