Blog

On the eve of the impending release of Unstoppable Fist I  thought that I would dig way back in the archives and show a bit about the evolution of Fist.

Based on our experience in game development we new that we had to keep the scope of whatever game we were to make down so that we would be able to finish the project. This lead to our decision to make Unstoppable Fist.

Unstoppable Fist was originally inspired by the NES classic Kung Fu.  The cool thing about that game is that the player had to skillfully choose when to attack hi or low to defeat an enemy.  We decided it would be cool to create a game that focused on the directing attacks in desecrate directions stripping out all other distractions.

Here’s the original pitch image that Chris put together.  Its awesome how one image can convey so much. I had a pretty good idea from the start that I needed to make the art style for Fist accent the retro gameplay. Being a huge fan of 8-bit and 16 bit games I knew what direction I wanted to go in.

In writing this I almost forgot this awesome pic that was a huge inspiration for me. Its so Van Damme ridiculous.  I knew that this kind of ridiculous over-the-topness was going to be the heart and soul of Fist.

This is the first incarnation of Fist. Looks familiar huh? We needed some character art to start prototyping with and grabbing something already available seemed like a great choice.  I mashed a bunch of Ryu’s moves together to make everything we needed.

In this very early sketch you can see that the idea of making Fist a sort of redneck super hero had already latched onto my brain. Hey, one of them has a sword!  That’s pretty cool.

I whipped up this gameplay mockup image and put it on my phone.  I loaded it up in the image viewer and would touch the screen as if I was playing the game.  It was actually quite helpful in visualizing what the game would be like before the coding began.

This is a sketch that I made in a neat program called Alchemy.  Alchemy in many ways forces you to be more spontaneous with the way you work.  In this image you can really start to feel the attitude of Fist shining through.

I made quite a few drawings of characters such as this one that pushed far outside what I had been thinking just so that I could be certain that the direction that I was heading in was a good one.  I really like this one but in the end his design didn’t seem to lend itself to the kind of animation and action I was going to have to do.

Here is a color test where you can see some of Fist’s most stand out elements starting to, well, stand out. 🙂  I really wanted him to have this obnoxious gold necklace but it proved to be too small of an element to work.  The floods are really coming into their own here but Fist is looking a bit too creapy. I love the the way the pink shirt and baby blue coat work so welI together.  Its so 80s and yet…I kept thinking Southbeach Guido as well, if there is such a thing…

Oh yeah, there is.

Here we see Fist in his final concept/model sheet form.  At this point in development I had decided that since I had no experience hand animating sprites and since my entire career I had been making 3D characters that Fist should be 3D. Sorta.

My plan was to make a 3D character, rig him, animate him, and then do some rendering magic/post processing to get it to look hand drawnishsh. You can see here the forebear of the Fist that’s in the game.

So this is what Fist was supposed to look like in the game.  These are final frames from his original animations.  I had animated and rendered 90% of the animations or more but after only completing post processing and painting the frames for a scant couple of animations I realized that this method was too slow and that I would go insane or die before I was able to complete all of Fist’s animations.

I new it was time to take drastic measures.  I cut the resolution of everything by half and started learning sprite character animation in a software called Graphics Gale. Using the rendered frames from the 3D model as reference I recreated all of the animations. I learned a lot of tricks to mash all of the animations into doneness.  You can see I also made some design changes to Fist.  I made his hands more visible by enlarging them (he is Unstoppable FIST after all) and I changed his stance making him look less like he is going to take a poop.

Deciding to cut the resolution of the game was one of the most difficult decisions that I had to make during the game.  It was also one that paid off the most.  By doing so I was able to complete the art for the game as well as create that classic look that everyone loves.

I hope you enjoyed hearing a bit about this process if there is enough interest I might do something similar for the environment art.  Thanks

–Matt