Our demented jester needs a happy home to spread his cheerful brand of carnage and skull shaped bombs. This is a combination of quickly mocking something up in 3D and painting on top (which works for me sometimes and sometimes not!)

We like to implement AI just using Cubes and Spheres; get the logic and feel for the behaviour right first, make it playable with no frills. For our first boss Yorick, we started by animating him, aas his activity is quite a bit more complex than the simpler enemies.
 

Wait til you see this sucker move.#HistoricalHotshots #gamedev pic.twitter.com/uJXQgVsrgF

— MeWe (@mewestudios) October 3, 2016

 
While we cracked on with implementation of this animated object and a written design, we started fleshing out the model.
 

Poor Yorick, taking shape. Just needs to be err, boned. And skinned.#HistoricalHotshots #gamedev #madewithunity #indiedev pic.twitter.com/Bhm3VLYvqD

— MeWe (@mewestudios) October 10, 2016

 
Putting the animations together with the new mesh pretty much worked first time. Yes, in Max, we were a little surprised too!
 

Nightmare fuel.#HistoricalHotshots #gamedev #madewithunity #indiedev pic.twitter.com/miblbpfrX4

— MeWe (@mewestudios) October 11, 2016

 
A first pass implementation of code and art in-game and it’s coming together pretty sweet.
 

“What’s my name!?”
“Yorick! I said Yorick!”#screenshotsaturday #HistoricalHotshots #shakespeare #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/ebaUPAfuzj

— MeWe (@mewestudios) October 15, 2016

We’re just about to start implementing our first boss character. Alas poor Yorick, who I’ve given an asses skull for an ass. I had to break up the green and yellow with red (He was beginning to look like he should play for Norwich City!)

(Lot’s of fun was had animating him juggling and walking on his hands!)

Here’s a few of the items you can find hidden away in the game that will have varying effects on your playthrough. They have a fairly convoluted path from being comprised of an adjective / noun that’s interpreted (by me) into an object that has a related trait or effect. For example:

“Frozen” “Keech” (An old word for fat) becomes the chirpy little snowman who will be a reuseable item that you can drop in the environment for makeshift cover.

“Dextrous” “Hedgepig” is the ring/keychain that definitely in no way, shape or form is a nod to Sonic the Hedgehog. (Or the fact it makes you drop precious currency when you get hit!)

We’re going to have a variety of different room types you can encounter and one such idea is a sort of library where the curator can portmanteau two words from your inventory together (for a fee).

Sticking with the historical real people theme I initially thought this person might be famous lexicograther Samuel Johnson but it took no hesitation whatsoever to carelessly drop an ‘L’ as a middle initial and come up with something referencing Pulp Fiction at the same time!

The brain/glasses character was an earlier candidate!

Another week, another round of scrappy concepting. Some loose designs for a bespoke treasure plinth/room and some chests. The Wordworm is a unique kind of lock that will only sod off if you feed it from your lexicon of carried words!

Inspired loosely by the symbolic gold,silver and lead caskets in “The Merchant of Venice” the vendors on the first level come in three flavours!

Mr Gold will offer items for precious life hearts, Mr Silver will exchange items for monies and Mr Lead does nothing but sit there…  or is there going to be some kind of secret about him? (Well obviously there is now I’ve posted that)

We’ve developed a classic segmented snake like enemy (You remember the old nokia classic? No? Well aren’t you just young and full of sweet life then!)

Amir had the fantastic idea of making it like a pantomime horse to keep a connection to our theatrical theme for the first level. It began with a mild Kate Beaton rip off developing into something that’s closer to the cute but deranged look I favoured!

We were lucky enough to be one of the finalists for the second round of funding provided by the lovely people at the UK Games Fund. As you can see from other entries on this blog and our posts on twitter (@mewestudios), our previous title of “Real Super Heroes” has a new name : “Historical Hotshots”. We can never resist a nice bit of alliteration.

Rob put together this great little video to show the UKGF guys our progress. While there’s always the temptation of waiting until everything looks super polished, I love being able to look back at really early shots of the game and seeing how things progress.

We’ll be doing these video diaries once a month and we thought we’d share it here too.  Big shout out to Sam Childs for the fantastic audio (the music, not your voice Rob).