un-named Valken-like game: progress thread
polycounter lvl 20
Hi there everyone! After years and years of not really being around, I have an actual project to work on again.
We have thrown around "Platinum Formation" and a bunch of other names, but insofar nothing has really stuck. For now I can just describe it as like Assault Suits Valken/ Front Mission GunHazard where the main character tries to solve a grand conspiracy while riding along in his giant robot wife.
I'm mainly art lead, so I can only speak definitively for aesthetics. The goals therein being:
- Create something that feels like an old system being pushed to it's limits. No lazy indie flat art or one pixel eyes, no "so retro" shenannigans.
- create/commission designs that get people excited and read well from the game space. The player should see these and wish a toy existed of it.
- Create a mysterious enemy faction that break expectations and make players go "wait, huh?!"
We have plenty of concept work already for stuff, and I also have done a good few asset tests from the previous 2.5D version.
Some examples:
The initial goal was to do 2D bone animation with 3D backgrounds, but given the tools for doing that are... weird to implement and poorly documented. (looking at You Spine!) I've decided to forgo that method entirely and just do full 3D.
Having said that, the animation tests I did for that did look REALLY cool. They'll be invaluable later so that I can just animate the 3D models timed to these frames.
This doesn't mean I was going to let all this hard work go to waste, mind you! If anything, it made me want to try some techniques I've been dying to do since I saw Brave Blade years ago. Models with textures at nearly the same texel density as the internal resolution, allowing things to give a consistent look to spritework without needing to redraw frames.
So here is the current progress on the model version of the test asset. I've been calling this thing the Caldwell for years, so that name is sticking for now. Only things really left to do are the feet and the gun. I feel there are some parts that could stand to be adjusted, but I'll get to those later.
Any thoughts welcome, especially since this is something of an experiment right now.