Darkfire's game
Over the last three months I was been busy writing a Metroidvania style game set in a unique fantasy world. I’m still developing the story, but it will be a princess and dragon quest romance type storyline. The games I will use as inspiration is the original Prince of Persia, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
As an example of the art style of the game, here is one of the game assets that I finished last night. I experimented with many different drawing perspectives and shading techniques before settling on this style.
Comments
I like the huge Enemy!(if the the boar thing is an enemy?)
Is it going to be a 2d or 3d game? or maybe 2.5d?
Karl
Is your goal to make a game, or to make art?
If your goal is to make a game, you should focus your efforts on making a game - prototyping mechanics, see how things move and work, etc. The reason for this is that if you start on the art rather than the game, you're almost guaranteed to have to change everything down the line when game mechanics are defined and you discover that the art you designed in the first place doesn't fit.
If your goal is to make art, that looks cool, do you know the constraints of the game enough to apply the art though? Is it going to be animated by cutting your 2D image up? Or build a 3D model, etc? Why does the enemy look like that? What environment is it in? Can you hit it anywhere or is there a weak point? How should it move? Which bits hurt the player? Is that even how the game works? All these things (and a lot more) should inform the design of the enemy.
If it's just concept for the art (ie not the final asset) then it would probably benefit you to create a bunch of variations to see which one is "best" based on... well, criterias.
Hey Tuism on a side note, Philip my colleague says he plays Netrunner with you. The goal is to create both, I will be doing all the game art and assets as well as the programming. I don’t have any musical talents so that will have to be outsourced, any music and sound donations are welcome in exchange for your name in the game credits, Hehhe.
I agree that I must be careful to ensure that I don’t create assets that I can’t use in my game and I also agree that all those questions need to be asked and catered for before investing too much time on creating assets. Currently, the development of the game and the game mechanics are running in conjunction with the asset creation. I already have a very basic working game that is already using some of the assets and tile sets I have created. All the game mechanics are not yet there, but slowly but surely the game is feeling more and more how I want it. I will probably have a bit more to show over the next month.
I’m using the game to tell the story I’ve always wanted to tell and each character and enemy that I’ve created so far already has a place in the story of the game. I find creating the art, assets (Tiles and sprites) and the animations of the game to be the most difficult and time consuming part of the development work. To put in into perspective, the following enemy I created and animated using Spine, took about a week to do (after hours). When I create a new character I need to take into consideration where every cut and seam will be, every character and enemy are broken down into between 20 and 40 different pieces, each of these pieces can then be rigged, grouped and animated.
I have been thinking about how to create variations on single assets, I think it can be done relatively easy using overlays such as war paint, armor, extra horns, spikes and even scars. I can attach extra images for the overlays to the different bones and joints and then turn them on or off programmatically. This functionality is already built into Spine and Gamemaker. I can also programmatically scale the size of an enemy depending on its strength or class.
Hey davidstrauss, I created and animated these images in much higher quality than I need so that I can scale them to what I need. For instance, I have not been able to decide If I want the game to be very pixelated or not, but I have the choice of either going high-resolution or full retro.
So what I'm seeing is a lot of focus on the art assets, animations and what the game looks like, and not so much how the game plays. If you're comfortable with that then you're on the right path :)
I personally find that whenever I make a game starting with cool animations and such, down the line mechanics inevitably change from what I had in my head to what I have in the end, as playtesting will ALWAYS yield unexpected results (that's what makes games fun to players anyway, emergent things that noone ever thought of before actually playing it. If a game plays exactly as you think it it probably isn't very interesting!), and that changes requirements on the design and art, which affects this and that and etc etc.
The other route is to have the art give you the direction rather than the play. In which case your art will give you restrictions. Again, if you're cool with that, then cool :)
Summary: Looks good, I dunno what the game does, so I can't really give any useful input.
On the animation - A T-rex should be heavy, and I'm not feeling that heaviness in the animation. The DOOF downwards frame. The rhythm (don't know how to put it) of the frames seem very even and flat. (Animators will know how to word what I'm saying).
