| Kingdom
Hearts - Inverted Hearts FAQ Page
Who and What is "From the Heart?"
"From the Heart" is a group of 7 friends who are creating
a quality production of a fan-based game called "Kingdom Hearts:
Inverted Hearts." Marlon Cobos (Ikaru) created and expanded
the team. Originally it consisted of 3 members and as the project
grew we had to recruit more talent. The project is still ever growing
so in the future we may ask for more recruits or if you feel that
you can contribute to the project, please email marloncobos@hotmail.com.
As of now, the team is broken up into two divisions, Team A and
Team B. Team A try to work on the game as much as possible, they
keep in communication with each other on a weekly basis. Team B
was very much monumental in the beginning stages of creating the
game, they contribute continual support and advice throughout the
game making process. Communication between Team B is less frequent,
but they have a huge impact on the game.
Team A
Marlon (Ikaru) - Creator, Director, Producer, Composer,
Concept, Graphic Animator/Editor, Programming and Team Leader.
Lon (Disnoid) - Graphic
Artist, Main Illustrator (Disney characters), Webmaster, and Graphic
Animator
Michael - Sprite Animator/Editor, Background Artist,
Quality Manager, and Script Editor
Roari - Main Illustrator
(Final Fantasy characters), Lead Animator for Anime
Team B
Lee Stanford - Main Programmer
Drew Hilton - Sprite Artist
The Members of "From the Heart" have many roles and are
not limited to their title descriptions.
Where is the Demo?
We released a demo two years ago which can be found at the-mousehole.net/KHIH.
This demo's purpose was to do two things: One, show that "From
the Heart" is legitimate and is not faking screenshots...and
Two, show you the controls and format of the game.
When will the Game be completed?
Simple answer, we don't even know when it will be finished. As the
project expands we keep realizing we have no idea when it will be
finished, so we have opted to create episodes of the game so that
fans don't have to wait years for the completed game. "From
the Heart" is working very hard to release the episodes in
a timely manner, and we hope you keep in mind that most of the members
have full-time jobs or go to school. Some of the members even spend
up to 60 hours a week working on the game, that's including the
job.
How much will this game cost?
The game is free and we would be sued if were to charge due to copyright
laws, but on the same note don't expect us to give up if we get
a cease and desist letter.
Are you using a game maker program to create it, or raw
coding?
Ikaru actually met a programmer named Lee who created a game for
himself (a side-scroller) and when we told him our plans for the
game he gave us a template for his game. So we had his raw coding
on how he made his game. We used his template to make characters
move and jump, after a lot of trail and error, we were able to understand
what was going on in the code. We were able to further modify the
code to our needs, although Lee’s game was a side-scroller
like ours, it had very different physics than what we wanted. We
can now create our own code and fix bugs that we create previously
when we were ‘trail and error’ing. I wouldn’t
say we are great programmers or anything like that, it takes us
more time to understand what is going wrong with something then
it does us to create a whole new stage.
What programs do you use?
Since the game requires so many different things we use just about
everything. The game runs on a modified version of C++ that was
created by our main programmer Lee. We use other programs such as
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe ImageReady, Soundforge,
Reason and many other misc. programs.
How much of your sprite work is edited, and how much is
from scratch?
When we first started the game, we created all of our own original
sprites, but we found it to be extremely time consuming. Eventually
we decided to edit sprites and focus more making a game, rather
than creating sprites. At this time, we weren’t even sure
if find out how to do coding or know how to create an artificial
intelligence, all we knew how to do was to come up with some great
ideas for a game and draw them. By the time we released the first
demo, I would say 60 percent is sprite edited and 40 percent original.
Out of the 60 percent that I mentioned, I would say 40 percent is
drastic sprite edit and only used for its animation and not for
the design. While the remaining 20 is also edited, but at the time
didn’t require further editing because a) it was a simple
platform or rock b ) didn’t want to take to really edit it
so much because we have future plans of creating an original sprite
for it.
On average, how long does it take to create a sprite sheet
for the game?
Well, I know Ikaru can create a new action for a character with
about 6-10 frames in about 2 hours from scratch. If we are going
to focus on this character we double check the animation with other
team members and maybe even create a few more frames so it is very
fluid, so that sprite sheet might get a few extra hours on it for
each action. The main characters have a lot of action animations
that we are actually running out of buttons to use. If we are dealing
with a character that plays a small role in the game, then all of
his sprites will make take up only 5 hours. If the character is
getting drastic edit from a sprite rip, then all of his sprites
will only take maybe 3 hours. I don’t know if you already
attempted to create your own sprites or not, but when we first started,
it took a good 2-3 days to get a characters full animation of just
(jump, run, hit, kick). The more you make, the faster you will become,
if you doing something really small, like birds or something I am
sure you could create those in like 30 minutes with 6-7 frames.
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