Other Prototypes
Every so often I will be struck with inspiration and have to spend around a week or so developing a prototype of some idea or another. These projects never get too far off of the ground but they're always there if I want to go back to them. I also try to utilize different methods of control, different styles of assets, and different rendering types to see which ones I enjoy working with the most.
This game is the result of a "combine two genres" experiment. I wanted to make a kart racer where no actual races were completed. I figured it would be interesting and funny to have a game structured much more like an action game or RPG, but all movement was done as if the character were in a go-kart. This presented a couple of challenges that are fun to occasionally work through and come up with solutions for. Firstly, car controls are clunky. Action games or RPGs require a lot of fine movement and trying to fit a vehicle into those settings is difficult. A small-to-zero turning radius was one solution I came up with to give the player a lot more control over which direction they were facing. Secondly, kart racers and RPGs are not an obvious mix of genres so there are several complex ways I could mix their gameplay such that neither one becomes redundant.
This prototype is inspired by the original Animal Crossing games put out by Nintendo. Although I enjoy the modern installments, the first couple of games in the series fill a completely unique niche. They're more... quaint? I wanted to emulate this quaint feeling while changing up the setting. Instead of the town being full of cute critters, your neighbors are all manner of terrible monster, demon, and beast. All retaining the whimsical personalities of their inspirations.
I'm particularly happy with the shader I developed for this project, combining banded shading with dithering to blend between them. It adds an etherealness to it that meshes well with the setting.
Often times when I start a new smaller project it's because I've played an older game recently and start thinking about how I would replicate its gameplay myself. I've seen the advice to "make what you want to play" and that is what is motivating me here. This one is based off of the Mario & Luigi RPG games by Nintendo. They have a unique flair compared to other JRPGs because they take themselves so much less seriously and are willing to mix gameplay between overworld traversal and combat in ways that traditional JRPGs do not. I made a small test for some overworld movement directly inspired by these games. This was also good practice for my spriting as well as a trial run of rendering sprites from a 3-D model.
