Character Design- Silhouettes

When i first started thinking about character design for anvil, i knew i'd have to take some artistic liberties against the real-life people that the characters are loosely based upon.

Controlling Flow

flow. what is flow? flow is the pace of a game. it's difficult to describe, but i guess a simple way of looking at it might be the progression of the level of excitement or involvement you provoke in the player.

Immersion and How Death Breaks it.

when you're making a game, the first and most important thing has to be immersion. you can get a biker gang hooked on pony games if they're immersive enough.

Sprite Progress

Some of you may have seen the original test levels for Anvil, and you would have had the distinct displeasure of playing with this tweened sprite.

I'm in the process of updating the sprite with a set of more detailed hand-drawn animations, here's where i'm at.

 

where the original was painted down with a thick brush, the new sprites will be built using the thin single-line vector tool- the pencil. this opens a lot of doors in terms of colour and zooming, and pretty much halves the filesize of the sprite. it's also a lot of work- but for animations as short and as important as character sprites, i'm prepared to sink in the time.

Grand Opening

welcome!
deviantart really didn't know what to say about game development, so i thought it might make sense to give Anvil it's own little corner of the internet.

now that i have, let's talk a little bit about this project.

CONCEPT
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Anvil is a story-driven platformer. the basic thread revolves around four young men who have been thrown into four surreal worlds. they live, they breathe, they fight and they learn the reasons for everything that's happened to them

i'm an animator- i have a deep love for making things move in an appealing way, and i want Anvil to reflect this as much as possible. i want to make the game world a pleasure to move around- even without the combat, platforms, and puzzles.

for code, i plan to mod the (now out of development) AS3 Edward platformer engine.
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this is a development blog. that means sssssspoilers. for the people who'd like to avoid having their Anvil experience tainted by prior knowledge of plot- i'm going to add an (S) to the title of any blog post that goes into any serious detail- but i'd really like feedback on everything.