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Saturday, July 23, 2011

MAL Title Screen

Humor me by clicking on the image and viewing the proper resolution.






  • Yes, I start out with scribbles and go from there.
  • Originally the shot was supposed to be in a cave (see the stalactites?), but bright > dark almost every time.
  • I'm not a big fan of the 'give Megaman a handgun' creative liberties that sometimes go into box-art, so I tried to stick as close to the actual game as possible. Despite that, creative liberties were taken. Like the implied suggestion that you can play all three of the main characters at once, or that the spiny lemmings (top-left corner) are 90% goofy-ass face, when in the game they all look like they're recovering from a hangover. But there is a jester who throws bombs at you.
  • That guy standing under the open portcullis (in the WIP) is King of Looter, but he didn't end up in the finished version and while I feel bad about that, the dude just didn't work with the composition.


Here's a link to the game's site. It's pretty fucking awesome unless you're looking for information on the game itself.

5 comments:

  1. Dude. I found this shortly after you posted it here and sent Dan a link. We're in agreement that it's awesome; I love this!

    Saw you checked it in last nite too. I removed the moving clouds stuff, since it wasn't being used.

    The only critique I have is, it might be unclear to the player that Jocko is an enemy, since he and the playable characters are facing the same way. But once people play the game, they'll know that.

    I love your style and I love the picture :) Great job!

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  2. The game's website is pretty hilarious. Are you accepting criticism on it? Or is it intentionally unfocused and I should shut up?

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  3. Yeah, we sorta finished some of it but got distracted by the game itself.

    Criticism would be great, mostly because it'd remind us that we should be dolling up the site a bit more.

    But, yeah, it's intentionally unfocused.
    Maybe we could embed a quick trailer of the game? As far as I know that's about 99% of what the potential market needs to decide whether they're interested or not.

    ReplyDelete
  4. OK, here are my humble suggestions.

    The first thing you need to do is come up with a good answer for Q1 in "why play this." Any content you create and trailers you post will be unfocused until you decide what the appeal of this game is. I know you're making this primarily for fun, but the fact that you're hinting at these things on its website leads me to believe that you are interested in having a lot of other people play and enjoy it.

    With that said, I think the rest of your page strongly hints at things you guys find appealing, but what's really strange is that the game itself doesn't actually contain these attributes. For example: if I were to see the "What Is Looting?" section without knowing anything else about the game, I would naturally assume that this is some kind of 8-bit roguelike. If a player really wanted to play an 8-bit roguelike and got this game, what do you think they're going to think when they find out it's a metroid-style exploration game? What is the purpose of an homage to a style that's completely contrary to the one you're actively developing?

    But what's even more telling is Q2 in "why play this." Unless MAL has had some serious changes since the UAT version, it doesn't describe the game at all. The thing is, this joke has more appeal than anything else you've posted about the game so far. Why not run with THAT as your focus (the answer to Q2 can be the answer to Q1), then go crazy fitting the game with that kind of over-the-top violence?

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  5. Why Play This Q1 really should have an answer, shouldn't it?

    But I'm not sure if, "Because it's ultra-violent!" is going to be the answer, mostly because we haven't added any disembowelment finishing moves. Not yet, at least.

    How about: "Because you can decapitate stuff with a sword!"
    And then we do a really cheap animated GIF of Brent lopping off the head of a morg minion.


    You know what?
    It'd be fun to design the site in a way that'd fool people into thinking MAL was an intellectually stimulating psychological adventure.

    Because it's not.


    (And I'll have you know that 95% of our game is killing and looting monsters, so the 'What Is Looting' couldn't be more on the money).

    ReplyDelete