Comic book inspiration

I want to make it clear that the game is highly inspired by my comic book experience. I am a big fan of Garfield, Gaston LaGaffe and Charlie Brown. I find the 9th art to be a very subtle, intelligent way to make people think and smile. Doing cartoon was always something I was proud of. I first started doing them when I discovered about Nabuchodonosaure  cartoon and "Le concombre masqué". They triggered something inside me to start producing my own. My graphic style was Charlie Brown and Garfield as it was very simple and efficient. I want the game to feel like you are part of that background. I like how things look graphically, how anything can happen. More specifically I produce the Recontre du 3e type cartoon book which was self publish and sold locally in my home town. 500 copies were sold, which is not bad considering the market. Despite the book didn't make it to the big league, it was show case in the International comic book fare of Quebec and at the Salon du livre jeunesse. I was very proud of it and had a lot of very good feedback on the work from the readers. The book wasn't necessarily really strong artistically. The core story was great, but It wasn't fully exploited and my skill at the time wasn't strong enough. I'll gladly share part of the original book in the upcoming weeks. What is important about that book is that it serve as a starting point of this project. I have 2 tome of prewritten scenario to start with. I don't know about other indie developer, but I think having a scenario draft is really important. I want to develop things around a story and not squeeze a history inside of a confine set of feature. Those two book gave me the opportunity to know my character. This is a lot of character background to work with ! It's cool. It's like if I had started that game a couple of years ago without even knowing I will ever produce that. That said, things have change for the best and I am not sticking to a simplistic adaptation of an old unsuccessful cartoon. This is a complete rewrite, remaster, recreated, new, unique and super wow bing bang history inspired by the original work ! I think it is very important to have a good story a good plot, we want to tell a story, we want a start, a reason to play and the goal to be clear. We want a strong story to support game feature and we have one. 

So graphically you can expect things in 3D but with a cartoon style approach. I want this game to be more like how Pixar does thing. Cartoon but with a realistic look... ok hold it here. I am not Pixar, but if I have to aim at something, i'de rather aim as high as possible. I don't want the inspiration to stop there. I want the game to feel like a comic book, not by having super great 3D simulation of  a page being turn, I don't want it to feel like a gimmick. What I am saying is that I want it to be funny, colorful, action packed and for all age. Everything will be, from a design stand point, inspired by that.

Designing a character is also very complex to me. Designing a character is not only how it look it is how it live, how it walk, how it talk, how it react to certain situation etc. You have to create, in your mind, a full feature humanoid. I remember working up at night to write down idea and redraw stuff that wasn't working well. All this data is part of me now. They were born and lived in my head and they still do. I'll make various blog entry regarding each character

Game inspiration

I can't really pin point what game would be the closest similar game to the our. I am not necessarily inspired by 1 game or a set of game, but i'm inspired by some game feature of the old days. At the time of classic arcade, colleco and nintendo NES there were some stuff about these game that make them good even 30 years later. They were very addictive, they required complex pattern learning, skill and you had to be really crazy devoted to finish a game. I remember the adrenaline rush and excitement of finishing a game meant at that time. I find today's game to be more on the easy side, very forgiving, very beautiful and cinematic but also very short and almost no replay-ability. Replay-ability is a big word that a lot of developer said to aim at but very few actually achieve it. We will try to achieve that in various way by implementing a lot of game mechanic we will talk in future blog post. What game had

1. They were hard and frustrating
   1. To a certain degree this is not so good as we want stuff to be fun, but if you want to have this adrenaline rush we all like,  you have to go through painful moment. A mix  of nice easy moment and hard impossible level that draw the line between care-bear and hardcore gamer ! I know that I treat the "hard level" of todays game as the "normal level". How difficulty work in our game will be shared in a futur blog entry.
2. They had a LOT of replayability
   1. Yes, people still play Mario 1. It will always be fun. Q*Bert, still very fun, even though every level look the same. PacMan ! 256 level of frustration. We will not have only 1 level repeating itself at higher speed indefinitely until the game crash, but we will give you reason to restart the game even if you ever finish it. We will give you reason to restart the game if you are  stuck at a certain level that is too hard. We will give you reason to start many game in parallel just to do thing differently. I can't wait to share more about it later !
3. They were unforgiving
   1. Ever played Rick Dangerous ? This is one of the most sadistic experience (still a very gun and good game) as everything in this game kill you instantaneously and this Indiana Jones inspired game had all of impossible to detect death trap every where. Each path was design to kill you each and every single time. Ever played the NES version Dragon's Lair ? (ok this one is a bad exemple, as the game was really bad, and the control were terrible) There is a funny episode  from the angry game nerd about it.( go to 2:46 https://youtu.be/00xIvTOLrYA  ). We don't intend to have a game that frustrating, That is not fun at all. But even in mario everything kill you in 1 shot. It's hard, some level require a Epic level of eye finger coordination. Today's game give you plenty of health, and health typically regen etc. We have our own thinking on how to draw the line between those two extend. More info soon
4. They were fun and had their own signature
   1. As easy as it sound, this is the hardest part. Make it fun ! You will be be the judge of that and you'll be able to judge the more you discover about the game.

Stay tune as the next blog post will be about the game story and what will be the humorous approach of this crazy universe. Follow us !

What do you guys think about today's game difficulty level ? Are they just right or are they too easy ?