Last week we didn’t have much to share with you guys, but now we have loads to share about the awesome stuff we did all week long. Apart from a lot of drinks, meat and mocha that happened last week, we came up with a theme, a character and some major aesthetic elements which would add a lot to this game.
Art Update:
First to start with, we came up with a character for this game – A Hero! But, Boy-o-boy, it was so difficult to decide the character, as each had their own specifications and emotions attached. Arpita wanted the character to be chubby, as according to her one-day character art research, chubbiness brings cuteness to any character. Many would accept this and go forward, but our art guy is not amongst those many. He took it as a challenge to create a lean character that looks damn cute. So all through the week, you would see everyone collecting references of their all-time favorite characters and sending it to him.
He made a lot of characters which would suit the attitude of the character that we wanted – a school going kid who loves art and who pretty much doesn’t care about anything else.
Each guy voted for 3 of the characters in order of preference and ultimately we came up to a conclusion after a little mix and match of features from 2-3 characters. And at last, the character was finalized and yeah it was a lean one! Have a look at the character and let us know how you guys like it.
We personally loved him and we named him “PABLO”. We are even in plans of releasing a comic based on his story. Our dear friend and one of the amazing writers we know – Samantha Vick has agreed to write the script for the comic.
Once we started thinking about the story and how to come up with a comic and everything, we needed more characters, may be a kid who would constantly keeps troubling Pablo? We named this kid Greedo! And here’s Greedo for you.
Programming update:
The game is just one week old. The prototype with the most basic features is done. Inclusion of colliders and some basic physics for better play-testing is done. The game definitely doesn’t look right presently without any art, animation and proper effects. It appears as if the game is going in its own flow and you are playing no major role in it. But, if you imagine the animations and VFX in your mind and play it, it definitely feels good. After playing this basic prototype for hours and settling it in our minds, we have decided to go forward with a theme and story to it.
Screenshot of early prototype
Theme/Story:
The game needed objects to be falling from the top in-front of a single screened background and we were breaking our heads for something interesting and beautiful that could fall down. Fantasy objects were not something we wanted to go for, as we wanted those objects to be more relevant to the lives of people. We went through a long list of games which had things falling down:
Fruit Ninja had ‘fruits’, veggie samurai had vegetables; sushi boy had sushi’s and POOP falling!
We didn’t want to go as natural as sushi boy, but a more neutral object which would have some attitude to it. That’s when we thought, ‘why not Puppets?’Puppets have an attitude and behavior of their own and puppets range from humans to monsters; I mean that would be our best bet.
Then it didn’t take much time for us to come up with a story that would connect everything together. You would have to wait though, till we reveal the story to you guys.We needed 3 cultures for the theatres as well as puppets. We wanted to avoid similar looking cultural puppet. Hence, we chose Indian, Chinese and European. We had to avoid cultures like Thai water puppets, even though that would have looked good, as we wanted all the three cultures to be in a flow and at the same time would give the players a visual experience filled with the richness of these 3 cultures.
So that’s it for this week. So, any of you guys were present at GDC this year? God! I miss that energetic environment. Can we have a list of some mind-blowing talks that happened this year?
Signing off,
Team MechMocha
FB page : https://www.facebook.com/MechMocha
Twitter :https://www.twitter.com/#!/MechMocha
Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/user/MechMocha
