...it used to be your conventional mecha game. The original idea was to have a squadron of bipedal walking armored suits (piloted by girls of course!), and after spending time in the garage upgrading and customizing, you send them off to engage in turn-based battle. Before I decided to up the ante with commercial-quality graphics, I was content with a top-down symbolic layout, as if the units were chess pieces. So not surprisingly, the first version of the HUD I came up with was very chessboard-like:
An early HUD prototype from earlier this year. The game couldn't have possibly been called 'Elspeth's Garden'... more like 'Mecha General'
It wasn't the first time that a game concept got totally overhauled. The main reason it got changed so drastically to its current state was because of the real investment I decided to inject into the project. Jake's Battle Engine was so flexible, it really encouraged you to go all-out with graphics and animation. So instead of everything being represented by symbols on a chessboard, it would be much more exciting to actually get to see the units animated. There was no way I would be hand-animating hundreds of frames by hand, thus a big portion of the budget was allocated for 3D models since it would be more efficient to animate them once then render out isometric camera angles. I then thought I might as well spend money modelling my favorite things instead of ugly mecha -- and that included different girls in various costumes. Thus, mecha were out; gothloli girls were in.
Now, since mecha were out, I needed some machines to be their replacements... something which were simple enough to model myself so I won't have to inflate the budget. And that is how airships came into being!
No comments:
Post a Comment