Dang ! Have you been looking at my design notes somehow? or was my description too easy to guess. I really want to explain why the character is who is he, but I don't want to spoil the story. I can just say , you and I are on similar wavelengths . We should "knock heads together" on the story or something !
Maybe it's option #3: I'm smart!
Over the years I've seen similar ideas and also like solving puzzles.
But so far my *guesses* were mainly based on the lack of human (or other living) characters. Sure, I'm interested in sharing ideas.
Of course one of the main inspirations, is a love of all whacky things that are anime. The one game that really pushed me towards this kind of character design was Bravely Default. Those Chibi characters were awesome, I'm not sure if you can see that influence in the characters proportions \ face etc
It's interesting that you mentioned
chibi because your character seems different from what I consider Chibi. I'm more used to these:
or in
[3D JRPG] Light Fairytaleand slightly this:
Your character does seem a bit different from a person with normal proportion but perhaps the beard also plays a role to hiding (pun intended) the Chibi style even the one used in Bravely Default. However, overall the character has a cartoony feel that fits the style.
Regarding target audience, hopefully players that's liked "high quality production" action platformers ala Guacamelee, Mark of the Ninja, Hollow Knight, Ori & the blind forest and appreciate fighting mechanics found in Street Fighter, BlazBlue etc.
Hopefully the theme itself of a human fighting bots won't turn people off. I was thinking of adding some organic monsters without the Robot machinery.
I'm wondering about the opinions of the others that read this thread. Do you guys think Alien mounted Robots aren't fun to beat up?
In a way, robots kind of reminds of the "side action" in Street Fighter games where you beat up different machines (car, fridge IIRC) and I wonder how appealing that would be in general. Also, using robots may limit variety in terms of visuals (i.e. every enemy is "just" a robot) and also in terms of enemy attack variety. This is just based on my first impression of what I've seen so far though.
My first impression of the poster is that it looks like as 5-7 people talking to you at the same time. 8o
There seems to be a lot going on, but not in a good way that is helpful.
-That can and magazine on the left seem to have equal importance to the main character.
-The title is somewhat confusing. I remember having long titles but found that most prefer short ones. To me
Kung Fu Janitor is a lot more unique and memorable than Mighty/Iron Corbo.
-Also, "Be the broom" is a good tagline ... but then does he have a chopstick in his hand? After some "careful inspection" I noticed that he's carrying the broom on his back.
-Seems like that are robots at the bottom, but that I wouldnt' even be aware if I hadn't seen the devlog.
So, to keep things simple, perhaps a portrait arrangement would look better with the title on top and only showing the character in the pose with some faded garbage things around him.
Another idea might be to show the robot enemies more prominently - i.e. he's fighting them. A few could be surrounding him and he just knocked one of them out.