Welcome back!

This week we spent our time on making a fun and playable prototype, while also making sure our art bible was complete.

Art

Our artists worked on finishing up the art bible 100% so we have a good plan of what we want our game to look like. Designing a character in the exact style as the Rubber hose animations from back in the day went pretty smoothly and was super fun! We decided to make an example page which we can always check back on to see if we got the characters in that style.

So what about the characters?

First, we had to decide on the theme of our game. After a bunch of ideas from everyone, we decided to go for archeologists climbing their way up a cave in a mountain to get to the very top and explore along the way. We want the environment to be interesting to look at, which is why there will also be a color shift in the level! We want the game to start with a cold color -like blue- and the very end should be a warm color, like orange! The scenery will have ancient structures to keep the players interested on what's behind the characters.

So we got the theme down, now what do the characters actually look like?

We wanted our characters to look different from eachother, both having their own strengths and weaknesses. We decided on a small and a bulky character; the smaller one can dash, while the bulky character can anchor themselves into a wall/the ground to launch the other one. The artists made a first concept idea for them:

Animations:

Now ofcourse, we want to work in 2D in the rubber hose animation style, so everything frame has to be manually drawn. This will obviously take quite some time to have animations for both character ready, but our artists are super willing to make this work. First animations we  tried were the idle and running animations. We also decided that every animation should be 8 frames max, unless there's one that really needs more. Some test animations were made which we implemented in the prototype, to see if everything works in that style.

Glad to say, they work well!

Prototype

Our programmers spent their time on adding all the mechanics to our prototype; Our connecting rope is our main mechanic, but what else do we have? Our bulky character can anchor himself into a wall or the ground, so he can launch the other character towards a platform, while our smaller character can dash!  We tried to focus on these parts mainly as they are the most important to our game.

Next week we'll be moving into the production phase.

See you then!