So I got in a huge discussion this weekend with my boyfriend over some logistics/details of our game. I was very curious to see how my art would translate to a playable game.
Ultimately I have decided to go with a more clean vector based style for the over look of our game instead of the 16-bit pixel sprite art.
Because I am more comfortable working in a gestural manner, I figured this would be better.
Hopefully by the end of this concept art course I'm taking in school, I will have animations completed for all 4 characters in our game.
I was thinking of making an Idle, a walk, a run and a jump animation for each character, but I'm not sure I will be able to complete that for all of them given the time constraint, but I do intend to continue working on the animations even after the class is over as well as including attack and defense animations for each character.
After much discussion, we decided to animate the characters in a "nude" sense much like the concept art that I made shows. Basically, no armor, no weapons, etc. because we would like to later layer those items over the basic "nude" animations and have them properly aligned. The reason for having this approach to the character animations is because we would like to display the items/armor a player picks up in game and have them visible to the player (instead of designing them a certain way where you do not get to see those nice little changes and just having it implied, but not shown).
For practice and simplicity, I will begin the animation process with Astra Fay as he is the simplest of the characters and I have a few distinct animations in mind for him.
I plan to have less frames in his animation to give the illusion of speed to his character.
Mr. Biggums on the other hand, will have more frames to really show the slowness of his stalky nature.
Also, we decided to keep our game as a 2D side-scroller instead of the "top-down" isometric view we had originally intended.
We want to make this available for up to 4 players, but in order to do so, we also decided to have a 4-way split screen in which each character can go anywhere within a given map, but will eventually all have to come together to protect the item/people in a central point.
(After all this is a tower defense game).
Doing a 4 way split screen gives each player the opportunity to explore the area map and not be overwhelmed by the fixed camera that typically stays on a certain area on a screen where all characters are seen at the same time. We want to also make it so that doors and windows to other sections of the map can be explored, and someone can open a door and be fighting aliens in a different room, but they can be seen through the windows of another players screen if they are standing around the windows of the previous room outside of the one where the player just came from. We think this will add a nice effect and depth to the play area in the game while still keeping it 2D.
