Ben James :: adventures in gaming

So, I was thinking in bed last night about my Alien Shmup idea, when I came up with an even better idea that I’ll probably try to work on first. Basically it would be a Double Dragon style beat-em-up, using the guys in my band as characters. I don’t expect the subject matter to have wide appeal, but I love doing stuff that involves my mates, so it should be fun.

Here’s some notes:

Use photos for the sprites, take photos of us all doing the various moves then cut them up so they can be animated independently (separate sprites for arms/heads/etc)

Probably go for a ‘big-head’ style, make the head large in proportion to the body so we can see facial expressions, etc.

Obviously we’ll all have weapons suitable to our position in the band, not sure exactly how they’ll work yet… we’ll also have special moves where we basically just rock out to destroy things in the area… so my power would be singing some high note or something, Rob will just create a massive surge of pure rock energy, Jay will go into a flurry of drumming.

We’d also have a dual special move where the two players have to do some combo at the same time, and the whole band comes out and just rocks out, decimating everything on the screen.

Haven’t quite figured out the storyline yet, I thought it’d be funny to use photos as a kind of cut scene, with dialogue over the top (either spoken or sub titled). Photos will be good especially since my art skills are pretty useless at this point. Not sure what I’ll do for backgrounds and enemies, probably just have to do some dodgy programmer art at this point.

Need to have all the staples of the genre in there: picking up and throwing objects and enemies, maybe picking up weapons that last a short time, though if we’ve got band specific weapons all the time I might leave that one out. Not sure what powerups and health will be… beer? That seems a bit too yobbo. CDs?