My names Liam O’Leary and I am one of the founders of Big Paw Games. We are a small company based in Sydney Australia. For the first part of this year we have been working on client projects to gain enough money to start paying off some licenses and get into our own projects.
We are at the point now where we can revisit some of our ideas and get stuck into some of our own game ideas. A game I would love to share with you guys is Tiny Assassins. If you jump over to our website you can play our Demo version of the game:
This demo was put together a while ago and since then we have had some massive design idea changes, and a lot of concept work done. For now I will just pop up some new concept images of the game so you can get a feel for our ideas.
I’m the lead artist on this game and am having the hardest time figuring out an art style! And I would love your help and opinions. I’m a pretty strong vector artist, however I have been toying with the idea of doing pixel art for this project. I will put a couple of our concepts below and I would love some of your thoughts.
For those interested in the concept of the game. You play as a tactician who works with assassins to complete missions. The player has been recruited by the “Order of the Shadows”. They start off working with a rookie assassin (the drawings seen above). The more missions a player completes the more they will gain reputation among the assassin community thus more assassins will want to work with them.
I’ll post some more information up about the game shorty, so make sure to come back to see how we are going, and be the first to play some of the first demos!
I recall playing your demo before (maybe someone linked it on Facebook?) it’s a nice little concept, glad to see you developing it further.
I feel like a pixel art approach could be out of place, it might be suited better by vector with pixel art considerations, best example I can think of is when the Worms games went high res. Strong outlines, basically.
Yewww Sydney! Good to see the Aussie industry growing!
I’d say work to your strengths, vector art can look awesome and would suit the project nicely I think. FlaxSycle mentioned Worms, which is a perfect example. Battleheart also comes to mind.
Thanks so much guys! From your responses I think I will stick with my strengths and go higher res, it will probably fit better in with the world. Thanks so much for your advice and interest guys!
I’ll be posting updates here as they happen, so please stick around
Just a little update on how things are going with our art style. We took your advice and went for a more polished, high res look. Here’s a little sneak preview of what the first level will look like. Well it will give you a general idea anyway. I hope you like the style we have gone with, and please leave any suggestions, or ideas you may have!
Its been a while since I uploaded any of our progress so here is a little something. This is the first boss the player will have to assassinate. Not too sure how quickly he is going to move yet but he might be needing a couple more frames. Hope you like the style we are going for and stay tuned for some more!
The concept is terrific. Kind of like those early flight games/land your jet (i cant remember the name now) for iphone. I really like the drawing mechanic. I noticed you cant draw on some areas - it would be good to communicate why. I think a tutorial is a must. Telling us to draw a line is a good thing, why not also add in a line or two (avoid the red areas / get inside the castle) - that way it becomes clear to anyone who has just picked up your game what to do (sometimes we need handholding)
I instinctively wanted to be able to drag the map around also to see what was nearby.
I think it would be nice if you didnt have to press play each time. if when you finished drawing the line you would automatically move BUT i havent tested it, maybe that interferes with the gameplay. But if it does work i think it would improve the flow. Maybe the guard vision could look more like a cone shape? like a spotlight, i think that people are used to seeing that and will recognize it more as a visual area to avoid. I didnt get that they were visual cones and walked right into one on purpose:)
I really like the assasin idea - it makes for a great setting. If you did all this in 2 weeks i can only imagine what you guys can come up with given time. Very nicely done.
