It’s that awesome time of year again- the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) is back! As if that wasn’t exciting enough, Rocket 5 will be participating in an event called Bit Bazaar, which is being put on by Bento Miso as a part of TCAF’s Comics VS Games 2.

On Saturday, May 11 from 12-8PM, Rocket 5 will be at Bit Bazaar promoting our upcoming game, code-named “Ghost Hunter.” A demo of the game will be available for you to play. Rocket 5′s game Get the Orb (GTO) will also be available to play. At our table, you can pre-order a copy of Ghost Hunter (working title), as well as purchase some awesome Rocket 5 and game-related merchandise.… More »

Last week we were honored to have our Ghost Hunter game chosen as one of the many awesome games showcased at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival’s Darkcade. Now as a special halloween treat, we want to give everyone a chance to play Ghost Hunter! Download Ghost Hunter for Windows or Download Ghost Hunter for Mac

We made Ghost Hunter as a family summer project with some of our nieces and nephews who ranged in age from 11 to 21! Melanie designed the characters, Max modeled all of the level art, Cathy animated the characters, Tim wrote the code, Christine managed the team and wrote the story, Rebecca, Mark and Patrick drew character and level concepts and helped with the design and Rocket (the dog) provided emotional support.… More »

I recently presented a step-by-step workshop titled “Making A 2D Sprite-Based Game With Unity” to the Toronto SkillSwap community which is “A collaborative group for folks interested in sharing their skills and training with other developers in Toronto, and for folks interested in learning!”.

Around 50 people showed up to the 3 hour workshop and although we tried our hardest to get through all of the content, we only completed about 1/2 of the project before it was time to move on to the beer drinking portion of the event.

So while I still had all of the project steps fresh in my mind, I figured it would be a good idea to go through the workshop at home and screencast the whole thing so that everyone could get a chance to follow along with the complete tutorial.… More »

This is a reprint of Cathy’s Animating Four-Legged Beasts article which was originally featured on Gamasutra in May 2012.

Animating animals is usually fun, but can often be complicated and technical. Figuring out what to do with all those legs can really trip up an animator. We can animate human-shaped characters a lot easier than multi-legged beasts because we have an intuitive knowledge of the way bipeds move. It is easy for an animator to act out a motion when the character moves like us; feeling the action ‘in the body’ helps us understand how to animate it. So what happens when the character is a quadruped and you don’t have that intuitive feel at your disposal?… More »

This weekend Cathy led a workshop on running an indie game studio. The workshop was part of a series called ‘New Game Makers,’ run by Dames Making Games and Bento Miso, and offered workshop participants the opportunity to learn from different speakers about the various aspects of game development. Cathy’s workshop, titled ‘Inside the Studio: Games from Idea to Production,’ focused on what it’s like to make the transition into indie game development.

The event led me to my first experience with both Dames Making Games and Bento Miso. I’d heard of DMG before and I know that Tim works at Bento Miso a few times a week, but I first got to see the space when we went to a DMG social the night before Cathy’s presentation.… More »

Earlier this month, Cathy spoke on a panel at TAAFI called ‘Press A to Jump: Animation, Art and Interactivity.’ Being a new intern at Rocket 5 (and the panelist’s niece), I was really excited to hear what Toronto’s indie game developers had to say about animating. Cathy was representing not only Rocket 5 but women in indie gaming, being the only female panelist, though the event was hosted by animator Sagan Yee. The other panelists were Jay Edry, Matt Hammill, Miguel Sternberg and Ryan Henson Creighton.

As the panelists explained their background and played demo reels to display their previous work, I recognized a few of the games mentioned and found myself making note of a few I’d want to play in the future.… More »

Last week we did something very different – we went back to high school! Cathy and I spoke at James Cardinal McGuigan Catholic Secondary School in Toronto to nearly 200 kids over 4 class periods about how we make video games.

Part of our mission here at Rocket 5 is that we want to teach kids and parents that there’s more to video games than just playing them and that kids might want to consider a future in the industry that provides them with so much fun and entertainment. There are tons of different job skills that are needed to make video games in areas ranging from the very creative to the very technical, so you might be surprised to learn that some things you’re already interested in might help you get a job working in the games industry someday.… More »

On the weekend of May 10, 11 and 12, I attended my first ever game jam: “TOJam“. TOJam is an indie game event where about 400 people gather together in one place to hammer out their individual game concepts in just 3 days. It is a hotbed of creativity, inspiration, innovation, cooperation and bacteria. Its a place where you can meet other game developers and eat too much junk food, drink too much caffeine and get too little sleep. If you are extremely organized and very very lucky, you can walk away with a fabulous little prototype to build from.

Before TOJam I had my doubts about whether spending 3 days in a building with 400+ game jammers would be for me.… More »

Hi Rocket 5 Friends!  This is Cathy, Rocket 5 Studios’ Art Director, and this is my first Rocket 5 blog post!

For those of you interested in animation, please check out my article that was published today in Gamasutra:  Animating Four-Legged Beasts!

I’ve used these notes to teach beast movement to both students and team members.  This article covers the walk cycle.  Check back here for more posts on animating the trot, the canter and the gallop cycles!

The adorable monkey demoing the walk is none-other than the star of one of our up-coming games.  Rocket 5 would like to thank the talents of Roger Liu and Shaun Budhram for the creation of my sweet monkey-bot, with additional kudos going out to David Huynh for his 11th hour help on Jet-Skate Jo-Jo.… More »

For this post we have teamed up with Packt Publishing who is giving away copies of their best-selling Unity books to 6 lucky winners. Check out the details at the end of this post to find out how to enter. UPDATE: The book contest is now CLOSED and winners have been selected.  Winners will be notified via email sometime in the next few days.  Thanks for playing!

We’re currently working out the art style for our next iOS game and so I thought this would be a good chance to try out ambient occlusion as a way to bring some interesting lighting into the levels. Since I had never worked with AO before, my first step was to do a test render on a scene in Maya as a proof of concept and as a way to get a better understanding of how AO works.… More »