Hello! I'm the board game guy who made Stardust Butterfly last year (which I just updated a few months ago) and Scrappet Kaiser Princess before that! I'm working again with MeBID to make another board game, called QQ Step!

Here's a little dev video showing off what I've got of the design so far:

QQ Step is a 1v1 chess-like board game, themed around teams of characters having dance battles in an underground dance club. The game itself is inspired by a board game called Onitama, and features 4 different teams/characters with unique powers. The basic gameplay involves using Dance cards to move your pawns across the board, trying to achieve one of 3 goals: Capture the enemy Leader, capture all the enemy's friends, or fulfill your personal goal. There will be 4 different playable characters: Privemal Mask, The Champ, Solveig, and DJ Dues. In the digital version, DJ Dues is planned to be an unlockable character. Each of these characters also has a unique ability.

So yeah, currently I'm working on playtesting and art. This year I'm going to try my hand at animating some sprites for the digital version (gonna make all the pawns dance, I hope), and I've got chvage working on some music. I've got to design and draw the concepts of the 16 characters that will be available here. Whew. Hope I can do it. Gonna be a little tough since I'm juggling a baby as well. This year the printable version might release well after the jam is over

Anyway, when it comes to story, I don't have much planned. Since this is a present for a teenage girl, and not a game that's carrying the weight of an already existing franchise, I think it's fine to not worry about telling an interesting story and just throwing in all the characters. But we'll see. As I draw more of these characters I might figure something out

Until next time!

Been a while since I opened up this topic. Even in the Discord, I've been pretty quiet about the progress over here.  Most of that is because it's pretty tough balancing working on this and taking care of a baby (I'm writing this as baby sleeps on my chest at 2 in the morning and I don't want to wake her even though I'm behind on art). Heh, I guess it was very ambitious of me to think I could animate 16 characters. About a week ago, I decided to cut down and only draw a single sprite for each character, and the "animation" will be done in-engine by squashing and rotating these images. I'm still working on digitizing these sketches I've done (15/16 characters sketched as of this post), but I do have a single character finished and ready to show off:

I'm so excited to see all these guys on the dance floor. I got some pretty great poses imo, and I'm excited to show them off! I think I'll save it all for the stream, so that's the only sneak peek here. I'll probably post the other sprites after the jam is over or something.

So the current to-do list I've got planned is to finish all these poses by this weekend. I've got a few online playtesting sessions planned with friends this weekend as well, and after that I'll end playtesting so MeBID won't have to worry about adjusting things on the final stretch. 

Then for next week, I need to draw up portraits for the 4 team leaders along with the UI elements and maybe some other art like the thumbnail. I'm also planning on adding some voice acting to the game so I'll need to record that too. I'll also need to finish writing the script (which is really only for the tutorial) and possibly iron out some backstory stuff (don't think there'll be an actual story to this game). MeBID also created a little program for me to animate the sprites for whenever they port things into the game, so I'll do that as well.

So yeah, I don't know how many of you guys out there actually print out my games, but I likely won't be able to start working on that until after the deadline. And with that would come more playtesting and potential tweaking and such maybe... I'll aim for releasing a printable version a week after the deadline (maybe by the time results come out). Anyway, I gotta figure out what this 16th character is going to look like before I allow myself to sleep, so I'll get back to researching now. Good luck to everyone on their games!

Oh yeah, I also made a logo