Hullo, I’m gonna talk about a CANCELEDish game jam thing I was working on with some pals around July last year that I really liked, but we never finished. I made some stuff for it I like so I wanna share all the art/animation I did and give you the rundown on the game it was gonna be..! I'm mainly gonna be talking about my side of making art for it so the other dudes can write about their own involvment if they want to, cuz we all put alotta work into it!
original concept sketch for HIGHROLLERS
DIAMONDHUSTLE HIGHROLLERS was a kind of 4 PLAYER ONLINE CO - OP game where you run around a casino tryin to hustle some diamonds and play gambling games with your friends. The gameplay was supposed to be akin to the Four Swords Adventures games with the interactivity of an online game, funny text chat and emotes and cool stuff.
Programming by @ninjamuffin99, Art & Colour Design by @DIGIMIN, Music by @siximpala, and Animation and Character Design by ME.
We were in the mood to make somethin with a fantasy vibe but along the way I managed to wrangle in a casino aesthetic that everyone was down for because we all love GAMBLING!!!
And so our little casino/fantasy world was created.
Though I’m not much of a gambler IRL (fraud), there’s something about the casino aesthetic and vibe that I adore in games and movies. The jazzy music, casino levels in Sonic games, Oceans Eleven, Rush Hour 2, ALL THAT.
I think it’s the snazziest place to stage an action scene, and my heart yearns to make the ultimate action animation set in a casino someday, and I’m not complete until that dream is fulfilled.
Anyway, for now, getting to design the characters for a casino game was rad!! There were 4 playable characters to pick from so every character was based off a symbol in a slot machine..!
Their names are just BAR, CHERRY, GEM & BELL.
I drew a good bit of concept art, I can't fit it all in this news post so you can check out my process for sketchin out the characters and all that here:
After my concept sketches I drew little roughs of the character sprites, which DIGI coloured and made look cool!
The next thing for me to do then was to animate the bastards so that's what I did, here's each characters run cycle!
Gem is my favourite, look at the little man go. Cam also programmed his sprite to display slightly smaller than everyone else cuz of how I drew him in the concept art which pissed me off at first but it was also really funny seeing the short king run around
I also animated some NPCs who were gonna sit around at the slot machines..
featuring ULTIMATE SURVIVOR KAIJI....
And of course I was gonna take any excuse to animate bunny girls so here's some cute casino bunny girls!!
And finally, some cool NEON signs I drew for the environment...
I had so much fun drawing all this stuff for the game..! So why didn't we finish it?
well ya know, our vision for a 4 PLAYER ONLINE NG game was pretty damn ambitious as you can imagine, so most of the time on the programming side of things was spent with Cam just trying to get the online to even work properly, while me, digi and KaTT just rocked our own thing. I was having too much fun making art that I didn't care that it probably wasn't gonna get finished.
here's a video showing the online working!
at the end of the day, what we had was pretty damn impressive! Cam made a working little room where the 4 of us could connect and run around in with proper collision, it was sick to see. but we were all a bit burnt out by the time it took to get even that working that I don't think any of us had the energy to actually design the gameplay.. part of the game.
but whatever, it was so rad making art with DIGI, I didn't post all the background elements he drew but they rock, and KaTT still churned out some SWEET MUSIC which you can listen to here:
anyway, I had too much fun to care that HIGHROLLERS never got finished, we had fun with it and then all went back to our own thing. the dream of the 4 PLAYER FOUR-SWORDS STYLE NG GAME is still alive though, and whenever and however it gets made years from now, I'm sure its gonna rock.
ok bye bye, I'm off to the casino. 2023 HERE WE GO
ninjamuffin99
game jams are gambles baby