And that's about all the constructive crit I can give you because I don't have more context of what these things do.
4 months after development started, I released it for public testing, basically when I was happy with the visual presentation.
Pretty much everyone agreed that the graphics looked fantastic (the game takes really good screenshots). I developed the game's core engine in about 2 weeks, and then spent 3 months producing all the art assets. So the fact that you say the assets are the most difficult and time consuming is perfectly normal, they do make up the bulk of most projects.
However when everyone started playing it, the response was universally lukewarm. Everyone praised the graphics, but noone enjoyed playing it, and when I finally started looking at it objectively I could understand why. The gameplay just wasn't fun, what I envisioned in my head just didn't translate well into the game.
But wait I hear you say, just take the feedback and implement that into the game to make it more fun. And you are right, I had some fantastic feedback to go off of, and a few ideas of my own, but implementing them required me to throw away substantial portions of the work I had already done. This lead to a feeling of despondency, and ultimately abandoning the project.
What I should have done, is released it for public testing when it looked like this:
Because changing the mechanics at that stage would have been trivial. And even if it didn't get any more fun to play, I would have invested only a month's worth of effort.
Don't get me wrong, my art skills levelled up a lot during the project, and the whole process was a valuable learning experience. I just wish those assets could have made it into a game that was actually fun to play as well.
So keep on doing what you're doing, everyone here is rooting for you, just move the order of your tasks around. It could save you a lot of time and disappointment down the line.
Gameplay before graphics,
Fun before fancy :)
Unless you're happy to focus on art at the risk of having okay gameplay, in which case yay art :) Pretty graphics :)
Hi Tuism, in the influential paper “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research”, which was presented as a Game Design Workshop at GDC, it is shown that game developers and players approach and view games differently, here are the quotes that describe the two approaches:
“From the designer’s perspective, the mechanics give rise to dynamic system behavior, which in turn leads to particular aesthetic experiences.”
“From the player’s perspective, aesthetics set the tone, which is born out in observable dynamics and eventually, operable mechanics. “
They propose that developers and designers of games should change their focus to the same approach followed by players, this will result in experience-driven, opposed to feature-driven design.
This is supported by the gamedev.net article “Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics”, where the author describes the 3 development components required during the game development process and specifies that the Aesthetics are more important than the mechanics and dynamics as this creates an emotional response and the player experiences it directly. He warns developers that focusing primarily on the mechanics and not the aesthetics of play can result in hackneyed games without focus. He concludes by stating that he believes that developers should focus on the “aesthetics of play you want to deliver” and then make the mechanics and dynamics suite and highlight these aesthetics. He believes this process will produce a more sophisticated and focused game design.
When considering newer game development methodologies such as the Layered Tetrad presented in the book “The Art of Game Design”. The primary pillars: Aesthetics, Story, Mechanics and Technology are all interconnected. You cannot develop one without it affecting the other pillars. This shows that all parts must be designed in conjunction with each other.
I agree with these game development approaches, especially the Layered Terad methodology. Over the last three months that I have been busy with the game, I have spent development time on each of these pillars. Currently, I have only shared some of the art because that is interesting to share, soon I might share the game prototype or make it available for play at the Johannesburg Community Event.
Yes, now that you mention it, the animation does seem off for such a big creature. My animation skills need some work.
Thanx for the comments guys, I really appreciate it. I probably would not even have gone and read about game development methodologies, if you didn’t raise concerns. I believe I will be better prepared for this challenge.
And regarding what you've wrote, I think what was meant by "aesthetics" isn't confined to how it looks - the aesthetics of a game is how a game FEELS in totality. The way everything fits to convey something. And that includes, well, everything.
Good luck working on everything :)
https://humblebundle.com/cryengine-bundle
Here is the breakdown of what you get:
+Madison Pike assets - 65Gb - may be used in any commercial or non-commercial project built with any engine
+Crytek assets - 1.5Gb - may be used in any commercial or non-commercial project built with the Crytek engine
+Other assets - 4.4Gb - not sure of the usage license