Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure

A couple weeks ago i was playing DragonBall Advanced Adventure again, and i realized, again, what a fantastic and rather unique game that is. It's a really fun brawler that sometimes requires split second reaction, prioritizes control over mashing, has cool and challenging move-sets and you can play every - single - character (including every enemy, of which there are a lot (except a few bosses i believe)).
It also is a platformer, challenging you with pits and obstacles, avoiding nasty ambushes and projectiles. The platforming is very responsive and almost has a megaman'ish vibe to it.
It also is a 1v1 fighter (as e.g. streetfighter etc) introducing different mechanics for the tournament stages. It works differently to any other fighting game though. While very simple, it becomes almost a game of rps, it can be quite challenging. You trade punches with your opponent until one fumbles and you break his defense, at which point only you can deal damage for a brief time until he recovers.

The artstyle is spot on, authentic to the max, the story progression is as close to the original db as it can get, going through all the major locations you'd expect, albeit a little altered at some points to make the single player experience more coherent.



Ok enough gushing about DBAA.
Let's talk game.

The game that has chibi kungfu guys

design (lol)
Right now there's only a bunch of loose ideas floating around. Platformer, brawler, tight fast-paced combat, multiple playable characters. It extents all the way to (local) multiplayer, vs matches, coop, whatever. Nothing's set in stone, nothing's really decided yet. Just the general flow or direction is set. You could argue its a DBAA clone, or heavily inspired by it anyways, since i dont know any game that is quite like it.

One thing i want to get down to is the kind of rps'ish nature of the tournament fights. It is a very interesting take on fighting, and it enables the characters to continually throw fists at each other, making it really appear like a kungfu coreography, as opposed to having one puncher, and one being punched. I think this can be elevated with light/strong (speak punch/kick) attacks that must be blocked/intercepted in some way yadda yadda, game design is lacking i know

art
I've been doodling around every now and then with these over the past couple weeks, proportions very much influenced by DBAA or Akira Toriyama by proxy.



I started working on a combo animation, which is quite rough yet, but i think it shows the general idea of it.



You might recognize 2 of the characters, one being the drunken master from one of the early jacky chun movies, the other is jin from ip-man, the wild savage fighter.

Ultimately i'd like to get to a point where different characters exhibit different fighting styles. Initially i indendet to pick some famous kungfu movie characters and kind of caricaturize them (what broforce did), but turns out there arent too many recognizable characters in that genre. Another idea is to use the kungfu animal styles and antropomorphise the characters. Otherwise i might come up with some original characters, or watch more movies for influences 

One thing i want to get down is that the actual moves and combos seem and feel fairly authentic. I did kungfu for quite a while myself and i feel i'm a decent judge at proper poses and movement, but it still requires a fair deal of research. But it's a good way to get my arse off my chair and do some exercises again

There's another thing i'm unsure about. Outlines! I usually don't like them. not a big fan at all. but it somehow works.
i like the flat shading, but the outline kind of gives it a bit more... i dunno. it seperates it and makes it readable.



For environments i'd like to go for a fairly simple attempt. I'm still experimenting a lot about how to render what. Meh.
Getting a cohesive artstyle going is tuff.

code

Nothing as of yet. i want to get a roughly sketched animation set for the girl for idle, running, jumping, punch combo and possibly kick combo before i want to tackle any code at all, since the state machine will be the main meat of the game, and to get that right i need sample and test data in form of a sprite sheet

There's still the consideration of what to work with. I am pondering unity, since i have a basic tilemap load/collision etc already set up for it, or to modify my 3d engine to work nicely with pixel perfect things (60fps lock, integer-frame-based movement, rendering, scaling, the usual). would provide a bunch of benefits in the long run, more control about uv and vertex setups, direct shader control for anything fancy that comes to mind, no scripting restrictions or anything like that. The initial preperation will take a while though. In any case it's a bit further off.

Anyways, i just wanted to get this out of my head for now.

Hello chaps.

Let me introduce jane to you. She's Johnny's girlfriend.



Spoiler
I'm working on the running loop right now and i learn new stuff about her with every frame. Had a hard time figuring out her hair.


Right now this is a 6 frame loop, but i'll smoothen it out once i get it right.
The head movement is still quite jerky and her hair moves a bit backwards.
Otherwise i feel the cycle lacks urgency. Maybe that's something i can fix with a higher framecount, but i think it should be achievable in this loop.
I'll give it another whirl tomorrow night.

Recently i've been looking around for something that would suit my needs for development.
Normally i'm the type of person who just writes the stuff he needs himself, but i thought i'll save myself the trouble and use something someone else built. Turns out at this point i'm considering writing it myself again.
I'm aware that a good bunch of you are developers yourself so i might also ask in here, what are your personal favorites for 2d game development? May it be an engine, a framework or a complete suite.
Keep in mind this is highly subjective and based on my own experience only.
Feel free to add to this list, make counterpoints, or just ramble as i like to do

LoVE
Lua based scripting, really bad documentation, lacks some key features (or documentation thereof), lacks debugging

SFML.net
Provided samples are broken, runs on OpenTK, so why not use that?!

Otter2d
Samples broken, runs on SFML, [...]

Haxe
Uses some as3 mutant script language, doesn't seem to have a functional debugging last i checked. Seems fine otherwise.

Unity
3d centric. i dont feel it's suited for 2d/pixel based games all that well. Same with unreal engine (plus its a bit overkill innit)

Pico8
Fantasy console, uses lua, interesting concept, too tight restrictions. not suited to make actual games.

I'm currently doing some fan art for Secret of Mana.



There are some struggles i have i cannot currently figure out on my own.
Mainly i'm happy with the trees, but i think they could be improved still. I think they're lit a bit too uniformly, the front ones anyways.

I'm not sure how to tackle grass. I tried an attempt with individual grass blades before but that was just not the look i was going for. And to be honest i'm not sure what look i'm going for at this point.


Thirdly i'm having trouble with the fur. For a big furry thing like that, i'm not sure how to convey it without texturing the whole thing which would probably end up in a noisy mess. The attempt i have so far seems alright, but i was wondering if someone knows some techniques that would help.

Thanks