When trying to make a game like Ebenezer, one is constantly walking a fine line between your grand ambitions on the one hand, and what’s actually practical on the other. Whether that’s a case of ruthlessly culling content or choosing to do the game in 2D rather than 3D, you constantly have to make these kinds of judgement calls about whether you’re ever going to be able to find the right talented volunteers to help you realise your vision, or whether you’re going to have to alter that vision to make it happen.
As I mentioned recently, one of my most urgent needs for help is for somebody to take the 2D character concepts that I have and turn them into 3D models, which can then be animated and then rendered out as sprites. But I have to face the possibility that I may not be able to find somebody to help with this, in which case I’ll need to come up with a plan for how I can get the game made without a character modeller on board.
I constantly find myself inspired by examples from within the indie gaming scene of people embracing the restrictions imposed upon them by lack of budget and so on, and turning that into a strength rather than letting it get them down. Sometimes by admitting to yourself that you’re not going to be able to produce Disney-quality animation, you can come up with something a lot simpler and more stylised that has a personality all of its own, and which can be achieved with a fraction of the resources.
Below is a nice little animation based on the book of Jonah that models one such approach. In particular, note how each character is only ever shown front-on or from the side – everything else is achieved by rotating one of those two perspectives in one or other axis.
This post is part of a series attempting to blog every day in the run up to the Christian Game Developers Conference
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