Radio Galaxy Cool stuff.
Things that I immediately wonder about is four characters with four personalities, how is that reflected in gameplay? Does Troy fight like everyone else or does he have special moves because he likes baseball? How do you differentiate those? It's all still using pillows, it's just tailoring it to each one. How do you tie that to each character so it makes sense? Think of that when you're moving forward. I'm choosing among players and I get art differences, but it should make sense in retrospect. Laura you mentioned likes hugging, so does she have a healing ability in there? Eris hates Troy, you do something like that in a game, how do you have that translate to the game in a way that makes sense? How do you tie them into what's going on mechanically? It doesn't have to be utterly unique. The characters in Castle Crashers are different, but basically they're the same. You want to make sure that you give each character a moment where they get to do something really cool. Rely on that character for something critical. Allow people not to play the four characters, but have a spot where you can have a mechanic that's normal difficulty if you're missing the character. But if you have that character, they can just roll over the enemies. Otherwise it's just a cute back story. For a game like this, plan on that stuff a lot. Tying this to the narrative, there's a little bit that I worry about. You're a sequel to the first one. 95% of the people who play this will never have played the first one. The basic story you have can still work, but make sure players who are new to this game don't feel like they're missing something. Either structure it so you don't get that. Write it as if it isn't a sequel. You can just put in little hints if you want. I don't know if you're going with Twoneironauts. Your title should be Book of Dreams. That's another part of realizing that the vast majority of your audience has no clue about the first one. Don't confuse people. I like the thing with the flat colors, everything read really clear. The sky and the grass and everything was clear. The trick now is to not lose that clarity. One thing I was thinking is whether you have an idea of where you're going with that stylistically. You could almost go more abstract. None of you have been at the Seattle Art Museum? There's a display that's all weird patterns. You could almost go with something different and make that work. Think outside the box. Ikea has tiles that look like grass and they have tiles taht look like pebbles. You could tile it and make it real grass in a way. The concepts of the characters and Nyx, the colors and the shapes don't pop very well. You need to really think about defining the shapes better so they pop better. I know it's a 2D game, but it feels very flat. I think a lot more concept work around that will make it sing better. The character poses were not dynamic enough for the characters. The shapes wer bland and the silhouettes weren't popping. You need to make the animations really sing in a game. Color style and animations are really going to be the tools you have to make these characters sing. The environments that you showed were desaturated from the characters, but they weren't really desaturated. On the UI, I would like to see a lot more exploration there. It seemed very topical and last-minute. A lot of people in video games don't put enough thought into the UI, it's your interface with the user, so really explore it to make it functional and good. It wasn't clear to me if this was one character at a time or if it was multiple players. Are the characters faster or slower, do two of them complement each other? Think through the play action a little more. Do they cooperate with each other? Think about how to combine that stuff to get more concept into what the gameplay might be. I totally agree that the silhouettes need to be much more clear. The silhouettes are something we mention time and time again in this class. It's very important that we can pick up and play this game and not have the characters look alike. If it's fast motion, it isn't going to work unless one character is all white and the other is all black. The template you're using is something we're seeing for the first time. I'm happy that you have a template, but something needs to be done about it. There's something a little intriguing about it. Make sure things match. Overall this is exactly what we want to see at this stage for a game. The next step is getting your artist's art in engine and start working together. The fear right now is usually that there's no engine work at all. Meaningfull differences, your characters either need to look really different and have different abilities. Otherwise make them all the same silhouette except with different colors. Don't lead me to believe it's going to be meaningful if it isn't. Since you have to work on the silhouettes anyway, just put them in the engine and work with them in engine. Change the name. You'll have judges that won't even play your game because they won't know what those words are. Ben's absolutely right about that. Play the game on the TV because that's the scale for these. Really nice work. You had more in-engine than I hoped. If pillows are going to be part of the character, they need bones and rigging. Nice job.
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