AuthorTopic: Kung fu chibi's  (Read 2809 times)

Offline wzl

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Kung fu chibi's

on: July 03, 2016, 10:54:33 pm
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 :P

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  :crazy:

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 :D

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. :mean:



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 :P

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.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2016, 11:01:53 pm by wzl »

Offline Curly

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Re: Kung fu chibi's

Reply #1 on: July 04, 2016, 12:03:10 am
I played DBAA a couple of days ago because I wanted to make somthing that looked similar too :lol:

Cute sprites. I like what you've done so far :)
About the mountain blending with the character's skin, maybe if you made it more blue it could look good? The outline doesn't look bad tho.