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Neo Samurai
Mommy Issues
DESCRIPTION
A 2D platformer fighter combat game where you play as a futuristic samurai bounty hunter in this cyberpunk Japan city. You are trying to find your way up to the top and gain the trust of those in power to find your mother, an infamous Yakuza head chief.
ROLE
Game Designer, Lead Artist, Animator
TEAM
3
DURATION
2 weeks (2021)
PLATFORM
LINK
itch.io
TOOLS USED
Unity, C#, Aseprite
Game Direction
Core Pillars
My main role in this project served as a Game Designer and Lead Asset Creation Artist.
Apart from our main roles, we all had interchangeable duties and contributions as Game Design leads where we created the game flow and mechanics.
As the main asset creation artist, I was in charge of doing research for the type of aesthetics that my team wanted to go for along with creating the assets that were necessary for the game build in 2D pixel art style. I was also in charge of creating tilemaps for the level design and UI designs.
Initial Idea
Our initial idea was to create a fast-paced game, a fighting simulator in a Metroidvania style. With the name being funny and unserious, the game mechanics are more serious and require players to try hard. We wanted to go for a 2D platformer-style fighting game that is old-school metro, and functional with a decent amount of art and sound effects. Inspired by Metroidvania where players have to go to different areas to level up and fight. We wanted to take out the money system for gameplay progression and prioritize important systems first: try to keep a sense of open-ness, start at the center and have the players explore left right up, and down, and maybe incorporate a time system that applies to the enemy difficulty, scale the monsters based on the region, have a time limit to add pressure, and dashing doesn't keep the character immune to the monsters because you have the attack abilities (It's more of platform navigation).
Idea sketches
Concept Sketches / Direction
With 1 person being in charge of the coding, and the other being in charge of character, I was in charge of making the tilemaps and the building assets. The process of development began with a very simple sketch on my notebook of how I want the worldmapping to look like. One of the city, one of the underground. I wrote very basic notes of how each asset was going to play into the game (although not all of them translated through the final design).
Level Buiding Sketch 1
Level Buiding Sketch 2
Final design
Art Design
The other artist being in charge of the character design and animation, I got to working on my part of the job which was creating the world build and assets.
Inspired by the game, Katana Zero, I tried my best to recreate a similar vibe for our game in the neon cyberpunk city. The player starts off in the sewage level and makes his way up to the world.
To create this neon cyberpunk feel, I did some research on the color palette. The main colors in a cyberpunk world are blue, purple, and pink in many different shades. I wanted my pixel sprites and background to be semi-realistic. So although I know I barely had time, I wanted to put a lot of time and details into them to bring out this feeling of the game. To put a lot of details into the work, the sprite canvas would have to exceed 100 pixels. The title screen was put into a 300 by-500-pixel canvas. The other sprites I drew were around 300 pixels. In a neon cyberpunk world, there are a lot of buildings that have a lot of glowing signs, windows that are shining bright, and lights that are glowing on top of the buildings. But they all stay within the color palette range.
How the city world build looked before splitting the assets apart
City Assets
Sewage Assets
Other Assets
Final level design
Sewage Level
City Level
Mid City Level
Upper City Level
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