Our classic adventure game Zeus Quest is being remastered and is on Steam Greenlight.
The game is a fully animated 2D vector art cartoon adventure game, old school…
This game is being made by 1 person, only me and its expected to finish Dec2015 or Jan2016.
The original graphics were made from an illustrator of course but now for the remake, all the image process is done by me.
I hope you like it, because any vote to spread the project is more than welcome
Zeus Quest Remastered is an old school ‘Point and Click’ adventure game. (Sci-Fi + Greek Mythology + Humor) You control Zeus (Boss of Olympus) which is a wacky character. You try to fix a time machine to save the planet from explosion. Everything happens in Greek mythology timeframe. The characters and dialogues are hilarious and are translated into 6 languages. There is English Speech in some cut scenes. Everything is fully animated with 60fps. We use Vector art, a unique cartoonish style.
The Story
Zeus, the boss of Olympus is summoned back to earth by an ancient security mechanism. He has to find the scattered pieces of a time machine in various islands so that he can use it to save the planet. During this process he will have to solve hundreds of puzzles and meet many strange and hilarious characters. The adventure is huge, it starts by landing in Santorini (at ancient times) where he will have to find a ride to 3 more islands. Then transform into a bull to abduct Europe and finally travel to Minoan Crete where he will find the missing pieces to complete the mission.
Features
Old-School ‘Point and Click’ Adventure game.
Vector art with Full HD cartoon graphics.
60FPS, fully animated, everywhere…
Full length game. Huge gameplay.
Hilarious dialogues. Funny characters with real humor.
Is one of the languages Greek? Since this is Greek mythology.
While I can see the humor in the video - the animations aren’t very appealing. It is very floaty, marionette puppet looking.
This might be the intended style you desired, but it is pretty amateur looking imo. Others may find it appealing though.
Yes, we have Greek, since I am Greek! You dont want to see the original game, it has no animation at all, only still images low res. No character also. Yes, animation could be better, working on it.
This is the video of the original game. Don’t be too strict, the game was made in 2004 for Palm OS Pilot originally!
I am trying to figure out what is the best software for advanced animations.
I already use Puppet2d and its good but I heard Spine is better? Is this true? It seems harder to use Spines code for transactions than unity animators, also why learn another program when you can go with the best which seems to be Harmony. But is Harmony exporting well in Unity and what about performance in mobile. If anyone can help…
I’d say your probably right - toon boom is probably the best 2D animation package, but unsure how artists fair with it using Unity.
My personal opinion - it seems like the ‘look’ style you are going for you can achieve in Puppet2d so Spine won’t help hit the mark you are going for. Spine has some advanced features that are interesting, but I don’t think any of them apply to your style.
Spriter Pro is a good package, and not expensive, and there are some quality games on here that have used it to create 2D animations.
But honestly - the tool - its just the pencil. Tools aren’t what make nice animations look nice. It’s the artist.
I think if you want to improve the animations in your game - you need to animate more than just the cycles in your game.
Take a day or two and just create animations and then refine them to make them better. Adjust the curves and secondary animation. Over shoot the end pose and set up some good anticipation keys.
I agree with goatboy - you do have a puppet style that is comical, but there are issues with the animations that are obviously not on purpose. If you clean up the anims, I think this will be fine.
Interesting project and I really like that “silly” look
If you like to use vector graphics inside Unity you can use simple plugin like our Simply SVG (http://u3d.as/jPK). It allows you to import all of your vector assets to the Unity as meshes. If you are going to use it I would like to have some feedback
I hope you get your indiegogo fully funded and your greenlight passed.
You might wanna change “Caldera” to a different name, because a game already has that name in it as one of it’s cities and I don’t know if the developers claimed it, so yeah. The game is TES 3 Morrowind and the company is Betheseda Softworks if you want it know.
If you go to Santorini island in Greece, where my games map is (I have been there many times) you will find out that there is a city named Caldera, which comes from the latin word caldaria “cooking pot”, basically is where a volcano raises. Nobody can claim city names that exist in the real world.
Caldera is a town in Santorini and in Chile.
Bethesda Softworks - no matter how much they would like to - can’t ‘claim’ that name, nor any other geographical location that is considered a common geographical term and thus public domain.
The name of a city, state or geographical location by itself is considered geographically descriptive and cannot be protected as a trademark.
Disclaimer - I’m not a lawyer, just an artist.
In practice: we have made a couple of mobile titles with it and haven’t had any issues with performance. In theory all meshes with vertex colors should have smaller memory footprint than full resolution textures and also be faster to render.
Our shader for svg meshes is super light to render. Much faster than Unity’s Spriterenderer’s default shader.
Should you have any problems with it and I’m happy to help you to solve all of them
What about the render passes? If every object in my scene is a vector, then if I have 30 objects then each frame it must render all vectors separately? This is fixed with sprite atlases. Is there anything like vector atlases???
