A browser game by Gavin Mortensen, Mitchel Hogle, Jocelle Bautista, TJ Camaclang, and Cho Hayes
A browser game by Gavin Mortensen, Mitchel Hogle, Jocelle Bautista, TJ Camaclang, and Cho Hayes
Keeping tempo
Battle for Our Band was created for a 96-hour game jam with the required theme of "Loop". After bouncing around ideas, we arrived at the topic of music to play into this theme. The goal with this project was to create gameplay resembling the process of recording a song, painted over as a beat 'em up with rhythm elements. In order to achieve this, we created a set of two main goals; gameplay should be BPM-dependent of whatever song was playing and combat would be character-based, cycling through each band member regularly.
Too many cooks?
With a defined gameplay loop, ensuring the visual style matched the energy of the gameplay was vital. I wasted no time reaching out to two main artists that I had worked with: Cho Hayes and TJ Camaclang. Though these two folks would be working independently and have different styles, I asked them to take on Enemy and Player character art, respectively. I utilized an inspiration board in order to tie their art together from the start, seeing as there would not be time for many iterations. We shot for a visual style resembling a "Spider Punk" world: comic-booky and rooted in punk culture. When I receieved the initial versions of the art assets, I was proud to have communicated our intention so clearly to these artists and allowed them to create such striking art assets to our game jam.