I’m not sure… The idea of not working directly on The Journey of Eko for an entire month is kinda scary, to be honest… But I admit I’ve been having a lot of fun working on a Singularity post-compo version for the last weeks! Here’s how it’s looking now:

For those who don’t remember, here’s what the LD24 version used to look like:

In short, what I did from a graphics standpoint was importing assets from The Journey of Eko, and adding some shaders and particles. And of course removing the silhouette look, revealing Eko as the protagonist once again!

As for gameplay, I did a new combat system from scratch, now based in directional sword slashes and combos. For those familiar with Smash Brothers Brawl, it now plays somewhat like a fast Ike (“We like Ike!”). I’ve also focused a lot on visual feedback for the fight.

I was very, very impressed by deepnight’s Strike of Rage. If you haven’t played it yet, you definitely should! He was able to pull off a great, professional level look and feel for his beat-em-up in only 48 hours, it’s really freaking amazing. I played it over and over again, and decided I would implement some of his ideas in Singularity’s combat – specially particles and camera shake. Deepnight, sorry for reverse-engineering your animations aesthetics – that’s the price you pay for being so good!

Anyways, the game that used to be Singularity is becoming quite decent now. I’ve been further developing it initially because I wanted it to be all it could be without the LD time restriction; then I continued because it was serving as a decent prototype for The Journey of Eko’s combat system. Now I don’t know the reason anymore, I think I’m doing it just because it’s fun!

So, I thought: maybe I could turn this “Singularity / Journey of Eko crossover” into my October Challenge game? I could work on it for a month, get some experience on actually trying to sell a game, and get community feedback that could then be directly applied in our main project. Or I could just stop working on Singularity and get back to the ‘real’ Journey of Eko. Ohh, cruel doubt!

Tell me what you think! And while I can’t decide but can’t stop improving my sword combat prototype either, do let me know (tweet to @pixel_cows or something) if you are willing to receive the most current build to test / provide feedback. It will be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

Gabriel
www.pixelcows.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2012 at 5:01 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.