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[The Great Emoticon]

The Great Emoticon

The Great Emotion is a topdown action-adventure game set in a charming post-apocalyptic future.

Powered by the three prime emotional energies — glad, mad and sad — play the last Science Knight of an oddball world
ruled by the nefarious & passive aggressive King of the Emoticons.

The Game

The main mechanic of the game is simple - match the colour of your sword to the colour of an enemy to deal damage.









Follow Us!

 

[EdFarage]

the art style is amazing and unique, i love it.

[The Great Emoticon]

the art style is amazing and unique, i love it.

Thanks! It took a long time to find an art style that we liked. Its really happy and bright at first but it gets darker as the story progresses and you start to realize what is really going on in the world of The Great Emoticon.

[SolarLune]

Yeah, the art style is really interesting, indeed. Great color usage and pulsating, "lively" feel.

[The Great Emoticon]

Thanks SolarLune and Josiah! Its always great to hear that people like the artwork. I find the hardest part of when you start making a game is to come up with a unique art style that lots of people like.

[MereMonkey]

This is looking great, can't wait to see more!

[The Great Emoticon]

The past couple months have been busy! A lot of things have happened since our last update. Our team has grown a little bigger and we're gearing up towards launching a Kickstarter campaign this summer, which we're very excited about.

Right now we're working on a trailer, which means getting the game to an almost-final level of visual polish. A lot of the tileset, sprites, and animations are being tweaked and improved on, and there have been a lot of amazing additions to the world (new enemies, new characters, a new lighting system, etc) that we're very excited to share. Overall, it seems like we've finally reached the point of fully understanding what the game is - the story, the look of the game, and how it should make the player feel.

Here are a couple of new and improved Citibots:

For anyone who might happen to be around Toronto and the GTA, we'll be showing off The Great Emoticon at TCAF on May 9-10! Come see us!

[The Great Emoticon]

Enemy Design: Bush Spies

Bushes are very important in The Great Emoticon. They’re everywhere in the world, and provide lots of opportunities for drops. There’s even an organization inside the game who manages them - they call themselves B.U.T.T.S. (Bush Utility Tidy & Transfer Syndicate).

Bush spies were clearly the next step in the process. Bush Spies are little spy minion robots working for The King. From a distance, they appear to be exactly like regular bushes, but if you get too close, they’ll pop up and immediately charge at the player. This adds an element of uncertainty and danger to the player’s careless bush-whacking.

Early concepts:



And final animation cycles, just finished today (popping out/hiding, run/charge cycle):

[The Great Emoticon]

We're kicking it old school with paper prototyping this week! With copious amounts of graph paper, we're re-designing the Forest of Moderate Frolicking. Lots of game designers do this probably. Right? I dunno, but its a nice break from the computer. Paper and glue kick ass.

[davidp]

wow, i was expecting some low quality smiley game, but this is amazing. loving the paper prototyping

[The Great Emoticon]

Haha yeah, the name without context is definitely misleading! People have said that before, we've talked about changing it but we haven't decided on anything yet. Glad we surprised you though! 

[The Great Emoticon]

So... we made a new trailer!

We got in with id@Xbox a while back and got the chance to make a trailer that would get showed off on Xbox's youtube channel during E3. We're so excited! Check it out here:

[The Great Emoticon]

Today we wanted to talk a little about our love of tilesets!

The Great Emoticon is built with a tileset we drew entirely in Flash. Everything - the ground, trees, screens, sky, etc - is all broken down in little 80x80px tiles. This makes level creation crazy fun. Especially since we currently have 2600 tiles in one sheet! With so many tiles, we are constantly discovering new combinations we hadn't originally intended (which is where a lot of the crazy fun comes from).

After being drawn in Flash, the tileset is exported, brought into photoshop to remove stray pixels, and then imported into Unity. We use 2DToolkit to make all the tileset magic happen!





We're going to be making some new levels soon, so we might record a level-making session so people can see it in action.

[The Great Emoticon]

Working on redesigning the HUD today! Here's the old version:


And here's the new one:

[~Tidal]

Is this the "game about an emoticon" I posted as a joke in that some-months-old topic...

[The Great Emoticon]

 

[The Great Emoticon]

Long time no devlog! It's been hard to find time to write about our progress when all we do is work on the game, but it's an important balance to figure out, so I'm trying!

The end might finally be in sight for The Great Emoticon - Chris made a full, final, enormous GDD that has the complete story, mechanics, levels, and systems figured out. We know what enemies are going to be in the game, we know how many levels there will be (12, plus an intro level!) and what's in them, and we know how the game ends! It's a good feeling having everything figured out.

Here's a bunch of new slimes:


And some step-by-steps for a multi-slime (final art done in Flash):

[David Stanley]

This is wonderful! I can't praise Flash enough; I'm using it in my own game for tiles/characters.  Can't wait to see more of this project

[The Great Emoticon]

This is wonderful! I can't praise Flash enough; I'm using it in my own game for tiles/characters.  Can't wait to see more of this project

Flash is the best. Makes tilesets so easy to work with and edit! Also, just checking it out now and oooooh - Skelattack looks amazing. Love the main character, such a cute style! :D

[Superb Joe]

even though it looks completely different and is a different kind of game it reminds me of panic on funkotron because theres something wrong with me