Paper Dungeon (Post Mortem/Pre-Resurrection?)

This is a project I made for my final year of college (about 9 months ago). I was studying programming.

I made it in a couple of months while studying full time, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to devote to it.

There are currently a lot of placeholder graphics; the ones that aren't placeholder are :

• The eyeball
• The journal (though it still needs polish)
• The potion
• Ceiling Lights

Everything else is placeholder.

I made this with the intention of every single visual asset having lived on paper at one point or another (thus the name). All of the finished graphics are drawn and animated by hand on paper with pencil, and scanned into the game.

I wanted it to look like you were watching a cartoon, and the eyeball and hands (which are my own, rotoscoped) give a decent idea of the feel I was going for. I still need to play with how I want to handle lighting though.

I have no traditional animation training, just kind of learned it for this project. That said, I'm pretty happy with most of the animations (thought the eyeball's idle is pretty terrible).

I thought this was a pretty original idea, so I didn't want to share it online for fear of the idea being stolen, but I've been seeing quite a few hand-drawn/animated games popping up, so I guess they're ahead of me.

I've included a video of the gameplay (the level was thrown together pretty quick... I spent the vast majority of my time on coding the mechanics and the animations, very little time spent on environment or level design).

This is very much just a proof of concept. Any finished product would have a full inventory system, complex character stats, skills, magic, procedural weapons/items, quests... I could go on. In a nutshell, a lightweight, indie Skyrim type game. I was very much inspired by Daggerfall, which I grew up with.

Let me know if this is something any of you would like to see more of. The project is a mess right now (things got pretty hacky as the deadline for the project closed in), but I'd love some motivation to pick this back up.

 

Thats pretty cool.
I like the hand drawn look. Its nice.

Some suggestions.
- Add a hit reaction animation and attack to the eyeball.
- Play the animations at the same frame rate but consider removing every other frame/sprite to remove the noticable lag in the animations, while still retaining the hand drawn look. This negative lag effect is a common result of traditional animation techniques being liberally applied to games.
Most of the best animators are very much grounded and start as a base with the traditional principles of animation, but they also have experience pushing and pulling on the principles where needed - to create good animations for specific games genres.
To see a commercial example of this lag effect look at or read about the first Earth Worm Jim. A beautiful game that suffered from laggy unresponsive controls due to - too many animation frames.
- when items are collected or stepped on there should be an audible indicator for the player to know they have collected an item.

Nice proof. Id like to see this progress.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

The eyeball actually has an attack animation, it's when it rolls forward (intended to appear to be 'whipping' you with its optic nerve), but if this isn't easy to tell, I guess the animation could use some work.

Thanks for the tips on the animation. I'm actually happy with the way the animations play. I actually wanted it to have a slightly 'choppy' look, but there are some occasional frame rate glitches.

As for the other stuff, this is very unpolished, and the current inventory/pickup system is not really reflective of how it would be in-game. I would actually use a full out inventory system similar to Diablo or something. Though I might keep the slots on screen as hot-key options.

Again, thanks for the feedback! Hopefully I can find the time to start working on this again.