Hello! I thought I'd start posting a few dev logs going back to the very first experiments and ideas that eventually lead to the ZOE you see before you now!
The very first thing I did that's related to ZOE was this little platformer, jetpacking prototype which was the result of a youtube tutorial series I was following.
It was just a project to learn and get into programming, so it was never really going anywhere as a game. I knew I wanted to make a shoot 'em up, but I was struggling to come up with an idea to put my own spin on it, so I started looking into my old animation work and thought there might be something in this Zoetrope technique I was playing around with a few years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p93FaJ91gcs&feature=emb_title
I was imagining the player somehow activating the frames of the animation and having it play out as a background during a boss fight or something. I adapted the code and reworked the sprites from the tutorial project, and came up with this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WIg9OvFB9E&feature=emb_title
I think there was something interesting there, but the feel and theme and context of it all was a complete mess, I was just making it up as I went, so I took some time to try and develop the visuals and context for the mechanics a bit.
Hux the green alien made a comeback for a bit, and I cooked up some silly idea in my head that he was trying to stop an invasion of his planet or something by activating a defence system that happened to work very much like a Zoetrope. Which in turn led me to just stick in some frames of an actual Zoetrope I'd made, to see how it might look... (the dots in the image are from the video below it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjBmLzMvgk&feature=emb_title
It was getting better, but still felt wrong and a bit forced to me. That frame from the Zoetrope animation was what eventually helped me make some sort of weird link in my head to think about the 1930's era drawn-on-film experimental animations of people like Len Lye and Norman McLaren.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgJ-yOhpYIM&feature=emb_title
This got me excited! So I decided to use Boogie Doodle as a visual reference and started working properly on what would become ZOE (hopefully the name makes some sense now as well!).
This is the very first gif I made while I was trying to mimic the visual style of the Norman McLaren film, and the very first bit of gameplay I recorded with some basic enemies and the Zoetrope frame idea still intact.
Next up I'll talk a bit about how I developed the visuals to work as a game.
Cheers for now!
Graeme