Development of Fun Guy continued

Initially, the character design was going to be animals, and the bad guys were going to be the authority – the police, who’d be slugs with police hats, it looked adorable and cute and my team mate created an angry state for them which was quite frightening, we decided that these animals did not convey the 60s as much as, say, a mushroom and human rockers.

The slugs looked quite pedestrian and bored and it was interesting seeing their body language change as they get angry or upset. The idea of having the authority as the antagonists was scrapped because if there are these police-officer-type characters in the scenery, the player may think twice before going to defeat them. Even in games like Grand Theft Auto IV, the police aren’t the bad guys. They are the antagonists of the protagonist due to the context of the main character being a criminal. Being arrested is a challenge to overcome so the player uses as weapons and choices at their disposal to defeat the police. Other than that the police officers are programmed to react to other felonies too.

The main player was initially designed as a person and the notes from their guitar could be used to create bridges to pass over inaccessible areas, like big gaps in the cityscape. However the 800 by 600 pixel screen didn’t allow this to be used, the team felt the idea would be used best elsewhere and used the guitar solely as a weapon. Another idea involved objects being turned into their friendlier versions of themselves, like a rocker on a bike turning into a bicycle after the player shoots his guitar at him.

Later, the sprite used for the very start of our digital prototype looked like this:

A dashing fellow he was, however the final art work looked like this, my teammate worked on this, we swapped suggestions throughout the process:

The team had some ideas for contextual changes in the scenery, examples include:

Above, Joey’s Garage is closed down and after the colour is restored it is open for business, with a camper van inside. The second example includes a tie dye centre which opens up after all the buckets are delivered to the camper van.

Below is a storyboard showing how the victory condition is achieved, it was outlined in the brief; the player should know how to achieve this as its integral to how the game world is constructed. Here we made the rockers look like bad guys so the player would know their goal is to defeat them and take back their paint.

And that's all for now, next I'll share some information about the sprites development and some more storyboards. Thanks for reading!