The Difficulty in Scheduling

I have to say, finding time to work on this project is difficult. People who know me well know that my schedule is pretty ridiculous. Between my full-time job and all of the extra activities that I have committed to, I've left myself very little extra time that I can work on Lozz. Right now, I'm working on animating the main character. I've been at this state for at least 2 weeks now, mostly because I have had 0 time to work on it in the past week. It's a pain. I really want to make this game, but it is becoming extremely obvious that I will have difficulty getting very far in development with my current schedule. Most weeks, Saturday morning is the only time I have free... And that is often taken up by other things... Like paying bills and running errands. Ugh. I hope to get some work done this week. But it's not looking good.

Lozz Concept Art

I have finished the first concept model for Lozz that I'm not embarrassed to share. I had a couple other concepts. Wow were they bad. They looked like a 4 year old drew them. This one looks like a 10 year old drew it. If anyone asks, tell them I let my non-existent 10 year old nephew draw it.

At any rate... Without further ado... The first concept art of Lozz.

I still want to make some changes. For example, I'm not sure what to do with his legs/feet when he's just standing. I kinda like the "ready to take on anything" look... But I feel like his legs look stupid being all straight and boring.

Any constructive criticism is welcome from anyone. Thoughts/Suggestions?

Creating Lozz

I've started the long journey today. I downloaded the tools that I'll need to make Legend of Lozz come to life, did a few tutorials to learn about the tools, and I'm now in the process of designing the main character.

Let me just say that the hardest part for me, by far, is going to be character and level art. I am not an artist. At all. That's part of the reason that all of the characters are going to be "8-bit" style. It's a kind of art form that I am more familiar with, and I can manage to create characters that don't look ridiculous.

I've come up with a concept drawing for Lozz himself. Maybe I'll post it when I'm happy with the design completely. It's really surprising to me that facial expression can carry over to 8-bit. My thoughts about Lozz: I want him to be a bit strange. You look at him and he has a smile... Yet he looks angry. I really want the player to not trust their own character.

The next difficulty? Animation. He needs a walking sequence and a jumping sequence. Thanks to the internet, there are many tutorials for this style of animation... But I have a long road ahead of me. The whole thing seems a bit daunting. Just thinking about all of the characters I have to make, all of the animations that those characters need, level design/art...

I'm actually looking forward to the rest of the game design. Dealing with events and collisions. For some reason, I find that stuff enthralling.

So that's my progress so far today. I'll post a concept of Lozz soon.

So it Begins...

I've decided to follow my passion. In the near future, I will be developing my first video game. It is probably going to take a long time to get this done... First of all, I'm not quitting my day job for this. As much as I would love to become an Indie Game Developer full-time, it's just not practical. It's simply too risky to go all-in. Secondly, I'm going to be working on this by myself. I have an idea in my head of what I want the game to look like. Trying to get another developer in on my idea could end horribly.

What do I want out of this? FAME AND FORTUNE! Just kidding. Obviously, I wouldn't refuse fame and fortune if it came my way... But that's incredibly unlikely. Honestly, I just think I would really enjoy creating my own game. If I can make a few bucks out of it, that'd be amazing. But if I can give some of my friends a few hours of entertainment... That's enough for me.

I've been starting to piece together the game in my head. This blog will be an outlet for me to get some notes down and to keep track of my progress. If anyone wants to follow my progress, I'm going to keep the blog public... Honestly, it's mostly a tool for me. I want to be able to look back in the end and enjoy looking over the entire process.

But enough of the rambling. Anyone who has read this far is probably interested in the game itself... So here's the basic rundown of what the game is going to be like. I want to start simple, so the game is just going to be a 2D Platformer. Some of my favorite games are 2D platformers (Mario Bros, Castlevania, etc) and avoiding 3D is probably a good idea for my first game.

I'm not completely satisfied with the same old platformer style. I need a "hook". Something that hasn't been done before (to my knowledge anyways). The key is that the player can switch characters at any time to complete an objective. I'm sure Trine comes to mind for many people... And to that, the character switching is similar. However, I want to take that and make players switch on-the-fly. In this case, the biggest use will be in the air. When a player jumps, they can switch characters in mid-air and use that character's power mid-flight. Those powers will be things like extra jumps and attacks. Successful jumps will sometimes require very precise use of 2 or 3 different characters, and some enemies can only be defeated by certain characters... Things like that.

I have a plot in mind... It starts out as the classic "save the princess" plot. I have ideas to spice it up some... But I don't want to ruin anything. The player starts out only knowing that a "princess" needs saving. That was good enough for Mario.

I'm obviously still working on all of the details. I have some character powers in mind that I may or may not use. Going forward, I'm going to create 1 character at a time and introduce them here. I haven't decided if I'm going to release all of the information on the characters ahead of time or not. I wouldn't want to spoil too much.

Everyone can know about the main character, though. Sticking with the Mario theme, the first character will be of that style. He can run, jump, and squash enemies. Simple. As of right now, the main character's name is Lozz... And the working title for the game is "Legend of Lozz". It might stick. I kinda like it.

That's all for now. It's time to start developing. I will be posting more with each step along the development process. I'll probably post a screenshot of Lozz himself in the near future.