Its a good time to be a tgea owner

So its been awhile since my last plan so i thought i would show off what my small team has been prototyping the last few months.

In my last plan i showed a few different prototypes we had worked on to try and get a feel for the type of game we wanted to make. After a few refinements we decided to go an even more cuter/kiddie look, but also try to appeal to adults as well.

One of my most anticipated games coming soon is a Playstation 3 game called Little Big Planet, its a huge inspiration for me as it combines my love of oldschool 2d platformer with a great community aspect and level creation.

So we want to create a similar concept using the built in level editing tools we have and try to make it even more accessible to a wider audience. We also wanted to stick with our original idea of a soldat style arcadish game .

Thus Tinkers was born :)

Our initial player design revolved around an existing concept known as the Munny

A nice simple design that allows tons of customisation through simple addons (hats e.t.c) and swappable skins.

However we didnt want to deal with copyright hassles e.t.c, Thankfully i found a modeller (Teck Lee Tan) who came up with our own unique design. Presenting Tinker V2.0 :D



Despite the similarities to Sackboy , the design actual is inspired by the old Muppet style designs where the upper head moves seperately from the lower jaw :)

So what exactly is a Tinker ?

The story of Tinkers revolves around the dreams of a little boy, involving his favourite teddy he calls tinker. Every night he dreams of new and exciting adventures for his heroic little friend and this allows us to have a high degree of flexibility in our map themes and designs.

But even though tinkers are cute, they also know how to fight :)



Animations

One of our current tasks is to get the tinkers animated and in game, thanks to Sean boyette for motion capturing our current animations and rigging them up for us. You can see some movies of our tinker in action below :



The animations shown are :

- Run
- Air Guitar (My favorite)
- Crouch
- Mouth movement
- Death
- Electric Shock Death
- Idle
- Jump
- Karate Kick
- Muscleman
- Salute
- Wave

Over the next few weeks we plan to add many more in, including more facial movements and transition animations

Weapons

Early on we made a conscious decision to ensure all weaponry will fit our cute theme and style, so as a result all our guns will be nerf gun style weaponry and all melee swords e.t.c will be foam padded style toys. At this stage we are just using some placeholder art. Heres a vid showing off our basic sword attack movements



Scripting

On the scripting side we have also been doing numerous prototyping, most recently integrating afx and moving to a more pure 2d sideon camera.



We messed with everything from physx integration to a more isometric camera/movement until we settled on our current model. For aiming/movement simplification we've decided to stick strictly to 2d movement, similar to our main inspiration soldat

Big thanks to Marc-Andre Vacon for all his scripting help thus far.

Over the coming months we plan to expand on the platforming and customization options (level editing/character outfitting e.t.c)

Big thanks to Teck, Sean and Marc-Andre thus far for all there help, we look forward to showing of more of Tinkers over the coming months.

We are looking for modelers and coders especially to get onboard and help us add even more features and customization into our current prototype.

- Ian Roach