A - So this is a super cool story! =D
The crux of the story is that Chris and Matt both wanted to build indie games that were bigger than just one person! As we mentioned in our previous ‘The Story so Far’ post we met teaching game development at a college. We help students build awesome games and always spoke about building something together with Chris handling the technical production and Matt handling the art production!
Chris is an avid fan of game design through prototyping and iteration. He had numerous projects he was playing around with in engine to find a game design concept he really connected with. During summer 2018 Matt was away in Athens and Chris messaged him with some ideas and concepts for a physics-based, party, sports game where the characters were shapes. Chris sent over some gifs of initial Squishy Sports prototypes using super basic sprites to convey this vision further.
Volleyball
Football
Basketball
The core vision with this concept was the characters designed as different core shapes like circles, triangles, squares etc. then the angles would be different when they come to interact with the ball using the physics engine. This would make each character feel different to play as and have their own advantages and disadvantages in different sports modes. Circles have an all-rounded approach whereas shapes like a square have flat edges meaning that the ball will rebound differently!
The shape concept also gave us some interesting creative constraints for the art direction that was super fun for Matt to explore! We were both big fans of old Saturday morning cartoons like Pokémon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well as modern quirky cartoons like Adventure Time and Rick and Morty and wanted to create an art style that blended these too to create a light-hearted silly experience!
Whilst still away in Athens, Matt began concepting character art for 2 of the shape characters; circle and triangle. He is a massive fan of really loose, quick, and iterative sketching using a biro, often only spending 30 seconds or so on each initial idea. The beauty of a biro is that you can’t rub it out so this forces you to keep building on each idea in the next design and create a range of options to choose from. The sketches for Circle and Triangle can be seen here:
Once a concept had been discussed it was taken into digital software to create the final product. Matt managed to create the 2 characters you see below still in Athens before he flew back to London, Heathrow but then straight out to South America for a 3 week holiday touring Peru! The two characters seen below were sent to Chris, who was able to use them in the Unity engine to start playing around with live assets to tweak the gameplay, character scale, collider, and more!
Super interesting but the design for ‘Goopy’ (circle) barely changed, however, Triangle changed quite drastically! Our final character designs can be seen here :
When Matt returned from his travels we got together and started fleshing out the full vision of the game. We started slowly developing the art assets from the goals to the environments to the UI and more characters! These shapes were really starting to take shape!
We finished up our first environment complete with crowd and animations! At this point, the game was fully playable and we had a really strong vertical slice! This build of the game we started taking to events, more on that in the next ‘The Story So Far’ post, to see how players interacted with it and what their feedback was!
A lot has changed and developed over time as we took people’s feedback and fleshed out the project. It's incredible to see this journey from the early prototypes to the game we have today! Each game design choice has tweaked and shaped this project to be the product it is today. As we are nearing the end of development it's awesome to look back on this journey to reflect on what we’ve achieved as a 2 man team!
How it started :
VS.
How it's going :
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed reading this journey as much as we have!
More 'The Story so Far' posts coming soon!
=D