Codename: Project Sumo
Dev. Team: Jared Thomson (xoorath) and Laura Lake (Limne)
Having had the pleasure of working with Jared during this year's 48-Hour Game Jam I'm pleased to announce the resumption of our successful collaboration. Jared is of course an awesome coder (with artistic ability) while I'm a decent artist (with coding ability) so our skill sets tend to compliment each other.
Our concept is still taking shape but as things stand we're working with the idea of a 2D fighting game in orthographic space. So far the idea is to have something like River City Ransom-style brawling with the out-of-bounds-style gameplay of Smash Bros; besides standard attacks you can pick things up (including other players), use them as weapons, or throw them like projectiles. We'll see how our concept evolves. Below you can see a very rough mock-up I rigged up to help put what I'm currently thinking into tangible for:
As for the Dev. log, this is actually my first time keeping one and I'm just about as new to reading them so please bear with me. Luckily, I have the guidance of my esteemed colleague. We are planning on keeping an update schedule as follows: I will be providing updates Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays while he'll be updating Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. For now, we'll be off on Sundays.
I did a place-holder logo on paper (above)... It's pretty much egregious but at least it's there.
Today was mostly spent consolidating a few of my character design sketches. We will be working with node based animation. I am particularly excited about this as, though I have experience working in animation and sprites, node based animation is completely new to me. Jared has been hard at work on a keyframe based editor. For my own work, over the last few days I I've been trying to design characters with a great deal of variation in their body types and sizes and I've been sketching all kinds of different constructions. I didn't see fit to post these because they don't look like anything. Here's what I do have:
What I have now is some rough designs in color. They don't follow any particular theme, I just drew the first thing to pop into my head. The result is fairly not dissimilar from any standard page from my sketchbook, which is a bit disappointing. As I progress I'm hoping to achieve greater thematic unity in my designs while still allowing my characters to maintain their idiosyncratic personalities. I love variety, but in doing something as complex as a game I really like to think I can express something meaningful as well. We'll see how that shapes up.
In any case, I'm still working out designs and I'll want to some consultations before deciding on anything final... Well, actually, I kind of like the bird man and the idea of animating those wings kind of like a cape. I don't so much know about anything else. Feedback would be much appreciated.
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