I’ve just made a forum posting, starting an open query for any artistic talents interesting in helping to contact me. My main concern at the moment is working out the games design bible while finishing off the Georgia drivers guide >_>.
Most of the code for Stargella is going to be reused for the later first person shooter and ‘mech projects (which may just get released years before the new MechWarrior lol). While the shooter is going to be a 3D affair, and the ‘mech combat game is undecided, the star fighter game (Stargella) is fairly straight forward: 2D is the only way to go. At least without getting sued for recreating Star Fox, if I dared try it in 3D lol. At its heart, Stargella is about having fun, the kind of fun that existed before the move into 3D games. I largely missed the big classics like Battlezone and Asteroids, only getting to play them in later years, but Galaga was a game I did play as a child. Its always been something I’ve found missing, no modern incarnation I’ve had access to just itches the right spot, that’s where Stargella comes in: it’s gotta be fast and furious, like an nail biting round of Centipede. Yet it’s got to something you can actually play and survive with some mastery, like Asteroids (one of my great favourites btw). Most of the games I played growing up, were side scrollers like Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog, so I remember the mechanics quite easily.
Graphics are my achilles heel however, because while I can code what I want, making it ‘look’ that the way I want, is limited by the models that can be created for the game to display. In fact, I’m actually thinking of drawing most of the ships for Stargella, and scanning them into the computer. Really it has been a long time since I’ve done free hand drawing, it feels more natural to me then the computer: I can work FASTER!!!
For Stargella, I very much know what kind of look I want, the question is can I get graphics that match it without the whole thing looking like the early arcade games, lol. I reckon that I could always hash things out in a modelling program and get a head start on code needed for the 3D titles, but I feel that is just over kill for a game like Stargella.