Levels

We knew right away that we wanted to make Super Hematoma a multi-player fighting game, but that we wanted to deviate from the usual fighting game standard by incorporating somewhat of a platforme-type style into the mechanics. We want players to be able to interact with the backgrounds, and for each level to have a little bit more character to it than a stage for the bruisers to merely move back and forth on while chipping away at each other’s life bar. Hopefully we can add a little more chaos into it than that.

We originally were drawing pretty heavily upon our Canadian heritage, and our first session of level designing involved sitting down and brainstorming a different stage that could be used for each province (and territory). It allowed us to rapidly come up with some stuff that we felt was funny… but we also decided to just concentrate on making some good levels that would have some fun mechanics more so that worrying about adhering strictly to a Canadiana theme. When it was all said and done, we’d brainstormed more than just one level per province. We liked some of the ideas more than others and so then we took to drawing the levels out on paper, and later (as you can see in the featured image) on my Galaxy Note 10.1. It was kind of a cool gadget to have for the sake of sketching out ideas as we were able to treat it as rough brainstorming and then even stretch and move parts around as we decided we wanted different elements in the stages. I think from our initial batch of concepts we’ve narrowed it down to four stages in particular that we’re committed to bringing to life. They’ve all got some good aspects to them, and we’ll try to make them really solid before we visit the possibility of adding additional content.

As I mentioned last progress report, one thing that was going to make a difference on this whole process was determining a scale to work at. We knew that we wanted a full screen resolution, but we wanted to explore options. I actually spent somewhat of an absurd amount of time trying to figure out the pros and cons of various resolutions. Sure computers can scale things fairly nicely, but maybe we’ll release for consoles someday. We ideally want graphics to be able to scaled using the nearest neighbour method so that pixels stay crisp rather than being smoothed… we needed something that was small enough to work on a SD tv, maybe we should go with the smallest size to make it look more authentic… use the lower resolution character designs… maybe we should use the larger characters so we get facial expressions… and … well as I said, the process was long and I waffled a lot on what I wanted. I’m pretty bent on making the graphics look as intended on all monitors so that I don’t spend time doing careful pixel art and then it just gets blurred.  In the end we’ve decided that we’re going to display our screen at 512×384 pixels. It’s half of 1024×768, which is a fairly standard full screen resolution for monitors… and allows us to work at a comfortable scale for the pixel art. It also means that down the road, if we release on consoles, we’ll need to release it at a different resolution… probably 480×360 which should look almost identical and should look great both on SD tv’s, and when upscaled to either 720p or 1080p.

And with that resolved, it means that we can lock onto other things. We spent part of the week brainstorming weapons for characters to use, and then I’ve been exploring one of our levels in particular: the Alberta Oil Sands. We think it’ll be a fun level to work with. The arena is somewhat simple at first glance, but the idea behind it is that while bruisers can walk anywhere in the level, there’s only limited space to stand that isn’t coated in oil. This means that you’re going to need to fight hard if someone should get a weapon such as a flamethrower, or molotov cocktail. One spark is all it will take and then most of the level will go from safe level terrain to a flaming death trap. We think it should provide just the type of action that we want. But it also has provided me with a great challenge of trying to figure out how to get nice pixely oil that sloshes around over the entire level. A little bit of an effects heavy level which, as you can guess, is why I was commenting on effects on Monday.

Anyways, the above level is still very much in progress at the moment, but I thought I’d give you a peek at what I’m working on. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any painting, and it’s very alien to be painting at the pixel level with a limited palette the way the old 16 bit games would have been developed. It took me a while to feel like I understood how to use dithering while painting. I feel that it’s starting to come together though, and I’ve got a pretty good idea how I’m going to get that oil to look alive.