thanks!
might as well give a brief talk about attacks, character design, movement, etc because i haven't gotten a new build from mike in two weeks (is he...still alive) and i'm still plugging away at new animations
ahem
6Ishmael has no arms.You might have noticed this! Here he is, without any arms.
So what's up with that? There's a few things up with that.
Combat is All Melee (for the most part)Aside from the possibility of combat-useful special abilities, Ishmael is
all kicks. He jumps on enemies and kicks them in a way Joe Musashi would be proud of. There's no shooting in this Metroidvania. What's interesting about the lack of arms is that this directly informs
how melee combat works; Ishmael can't balance while attacking, so it's a necessity that combat is consistently mobile; in other words, every single time he kicks, he moves forwards or backwards. Every kick is a dash. This works in favor of ensuring that combat never feels
stagnant; motion encourages fluidity, and I want to set up combat in a way that makes flow not only possible but necessary.
A part of this is that combat maneuvers are also exploratory ones; every move learned that attacks enemies can also be used to approach different obstacles in the world. Combat feels less stop-start, then, and more deeply connected with the world as a whole.
Other Thing: That's how he was drawn to begin withSomething you might not expect given all of this is that this game was actually built out
from Ishmael, not the other way around; in other words, the character came first.
It's Snowing Hard and Beautiful began as a simple MS Paint drawing using a trackpad saved as what a world.png:
I was just doodling.
From there, I largely didn't really know what to do. I knew I wanted to somehow explore this dude in some kind of a game but I thought
initially that Ishmael (who didn't have a name at the time) would be an NPC; he didn't strike me as the main character at first.
I made
some music based on this above image to try to fiddle around and find an aesthetic; it wasn't until I made
this that things started coming together. I built a small Unity prototype (using abysmal tools and zero understanding of any programming) to try to further nail down a vibe; a week or so later, I figured out exactly what this game
was aesthetically and what it was going to be practically; Ishmael's lack of arms informed how the combat would work, and it pretty organically folded into everything else.
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6.2: a tiny music preview again, as thanks for reading the above. listen to that
here.
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