Page claim because I'm bored.

What about graphic Design?

Obi1mcd has already offered to do the tiles for this game, and I'll do anti-aliased background if necessary.

If anyone wants to try some sprites they're welcome.

Actually, I've been designing our character for a while now. I like jackets. I'll probably have one sprite ready by tomorrow.

EDIT: Here's a version with flat colors.
[IMG]http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/8337/spritep.png[/IMG]
He's clearly terrible with wardrobes. This version is without BoB hooked up on him. I'll be shading and animating this some time. Notes about his outfit: Bright red T-Shirt (I'll be adding a design onto it), Navy Blue hooded jacket, brown cargo pants. I also need to fix his legs.

It could be good if you can change your clothes. For example, get something in game while playing, and you can unlock and buy a new jacket with shield or something similar.

I wouldn't recommend adding an option to change clothes because that would detract from the whole experience. But I'd like to hear what others have to say on the matter.

[IMG]http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/1984/spritew.png[/IMG]

Some shading added, shirt creased, hair sprayed onto his head. I'm terrible with shading his shirt.

So slight update, I've been forcing myself to create a base for some sprites for another game I'm working on. However, if they turn out alright there's no reason not to use them for this too. The main advantage would be that we could make a bunch of characters with relative ease, and have a sense of consistency with the visuals. Also, if I post here that I'm working on them, it forces me to finish them instead of giving up in disgust and deleting them all. Hopefully.

Also, we have a basic concept down for the teleportation gimmick, but I think we need to really think out how in-depth the gameplay should be so we can start making stuff. Not only can we then get a game engine started, but the gameplay affects how the story is told quite a lot, unless we resort to a large amount of cutscenes.

Thank God, people who know what they're doing.

I've been discussing with a few of you about implementing an upgrade system into BoB, whereby various limitations are resolved. Some suggestions for limitations included the two parts of the device requiring physical connection (i.e. a wire), a 3-or-so second charge-up time required upon pressing the teleport button to actually teleport something, blah blah, you get the idea. At first I was leaning towards these upgrades being acquired in an order determined by the story, but what do you guys think about earning experience points of a kind to unlock the upgrades in any order you wish? Or maybe combining the two, and having certain story-linked upgrades and other free ones.

I'm also wondering what people think about using voice acting. 2D sidescrollers typically cater to text for dialog but maybe we could try something out of the ordinary.

I've also talked with Obi1mcd about including multiple endings, a bad one for when your playstyle was rather aggressive, and a good one for when your playstyle was rather... for lack of a better term, not aggressive.

Would love all your thoughts on these issues, guys.

On the subject of upgrades, how about upgrades that can be fine-tuned afterwards? For example, a weight modifier that lets you choose a scale between a BoB that is lightweight and can be thrown further, but will bounce more and is harder to be precise with, as opposed to a heavy BoB that you can't throw far but won't move much after it lands?

That sounds like a good idea, and little details like those encourage the player to develop their own playstyle. Although, it's going to be to create levels which encourage the same. Multiple solutions is something that's tough to pull off effectively.

Well, tweaking smaller things rather than bigger things would just mean slightly different ways of reaching the same general solution, so we'd just have to make sure to have bit of leeway.

Is this game dead? Anyway, if anyone's still interested in doing this thing, I have a friend who is looking to do art in general for a living, and he'll be happy to help draw backgrounds and other things for the game.

Also I'd like to clear one more thing out: will we be selling the game if we finish it, or will we be distributing it for free?

I am still interested, and I definitely want to continue this.
I've been a bit busy, but as soon as we properly sort out what tiles and stuff we need I can get going. If your friend can draw backgrounds, that's great, since the backgrounds are the part that I tend to struggle with.

As for whether we're selling it or not, I think we should decide that at a later point when we have a better idea about whether it's worth selling. If it is, perhaps we will.

Either way, since the topic has been bumped I might as well put forward a couple of suggestions for where to go next.
For example, I can't really do any art until I have a solid idea of what locations are in the game. But we could, for example, begin on the game engine. Sir Ementaler, are you still interested?

I've been thinking about the script and I've narrowed it down to a few things we're definitely doing: New York apartment, motel on a highway, office complex in a city environment. I'll be putting other things here as the script gets further done.

Well, after I finish my entry for the competition I'll start working on them then.

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this project today's morning. One of my main problems is, I wasn't given any tips on how should the most basic aspects of the game look like. While implementation of semi-realistic Earth physics for a human character shouldn't be hard and I can suppose Obi will be most familiar with tilesets made of a main image and mask, I still need things such as tile size (I recommend 32x32 or 48x48), character mask size (something like 16x64 seeing your sprite? for comparison, in JJ2 it's 24x24) and how many pixels are there per an in-game meter (depending on how tall the character is, probably something around 37?).

Tile size will be 32x32 as 48x48 will give technical problems. The character mask will have to depend on the final sprite, but I'm not sure what that will be yet. I haven't made much progress on my template for the sprites, but I haven't deleted them all yet, so there's that.
Here's an example of what size they'll be if I finish them:

As for pixels/meter, we obviously need to base them off of whatever sprite we use in the end.

Doesn't look like a very proportionate drawing. Just my opinion, but seeing as to the general tone we're going for I think a more realistic look would be better.

For now we can just use a 16x16 block of black as a placeholder for the sprite, and maybe we can adjust it once we finish the sprites.

Ok, that's fine. The main reason they're out of proportion is that they were for another game with a more cartoony aesthetic.
And by the sprite above, 16x16 would probably fit.

I think it's important to have at least a standing sprite, just so that proportions match up. If you compare JJ1 sets to JJ2 sets, for instance, the JJ1 sets tend to look smaller, because they were made to match a smaller sprite.

For a standing sprite, we could probably use Sean's sprite above. Even if it gets changed later, it should hopefully still have very similar proportions.

Great then. Let's get to it. I've got lots of time to kill for a couple of days where I can't work on the competition, so I'm going to get on the script.

On the music side of things, I've been fooling around and came up with something that sounds like it could be used for this project. Care to take a look? http://soundcloud.com/srgorter/hey-coders-1

Two things: On the behest of Obi1mcd, I've created a separate document for the amassing of game ideas and other things. Gameplay, sprites, direction, stuff like that should go in there. You've all been sent a PM for the link to the new doc. Stuff.

Second, no one has quite given me an idea of whether or not I should keep working on that music up above, so I just kept working and I seriously need to know if this will work in the game as either a) the main theme, or b) main menu music.

It will certainly be used somewhere, I can say that. As for where, I haven't thought about it properly yet.

By the way, I really want to encourage everybody to use that link you've been sent and write out a rough draft of what you want in the game. You don't have to do all aspects, but just do whatever you're interested in. After everybody's done, we can start sorting through the proposed ideas and set out some solid guidelines for where this game is going to go.

At some point we're also going to have to stop discussion taking place on this forum. I've already created a private Google Group, but not everyone's been invited as it's not going to serve as the replacement for JCF just yet. As soon as you think this is not the place for game creation discussion anymore, we should move over to the group.

I am a fan of that song. It reminds me of introductory tunes of some free RPG games I played.