Kaijus + 90s era destruction games = FUN

Kaiju Krusher has been a fascinating project to work on. 

Inspired by my love of giant monster movies (aka Kaiju films) and 90s destruction games like Blast Corps, I figured it would be a match made in heaven and kept obsessing over the idea. While working on another gamejam project, me and our lead programmer Tiezzi had hit a bit of a snag, things were going slow and we wanted to get our creative energy and motivation fired up again, so I pitched him the idea of doing another smaller project within a few days and see if we can get it done.
A little bit later he tells me we're in another official jam and we got two new team members, a game designer and a pro musician/audio engineer etc
And we even had an entire month for the project! awesome!... only for life to get in the way by a lot, even so, we stuck to it and released the game in the current state you see it in and you know what? I actually enjoy playing the game, so I count that as a job well done! 

Our team was also excellent, Tiezzi remains in my eyes a wizard with what he can make Unreal do, doing much of the project within 2-3 days.
Alexandre likewise is a wizard in my eyes. 
RML "Romulus51" has been an absolute hero for this project, designing the levels and also working hard to the end to get the game working in Unreal, working back and forth with him has been an absolute necessity and helped us focus the game (and perhaps more importantly, avoid "feature creep").
Then there's Dom who has been a total joy to work with, her talent as a musician cannot be understated and her work here shows it, what's funny is in keeping with the 90s aesthetic she deliberately bit-crunched all the audio and it still sounds incredible, her music is literally too good to sound bad! Working with her to add sound effects to my silly animations has definitely been a highlight of this little adventure.

So let's talk about my role in the project. Officially I am credited as "Kaiju's favourite" which refers to the fact I literally made the goofy thing  I also came up with the premise, every model/animation, most of the dialog, the attacks were all my idea and a good amount of game design ideas.
Not to toot my own horn though (I make it a point not to ever give myself credit), as I am also, a bit of lazy hack.
What do I mean? Well take the Kaiju himself; Jackson the Chameleon!

I am sometimes told I am too honest about myself and the things I do.

I basically kitbashed him together using parts of another PS1-esque looking creature I made a year prior and many aspects of his design (like the fact he's a giant Jackson's Chameleon) were things I let myself get inspired while experimenting with the placement of parts. This is partially why I love low poly art, you couldn't get away with this sort of thing anywhere else. I only slightly changed the texture's color (because why fix what is broken!), I added the horns for a tad more expressiveness and since the eyes I temporarily placed made it look like a goody chameleon, I stuck with it and grew quite attached to the adorable gigantic thing.

The creature on the left was meant to be in a star-fox-esque game I pitched before moving onto a different project I also pitched (hopefully that comes out soon ;) )

That's not to say I refused the idea of making another model from scratch, i'm actually fairly decent at modelling (once again not to toot my own horn), it's just when I did make a model I ended up making.... this:

So... yeah, didn't quite feel the right mood with that one.

As for gameplay ideas, I just thought of the question of what would be cool and fun, so in a few minutes I made this:

Not every idea in that scribble is in the actual game but mostly because we ran out of time, though we did decide very early on that having actual destruction physics would stray from the 90s aesthetic (90s games didn't need no physics to break things!)

But just so we can have it documented that the Kaiju did infact have a screen clearing belly flop attack, please enjoy

Inspired by a move Godzilla himself did in one of his sillier moments: 

Next was the story, which was also made up in a hurry! I thought it would be neat if there would be little news bulletins during gameplay, I wouldn't describe myself as a writer but I do write stories from time to time and figured it would be fun to play around with the idea a little bit.

It's really with the newscasters that this game found its tone, I wanted a fairly fresh idea and an idea I personally never saw anywhere was the idea of a goth newscaster, which is how I came up with Gladys Macabre, the "Goth newscaster".

So naturally, what do you do when you have a character who's gonna be negative and dour? Easy! Just have them forced to work with someone of the exact opposite personality, the "Happy Newscaster" Chuckly Newshappy.

Now I am not really a sprite artist, but these two needed to be one screen and I knew I wanted to make stylized pixel portraits. Interestingly enough I used two very different methods for them.
Gladys took more time then I expected, at first I made a "high res" sketch on my Note 8 phone and used its form as a guide for her pixel look, it didn't actually help that much with creating the pixel art itself and I basically had to ignore the base image for everything but sillhouetes considering the details I wanted to add (eg makeup, lip ring and gold earings, which while barely visible, are still there and that gives me much joy.), I also couldn't quite figure out the hair color and had the team vote

Have I mentioned i'm not good at drawing humans?

As for Chuckly Newshappy.... honestly I pretty much knew from the heart what I wanted him to look like and drew him using a pixel art program on my phone during a 3 hour flight, and I think he turned out okay! Even with time to spare to work on Gladys again... it wasn't as good as the first time

I still kinda like it, don't know why she's wearing a mortal kombat outfit though.

As for the dialog something happened I didn't expect;

The Team took a real liking to the newscasters, especially Gladys! I was especially delighted when other team members would add their own lines and jokes between the two newscasters, it was a moment of wonderful creativity between people intertwining and playing together and I loved it. 

So... yeah, there's a small peak into the developement of this game, not quite Dark Souls game dev lore but I myself always found devlogs fascinating to read just to see how an idea can change and iterate into a fully realized project. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it and hope you enjoy our little game!