Buddy Lives Another Day
2022
Alex Su, Charlie Doris, Lana Lim, Micha Rand
The initial inspiration came from our high school mascot Buddy and a recent Spirit Week celebration. It then was reframed into a gritty film noir aesthetic that retains some lightness by the premise that in this world of anthropomorphic animals, arm wrestling is combat. What follows is a good ol underdog story with Buddy and his friends against the evil Stars trying to take over.
The game was never finished. For one, the core interaction of arm wrestling just wasn't a very compelling mechanic. And the highly branched nature of the story also made the programming side of things increasingly cumbersome. It eventually just dragged on a bit too long and we all started drifting towards other projects. But the few months we did spend in development amidst college applications were incredibly enjoyable.
Last I remember, the project file had fallen into disrepair, so all I have here are some backgrounds and sketches.
I was in charge of the art for this game (thankfully Lana came on later to do all the characters). We were initially going for something isometric inspired by the likes of Transistor or Disco Elysium. But it dawned on us that one big continuous map was a lot of work and Micha suggested a simpler zelda dungeon top-down perspective. This actually added quite a bit of charm and having disconnected sections allowed us to imply a much grander scale for the world.
Right from the start I arrived at this photobashed approach to have maximal visual detail in the shortest time. We also decided early on that the lighting should be baked into the backgrounds (besides a character shadow) for much higher fidelity than if we went with actual dynamic lights through the engine. And because it's mostly ambiently lit, I leaned into a kind of exaggerated ambient occlusion style of shading with a general principle of keeping high contrast everywhere. I would also come to add little patches of light and dark to break up surfaces especially with tiled images. It was a lot of fun learning this new workflow and it also forced me to get very proficient at Photoshop by the end.
The plan was to replace the heads with portraits that could be swapped out for each of the characters, so we didn't have to redraw and reanimate the arm movements for every single encounter. The portraits would also express facial cues much better which was vital for the fakes and tells as part of the arm-wrestling gameplay.
Where the climax takes place as Buddy finally takes on Lil Star. There were grand plans for this area...
Posters and other environmental text were supposed to diegetically add additional lore and flavor to the world.
Cutscenes were of lower priority so they most definitely did not get off the cutting board.
These indoor scenes were inspired by the Snowdin Town shop from Undertale.
These dock areas were actually the first ones drawn yet are still the most cohesive...
This was going to be an easter egg room.
