Mudtato
Significant Progress!
The story was a huge obstacle for me. I struggled to settle on something I liked, which made it hard to develop the player character(s), mechanics, enemies and their behaviours, levels and so on.
Well, I’ve got my story figured out, I’ve got my main characters figured out and it’s finally all coming together!
As I’ve mentioned before, DKC2 is a big inspiration for this game. I’d almost given up on having two playable characters with distinct advantages, like Diddy and Dixie, but just the other day I had a flash of inspiration! I’ve now got two very different main characters that will be great fun to design levels for and play with.
One of them is offense focused, and the other defence. This will make more sense as I show more of the game’s progress.
However, coming up with this stuff on paper is easy. Actually making it work in the game is another story. Well, I managed to implement it over an hour or so tonight, with the player now being able to pick up the equivalent of a DK barrel to enable you to switch forms (with their own animations and abilities), switching forms when hit, losing additional forms when dying and so on.
I’m amazed and excited with how quickly it’s coming together.
My next task will be to do some simple keyframe animations for the two characters, so I can start to build out the look and feel of the game. With the final art being claymation/stop motion, the rough drawn animations can double as storyboards/concepts which will greatly speed up the process later.
I love look of the game that these guys are creating, and I’ve seen how they utilised placeholder animations in their devlog videos and I think it helps a lot. (example)
Can’t wait.