Dear diary,Today I felt compelled to reveal a project way too early, because I recently discovered The Retro Hour podcast. In August 2018, they did an interview with Mr. Archer Maclean of IK+ fame, where he said that an IK++ game was in the works. Great news for everyone who waited more than a decade for this, except for me who only recently learned how to make games with Unity.I've been a fan of International Karate since the Atari ST days and I had been planning an updated version of that game for the past 20 or so years. In fact, I'm pretty certain I still have an e-mail exchange with Archer Maclean himself, where I tell him about my idea. I had an atari.org address and I think he only replied to me because he thought I was an Atari employee, but at least I got a reply from one of my idols! If he releases IK++ and it has the same idea, which was about the control system, just for fun I'll have to try to dig up the hard drive where the e-mail is, and find out if a modern PC can still run BeOS (as I said, it was 20 years ago).And on the topic of ideas, that was something Mr. Maclean mentioned in the podcast. Because International Karate was famously sued by the makers of Karate Champ, even though Way of the Exploding Fist felt more similar. And Mr. Maclean specifically mentions that because of that lawsuit (which he won), there are now new laws which protect the look and feel of something...I plan to release two games (well
three actually, but what people say about not doing a too large project as the first game, turns out to be true). The first, which I was planning on calling (brace yourselves for the naming system here
) IKK-, might only get released if IK++ never gets released, since it will follow the
control system of Fist/IK+ in spirit.
The second game will use the same assets and more (hats!), but with the previously mentioned new control system idea.
So I started out pretty close to the original title... might have to go a different direction here...
Although I'm now not sure that potentially getting too close to an even larger litigious entity might be such a good idea...
Before I found out about IK++ I was tempted to try to contact Archer Maclean once the project had matured a bit more and get his blessing, but now it instead sounds as if I'm just going to have to change direction a bit if it does get released, since I do plan on this being a commercial project.
So far, I'm making everything myself, struggling all the way, and I have a day job and I commute weekly between two neighbouring countries, so things will take time. Last time I worked on the game was in july of this year, but I think I'm going to have to try to pick up the pace.
I buy whatever tools and resources I need. For example, for the inverse kinematics I'm currently using FinalIK. When it comes to the music, most likely the AI, and perhaps even the networking, I will be contracting those things out to people who are better than me.
I've discovered that I absolutely
loathe animating, but I'm going to try to rotoscope some movement and see how that goes. That's going to be a future devlog, but the next entry here will show a bit of the movement and input system.
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