Starting Something New

It has been a hectic month! After working so long on developing Striker Ball, it was easy to forget what it feels like to be on the threshold of a totally new project. When you have blank slate in front of you, there is a certain anxiety as you try to put a million pieces together in your mind and envision a new world. But there is also that unforgettable feeling of excitement, where the infinite possibilities seem to expand your imagination. Today I get to talk about Bounty Bros., our new game project being developed on Bones game engine.

Bounty Bros.

With the 1.0 release of our first game, Striker Ball, K-Tech Studio has now embarked on it's second Skeleton Crew game project. Bounty Bros. in many ways has similar motivations to Striker Ball. It is intended to help us solidify and improve Bones, demonstrate actual game functionality, and to do it all at a scale that is possible for our small team. However, Bounty Bros. will be a totally new game that will push the boundaries of what we have done so far, implementing many new features that are common throughout popular game genres. We also would like to push the scale slightly, taking advantage of the groundwork that we established with our first game to be able to expand past the simple single screen gameplay.

Bounty Bros. will be a top down retro art game, so it shares that in common with Striker Ball, but rather than a sports game, Bounty Bros. will be a top down shooter in a wild west setting. This is a genre that I have wanted to get into for many years and I think there is a lot of fun to be had with it. I would love to go into more depth on what we are planning for the game, but because we are in such early stages, things are still very fluid and you will have to be patient while we are solidifying the basics. But don't worry, as we make progress we will be sharing tidbits of anything we can along the way. In fact at the end of this post we have a teaser of the first character animations for one of our heroes named, Doug.

Background On The Theme

Bounty Bros. is actually a theme that has been knocking around K-Tech studio for a number years now. Our current game may eventually adopt a subtitle to define it better, but for now we are unsure what that subtitle might be. The original idea spawned from an earlier attempt to make a Zelda like game in another game engine where we used a modified art pack for the graphics. Using an art pack greatly reduced overhead work, but we were also fortunate to have a friend who put a lot of work into tweaking the environment art to suit our preferences and theme better. I think this strategy is a good middle ground for small teams, because it allows them to skip a lot work, without entirely removing the personal touch that will make the game unique. Our latest version of Bounty Bros. will be using much of the same artwork that we put together back then, with further modifications made to suit the new gameplay. The characters especially will be heavily modified to use new, more advanced animations.

The original game script was very simple, but the story and characters of Bounty Bros. were so endearing that it eventually became a somewhat developed theme here among us at K-Tech Studio. While most of that development has no proper outlet for us at this time, we hope that a Bounty Bros. game will be enriched by much of the on-the-side world building that we have enjoyed since the theme was first conceived.

Doug Character Teaser

And here is the first artwork teaser for one of our main characters, Doug.

In the future we would like to go over some of the art process in more detail, giving you an inside look at how we designed the animations. We can't wait to make progress on the game itself as well to share with you next month. See you then!

Written by, Harsulin: Lead Artist at K-tech Studio