[Beat 'em Up + RTS]

Beat 'em Up + RTS

Much like the Dynasty Warriors series, this is a tactical game where you also control a unit in the battle. However, you can switch from one unit to another when you die, and you have the standard ability to make new units and direct their motions. Individual units aren't strong/smart enough to win battles without your direct supervision -- but you can't focus entirely on smashing your enemies' faces in, or else you'll run out of backup.

Okay, this is better than my previous attempts at an unreferenced drawing. It's still pretty cruddy, and I'm not certain my attempts at shading helped any (but hey, I have to get practice at shading somehow!).

Unreferenced drawing

Her legs are uneven, and her right leg (our left) has a deformed ankle. Her right calf is shaped oddly (the muscle bulge is too close to the middle of the lower leg). Her left foot isn't properly planted on the ground; it looks fine, but it was supposed to be planted in my head! The shoulders aren't properly defined, instead just sort of bleeding into the torso. The head's just generally shaped odd. I forgot to shade where her left hand is planted. Her left hand is too big. And of course, I wimped out on drawing fingers.

And she's clearly playing Twister. Yes.

Also, a game set in a non-European medieval period would be interesting, especially if it was a fantasy game. After all, how many games can be set in a pseudo English swords and chivalry setting already with orcs and deep forests and giant spiders? Sure, everybody loves Lord of the Rings, but is that all fantasy games are ever going to be? Irritating...

For sure. Give me a fantasy RPG set in ancient Japan or India. Greco-Roman stuff has been done, but not to death and would be cool too.

Okami was a wonderful experience in no small part because the mythology was completely novel for most Americans.

I took a stab at drawing a reference-less nude, and it was terrible. An emaciated cross between a runway model, a ballerina, and a mannequin. So you don't get to see that.

I'll try again later!

Are those books, gun-hands, or a really big belt?

Looks cool, though. Dig the thick lines.

[Stealth + Base Building]

Stealth + Base Building

Play as a tribe of gnomes that's trying to infiltrate, and ultimately destroy, a human settlement. Only problem is that if they're discovered before they're ready to Throw The Switch, the humans will break out the bugspray and it's bye-bye gnomes. So you'll need to stealthily make all the bedrooms, farms, and workshops the gnomes need to survive until everything is in place for the big day.

these are really nice, though the aa on the trees seems a little out of place

I think without the shading on the trees they wouldn't stand out from the background.

Just for an alternative approach, I model my characters in Blender and use its skeleton rigging system for animations.

I don't think you could easily adopt such an approach to hand-drawn sprites, though.

Beautiful! More games should be based on watercolors.

The thing is, no amount of intelligence will take a gun that has a 5-meter spread at 5 meters into a sniper rifle. It is literally impossible for a human to use the Reaper as an effective gun (it might be possible to use its secondary as an effective melee weapon, though I'd be surprised).

This basically amounts to "don't give advantages to the AI that a human can't also get". Darksim bots were also faster than humans, for that matter -- even if the humans were diagonal-strafing, IIRC.

I see a guy leaning with his back to the left side of the panel, his hands in his pockets, left foot kicked back a bit behind the right foot. But I'll admit it took me a bit to find that interpretation.

Fighting + Chess

Basically like Archon, you play a normal game of chess, except that when a piece capture would normally occur, the two units must fight instead street-fighter style, with the piece that gets KO'd being captured (even if they made the initial attack). Units never recover from damage, giving you the option of capturing that queen eventually with a storm of pawns who each deal chip damage before dying heroically.

OR:

Fighting + Physics

In this game, instead of beating on your opponent directly, you beat on physics objects that you try to fling into your opponent. Each of your attacks hits a different area and sends things flying at a different angle and speed; super attacks simply have better areas of effect or hit things really hard. A skilled player can of course bat the incoming dump truck out of the air with a carefully-timed super...

Which reminds me of something that really bugged me about Perfect Dark (for the N64) but probably doesn't qualify as a trope. The Reaper weapon in that game is basically a hilariously inaccurate chaingun with a terrible spin-up time...in the hands of a human. Bots will snipe you from across the map with it, and that spin-up time turns into the Sound of Doom: if you don't identify where it's coming from and get behind cover before it finishes, then you're dead dead dead.

So yeah, make certain that when your bots are using gear that the player has access to, they get all the perks and penalties of that gear.

I wasn't trying to give him a hard time.
I was just wondering which arm was supposed to be mechanical, because it could have been either one.

Anyway, it's interesting, but it's not much too look at at the moment. If you do some kind of actually shaded/colored version, be sure to post that here. Or the model, if you do one of those.

Will do. I'm barely at the point where I consider myself to be capable of making useful line art; I've yet to figure out proper shading and coloring techniques.

I guess I could model it, and then shade the line art based on the render of the model 

The left arm could conceivably be contained within the blade. The right arm, though, is grossly oversized -- in particular, the elbow joint is too far down to accommodate a normal human's upper arm.

The Animator's Survival Kit is an excellent book. It's basically the book that always comes up whenever anyone asks for advice on animation books. Like right now!

So you should get it.

I figure this is a power suit for someone who lost their right arm. I may end up modeling this in Blender for my project...or I might not. We'll see how it goes.

FishyboySquirrelsquid: the ponytail might work better as a traversing sine wave or something similar. Right now it goes from kinked to straight, more or less. Looks good either way, though!

Edit: whups! Thanks for the correction, Fishyboy.

Given the way the human brain looks for patterns, and remembers bad luck far more often than good luck, I think you pretty much have to chalk that up to the game being overly luck-based.

As an alternate example, in Angband, every time you cast a spell, you have a chance to fail. I'll often find myself calculating the odds of failing to cast a single spell three times in a row, and finding the odds to be in the  "1 in several hundred" range. What I don't find myself doing, though, is calculating the odds of casting the spell successfully many times in a row, even though that does happen. And I'll occasionally notice that I just got four critical hits in one round of combat, but I don't notice that nearly so much as I do four misses in a row...

I like how your heroine is looking at that thing and thinking "no way can I ride that without falling over."