[WIP]Blood will be Spilled - A spaghetti western 2D action

I'd like to show you the game we're working on in Doublequote Studio. It is our first game and still quite early in development (even though we're working on it for more than a year and a half) so it's a little rough around the edges. And I'd really like to hear what you think about it.

Blood will be Spilled is a spaghetti-western-themed 2D action platformer taking place in a world inhabited by insects. You follow the story of Jack, a mosquito gunslinger, on his quest for revenge. The game will be available on PC, Mac & Linux and we're also planning to bring it to consoles one day.

The game is our tribute to the spaghetti western genre. We took inspiration from games we love and also from movies by Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez. As the characters are insects, we tried to draw the inspiration from cliches from the both of the worlds.

With the story setting being a spaghetti western, we are trying to utilize mechanics like gun tricks, shootouts, standoffs and bounties and wanted to make every bullet of your sixshooter count. The art design consists of comic book-like hand drawn illustrations and motion comic cutscenes to drive the whole experience.

Our early pre-alpha demo is currently available for download from our website
Please, let me know what you think!

Features

• Taking cover
  During shootouts, Jack can hide behind a cover to reload bullets or just to take a little break from all the shooting. Or he can always shoot back, right.
• Reloading
  Every bullet counts. If you take an empty gun to a gunfight or will shoot without thinking and aiming properly, it’s quite possible that you’ll trade your pistol for a coffin. Because reloading takes time and that’s a precious commodity once there are bullets flying all around you.
• Duels
  If there’s one thing, that’s really iconic for the spaghetti western genre, it’s the wind tower making a really ugly squeaky noise when it turns. And right there in the second place, we have duels, or standoffs. Some of the boss battles will be done in this way, rewarding speed and precision. But duels are a tricky business - pull out your gun too soon and you’ll be forever remembered as a dishonorable bastard, draw too late and you might not get a chance to draw your gun ever again.
• Bloodsucking
  Sucking blood is what mosquitoes are best known for and it’s no different with Jack (in the world of BWBS, also mosquito males can suck blood). The blood is then used to fuel his powerful abilities.
• Skills
  Jack will be able to choose from three different skill trees - the good, the bad and the ugly, each with its own special abilities. For good guys, acting faster than anybody is the way to go, bad guys like to keep things simple and deadly and ugly ones… well, they just want to laugh at the world burning. Player will be able to choose a skill tree (we call them “Paths”) before each level, so that you try out which one suits you best for every particular level. New abilities will unlock after completing a level.
• Guns
  For a bounty hunter, chasing down gangsters is a livelihood. And to be good at your work, you need the best tools available. With the money Jack will acquire, he’ll be able to buy new guns with different properties, like accuracy, number of bullets or range.

Where to find us? Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | IndieDB

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And now for a little promotion. If you like our game and would like to help us, we're currently on Steam Greenlight and would really appreciate your Yes vote. And if you wanted really help us a lot, you could even share it with your friends. Thank you very much!

 

Very cool aesthetic. Your presentation and art is very well done, I especially like the comic book treatment, but there is a detachment in almost all the animations that is very distracting.
The player characters movement and animations are very floaty and when he walks he looks more like a spider but a soft organic spider. Characters/enemies especially insects with exoskeletons don't move in such a floaty/soft manner, they are more twitchy and 'bug'-like. There movements are deliberate and linear with very little easing.
The player character should have a sharp/quick jump instead of a eased curve jump and his locomotion should be a lot more linear and snappy.

I know this is a wip and I don't mean to be harsh - I like the visuals, but the animations really have to be improved to make all the characters on screen more believable - even though they are cartoon insects.
Suggest watching a bunch of 3D and live action videos of insects for reference. One that comes to mind instantly is the circus flea on A Bugs Life. The grasshoppers in Ants is another good reference, not the Keven Spacey grasshopper, or his side-kick, but all the other ones.

Hope this feedback is helpful going forward.

 

Thank you very much for the feedback.
You were in no way harsh, I really appreciate you advices. Honestly, this game is my first time doing character animations, so it is still very much a new territory for me.
With the movement of the characters, there are currently two main problems:
- the animations themselves has plenty of room for improvement and where labeled as 'good enough' for now. I think they really need to be more over-the-top and stylised. It is something I plan to work on in the near future.
- second is, that because of the weirdness of the characters (and especially with a main character on four legs) we have a bit of a problem with finding the right movement speed in the engine itself.

But once again, thank you very much for the feedback. I will work on that. A lot.

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By the way, we've been greenlit on Steam Greenlight! So we're really happy about that now.

 

Hi guys,
here's a little update from us. Among other things, we were also working on the first prototype of our Duel mechanic, because you can't really have a Western game without duels.
Duels are usually composed of two phases - the build up phase (the most iconic part, made quite legenedary in movies by Sergio Leone) and then the actual drawing-of-the-guns phase. In our current prototype, we have both, though currently, we created a meaningful mechanic only for the second one. So, here's a short video about our first prototype of the Duel mechanic:

So, because our characters are insects, we have the opportunity to let them use more than two hands. The duels will be mostly used in boss battles and those will usually be people (or insects) with bounty on their head, therefore we also wanted to give the player the option to capture the enemy alive - that's the reason, why you are disarming the oponent, instead of outright shooting him down.
As for the first phase, we had a couple of ideas, but still haven't decided for the one that would make most sense in the context of a duel. If you have any ideas, I would really appreciate any ideas.



If you like the idea and would like to know more about the whole creative process behind it (or learn something more about the duels in spaghetti westerns), you can read about it in my new blogpost.

Please, let me know how you like the idea. Any feedback would be really helpful. Thank you and have a good one!