Thinking about the actual gameplay

What is the setting for my candy based characters? 

For our studio work project, if you were someone who has chosen to do character design, we were told that the most important thing to focus on is the actual characters and we don't have to worry too much about what kind of game that they will be featured in. However I feel that this aspect is actually quite important as otherwise you are making character with no real purpose or direction and the type of game will actually greatly effect the design process and what you need to be drawing. So I decided, before I got any big design work down that I should have a little think about what sort of game I want my candy based characters to feature in and if there are existing games similar to what I come up with to do some research on.

So originally I had thought about possibly having my game as a 3D animated third person shooter similar to that of the existing video game 'Team Fortress 2' but as I started to progress through my project I really started to go off of the idea of making this sort of game as I was uncertain on how it was going to work or fit my theme. After a little while of trying to think up new and different type of gameplay that would suit my characters I sort of hit a brick wall as I just couldn't think of anything that would work nicely or wouldn't be to overly complicated. It was only when I was speaking to one of my fellow students about it that I came up with an idea I actually really liked the sound of and got excited about the thought of working on.




A 3D fighting game


My fellow student suggested that she would love to see my characters in the style of a fighting game and to be honest I couldn't agree more with her. As soon as she mentioned the concept I started to feel excited about creating characters for this sort of gameplay and knew that this the idea that I was going to stick with and work on. The reason I really warmed to the idea of a 3D fighting game was for a multitude of different reasons which I have listed below:

• This type of game will allow each character to fully express their set mood via their movements, fighting style, speech and expressions. 
• The players will be able to pick and choose which characters they want to play as which makes the name 'Pick & Mix' work perfectly. 
• I am not fantastic at environment art but with this type of game, which will most likely be a side scrolling 3D game, I can at least get some level design art work done.  
• Less of my time will be taken up due to the fact that I won't have to be designing different weapons as I would of have to have done with a third person shooter.
• There are lots of different existing games out there I can look at briefly for research and I have also already played a few fighting games before so I have first hand experience with them.

I just feel like a 3D fighter would be the best type of game for my character ideas and I think I could get some really nice designs done with this gameplay theme in mind. So now that I have a good idea of what kind of gameplay I want I decided that It would be a good idea to have a little look at some existing fighter games for a bit of inspiration. As our tutors said, the actual game creation isn't the important part of this project seeing as I am focusing on character design work, so I have decided not to do too much research otherwise I will go off on a tangent but just enough so I can get a good idea of what I need to be drawing later on.

I already know of quite a few fighting games so I thought it would be good idea to pick two different games, one I haven't played and one I have, so that I could get a good variety of research and influence. The first game I chose was the 2D side scroller fighting game 'Skullgirls' and this was due to the fact that this game is clearly inspired by anime and cartoons which is something I want to incorporate into my own character designs so I thought it would be a good one to look at. This game was independently developed by Reverge Labs and co-published by Autumn Games and Konami and was released on multiple different platforms on April 10th 2012. 'Skullgirls' is a video game where player can engage in combat against each other using teams of one, two or even three character and the goal is to either completely knock out your opponents characters or have the must amount of health when the timer runs out. This game uses many different game mechanics such as tag team-based combat, character assists, snapbacks, and delayed hyper combos as well as different modes such as story mode, arcade mode, versus mode, training room, tutorial mode, and online play. The characters in 'Skullgirls' are nearly all female and have been quite criticised by the players and fans as being overly sexualised.

There are elements of this game that I would like to incorporate into my own gameplay if possible as they are really just the basics of a good fighter game such as character assists, combos, verses modes ect as well as things like the use on an expressive and anime like art style which are all things that I will need to consider when doing my design work. But overall, this is a 2D video game when what I actually want to be creating is a 2D art book for a 3D side scrolling fighter so what I really needed to look at was a fighter that is similar to my desired concept and the first one that came to mind was 'Super Smash Bros' for the Wii U.

'Super Smash Bros' is a series of fighter games that features the main characters for a variety of different videos games series such as 'Super Mario', 'Sonic the hedgehog' and 'The legend of Zelda' and allows the player to pick and choose which characters they want to fight against each other. It is published by Nintendo and the first original 'Super Smash Bros' was released on January 21st 1999 and the most recent game in the series came out in November of 2014. The game is a little different to regular fighters however as instead of winning the round by depleting an opponent's life bar, to win the player needs to launch their opponents off of the stage and out of the map. All of the 'Super Smash Bros' have very simple controls compared to a lot of different fighting games and a huge amount of character combinations and battle items which the players can use to aid their character and help them win the fight. Every single 'Super Smash Bros' game has been well received by critics and has now spawned a large competitive community and has even been featured in a handful of high profile gaming tournaments.

Both of these fighter style games are going to be really good to look back at for some inspiration when it comes to the design part of my project as they both have shared elements that I would to try and incorporate into my own project. I didn't want to go into too much detail with researching them as our tutor did say we should be mainly focusing on the character and not so much of the actual gameplay so I thank I have got enough basic information down to help influence my work. So now that I have done some research into the type of game that my candy based characters are going to be featured In I can now continue with my sketch work and start getting some more solid designs done.