DEAD KITTIES
The Grim Reaper is hosting a carnival of death and has forcefully invited Tig and a group of his friends to join the chaos. Will he escape with his life or become one of the dead himself?
BACKGROUND
Since finishing my DKC fan-game a few years back I have yet to finish a project, but have been making progress on my engine. I've been re-iterating over this game for a while now. It was originally supposed to be a megaman-style game, but it's evolved into something completely different. Pretty sure I know the direction I'm taking it at this point, so here goes.
This is currently a solo project, I'm handling the art direction and the development. Music and audio will eventually be handled by my brother.
GAMEPLAY
Level-design will likely be something similar to a Yoshi's Island/DKC hybrid. I wanted to create a difficult platformer that was still forgiving for when you screw up. Most of my friends aren't as big into platformers as I am, so I wanted to make something difficult enough that i could enjoy it, as well as them.
With that in mind, I built it so that when you get hit your soul leaves your body. Not an immediate death but you still have to recover your soul similar to the way that Baby Mario has to be caught before the timer runs out.
I'll be approaching the level design to a similar way that I did for my DKC fangame. Each level will have a unique theme that will develop as you progress through it.
TECHNICAL SHIZ
- Unity
- Ferr2D
- SpriteLamp
- Asesprite
I'm building the game in Unity but I'm mostly just using it for rendering purposes. I'm using my own custom-built physics which is more tailored for my needs. Ferr2D is being used instead of tilesets, due to the smooth nature of the slopes in my engine I couldn't really rely on fixed-size blocks.
I'm using Sprite Lamp shaders within Unity for normal mapping with my sprites. I design my diffuse sprites in Asesprite, run a script to generate the lighting profiles, generate the normal maps with Sprite Lamp and apply them as a material in Unity. It allows me to play around with some really nice lighting at runtime:
Here's an example of the lighting profiles of the main character:
I used to do the lighting profiles by hand, which took forever. I still have to make some updates to the lighting script that I have, especially when it comes to the front-lit frame. It's not the top of my priority list right now though.
If you're a code monkey, I publish some of my code publicly on GitHub. This isn't the whole source code for the game, but it contains the majority of the high-level logic if you're curious about that sort of stuff.
SOCIAL SHIZ