Ok everyone, so I had some really big changes happening IRL that prevented me from working on this project as much as I would've hoped, even before I announced a brief hiatus back in November. Anyways, I got through the hardest parts and as of today (2/1/20) I should be back to working on this pretty consistently. So big update today in celebration of me finally getting back to work.
Art Style Change:[]
A few of you may remember I was tossing around art styles and struggling to settle on one. Well, since the game is already based around a fighting game, I thought it would make the most sense for it to be a sprite animation series. It would fit the video-game motif better, and I can use sprites from other games and media for backgrounds, objects, and effects, further cutting down the work load and time between updates. Once I have all the sprites made, I can use them over and over without having to redraw anything and be able to get episodes out to you all a lot faster.
Below are some sprite ideas I toyed around with during the early phase of this project. I will definitely be updating them, but they will give a good idea of what I have in mind.
Character Design Changes:[]
Due to the art style changes, the characters have slightly updated looks to reflect this. NOTE: These images are concept art and may or may not change before the animation is complete, but the sprites will be more or less based off these looks. There wasn't too many big changes, but the biggest one was scaling the power type characters closer to the others. Previously they were significantly taller and more muscular, which would be hard to replicate in sprite format. So they are now closer in size to the other characters. Speeder was reverted closer to her source look of having 2 legs and 6 arms, but I'm still working out if this or her more "spider-look" will work better in sprite format. So depending on which works, her look may use either or. Kennedy got worked a bit to make his species a bit more identifiable at first glance and I tried to make sure this didn't stray too far from his source. Other than that, mostly just universal art style changes.
I wont be ditching the hand drawn animation style completely though, I will use it for intense moments and closeups, similar to how anime like One Punch Man changes the art style during intense of expressive scenes.
Animation Releases:[]
I did promise that I would be doing mini releases up until the first episode and I still intend to do that. From here on out, every time I get done with a character's sprite sheet, I will upload a short video showing off their sprites and animations (probably just them beating a horde of badniks or something simple) as well as some brief dialogue. This will be a bit slow going at first, but will get faster over time as I figure out what I'm doing.
Notes:[]
Thanks again to the people that have stuck around and encouraged me to keep going even though I had such a hard time staying committed to this project, I will make sure that I have consistent updates from now on. This project has been in development for several years now, and I think I am in a good enough spot to finally start getting some major work done. Hope everyone's enjoying the new year, I wish everyone good luck in what 2020 has to offer!