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I wanted to wait until I had significant progress done on this before showing it. So here it is!


UPDATE!: Idle animations FTW:(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v320/AlienQuark/LEVI-HERO_IDLE.gif)




Story
In this game you play the last soldier of Chronos' army. The world is on the brink of destruction from the Leviathan, the King Demon. With the help of Chronos' divine intervention you must fight until the beast is slain. As you die and resurrect you gain valuable strength needed to finally topple this colossus.

Features
As stated, the game only has one boss, with 1billion HP. Every enemy you kill will help bring you closer to defeating this foe. However, the boss remains persistent over consecutive tries, so every little bit of health you manage to chip off counts. Although it may seem like an impossible task at first, the more you play, the stronger you will get.

The goal of this game is for speed. Play fast and hard, the grind is not meant to hinder you, but to help you become acquainted with the game and figure out how best to tackle levelling and runs.

There is a slight RPG element, in that you can level up your HP attack, defense, increase the length of time you have to reach the boss in order to increase the total amount of damage you can do per round.

I want to take this very straightforward concept and push it as far as I can, and hopefully it'll be fun!

Style
The mockup actually does in fact represent the aesthetic I want to go for. Something in the vein of Odin Sphere/Demon Blade. Since the length of the game will be rather short, it will free up time to make some really nice hand drawn assets, so hopefully that will work out.


Wot I've done so far:

-Movement working
-Minor floateys in.
-All boss HP tracking in,


Currently working on:

-Level up system. IT'S THERE!
-Menus
-Brainstorming enemies

Music
http://soundcloud.com/scott-gamble/calm (http://soundcloud.com/scott-gamble/calm)

As of right now, the proof of concept is established, and it is technically playable, although you really wouldn't want to. I'm hoping that by keeping the scope small I can pull this all together relatively fast.

Post thoughts, feedback, what you think about the concept, whatever. I'll be sure to post concepts and sketches as progress continues.

Thanks guys :)

I'm interested.

Chris Pavia: Sweet :)

Also, suppose I should mention, it'll be made in Game Maker, because it's the only language I know well enough to code in. So don't expect anything particularly stellar out of the gate.

Managed to get a crude level-up system working like a charm. Whether it'll work in terms of balance is obviously yet to be seen.

I wonder what I should do next......

also this:

http://soundcloud.com/scott-gamble/calm (http://soundcloud.com/scott-gamble/calm)

Very cool concept.

I imagine this kind of beautiful visual style is very hard to make look good in motion. What are your plans for animating everything? The animation system they had in Odin Sphere and the like seemed rather complicated

I'm hoping that the limited number of things I will actually have to animate will help. I am focussed on getting the technical side done as much as possible, as I am more and artist than a programmer. I was using Odin Sphere as an example of aesthetic more than of animation style. I've yet to really touch upon that stuff.

Also to note, the length of the game is intended to take a MAX of an hour. Meaning the level design will be pretty small in scale. I'm trying to keep it manageable. This is not an epic in terms of level design, so I will be able to focus on a small number of key landmarks (we're talking less than 10)

Wow, these threads drop fast!

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v320/AlienQuark/LEVI-HERO_TEASE.png)

It's not much, but here's a tease for the in-game hero character. Going to be blocking out some animations for it hopefully in the very near future (idle, running, jumping) see how that goes. This is a new kinda approach for me, so it could go really well, or fail miserably, who knows!

Anyways, yeah, that's all for now.

Sounds like a unique concept  :handthumbsupL:
But i'm not sure how the game plays out.
Does it play like a rpg-platformer, with the boss appearing at intervals, each time with a little less hp?
Also what happens if a player dies  :o

@ wuhu:

Yeah, the game, as I have it planned right now, is a very fast-paced, straightforward Action-RPG. There are enemies and sub-bosses you will have to face to get to the boss arena, and once you are there you have until either a)you die or b)time runs out or c)you beat the boss.

When you die, you are sent to the continue screen where you can level up using experience from your last runthrough. all damage done is carried over, and you start again from the very beginning, but stronger. so that the next playthrough, hopefully you do a more significant amount of damage to the boss.

Then, once you've leveled up sufficiently, and have increased your time limit, you can manage to get to the boss quickly, and smite him down before time runs out. That's my vision anyways. We'll see how it pans out as I go.

I really hope you can preserve that (character/boss) art style you had going in the mockup. That's just, wow!

Yeah, I only plan to go marginally more polished than what is shown. I want to give it a really loose hand drawn feel. So far so good, it's just a little more painstaking than say, pixel art or 3D. I'm hoping the character animations will work out  :-[

If you aren't doing this already, try drawing out your frames by hand first.  :)

eye on!

is this like the running game?

orite man got it!

This looks very interesting. I'm keeping my eyes on this :)

UPDATE: Started in on some animation, pretty happy with how this came out, so I will show it to you all :)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v320/AlienQuark/LEVI-HERO_IDLE.gif)

Having his bicep rotate and shift seems a bit strange, seems like his arm is wiggling around in his sleeve could just be due to the clothing not moving yet. (unless your planning for like clothing upgrades along the way)
His right thigh (our left) seems like it should move forwards, having it pull back like that seems a bit strange as well.
Might help if you make the leg get bigger instead of smaller, like the knee is bending towards us and then foreshortening.

Also I'd probably put the belt behind his forearm arm, seems odd to hold it behind the strap.
Though that could just be a layering issue, may have to make the forearm a different layer.

Looking good.  :gentleman:

are you gonna do the animations with cut+paste+rotate type style or is this just the rough first pass?

Where I can get away with cut/paste/rotate I will, but for things like running animations, I'll draw it all out. And if it comes down to it that the cut/paste method looks out of place, I'll do separate frames.

Chances are it'll be a combination of both in that case

You have my attention. I love the concept! :coffee:

Love this animation and simple blocked in sprite  :-*

Nice change from all those pixels on TIGS

Thanks guys.

Threw together another track for this thing. Not too much to show in the way of animations, I'm not really trying to go too hardcore on the work for this one. Too many other things going on at the same time.

Regardless, have a listen:

http://soundcloud.com/scott-gamble/rising-tides (http://soundcloud.com/scott-gamble/rising-tides)

Has this project descended into the ether?