RPP3: Daily Dev Blog Post 04

Welcome to Day 4!

Happy Friday! The weekend is here! 

Which pretty much means nothing when you're in the middle of a project, am I right?

Today the team met and decided on an art style to move forward with. We're all very inspired by Cuphead, which in turn was inspired by Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, and other cartoons of the 1930's and '40s. We also grew up on Studio Ghibli works, such as Porco Rosso. These intellectual properties all have a cartoony style with flat shading and solid black outlines. We'll be emulating that style in our game. 

We have also been working on the basic building blocks of any great platformer game: the level! For a character to be able to move successfully in game, there needs to be ground collision and physics, so that objects are affected by gravity and have weight, but don't fall straight through the floor. Since we already have proxy art for the various objects in our level, this programming step will start to turn simple shapes into "real" objects by applying physics. Once this is done, it's time to move onto the player character: our loveable, rebellious frog! 

See you tomorrow for another Daily Dev update, where you'll learn a little more about how we're bringing our hero to life!

Today's Bonus Content are a few of our inspirational art style images:

The iconic characters of Cuphead, with that classic animation style. Strong black outlines and simple or "flat" colors.

A screenshot from Porco Rosso, a Studio Ghibli film about a rebellious sea plane pilot. Again we can see the strong outlines and flat coloring that our team would like to aim for in this project. The shading pictured here is referred to as "Cell Shading," and may also be a technique we use in our assets. 

Let's see if you guys can pinpoint the influence of these images in our final work!