Ah, so there's a topic about this here.
When The Chosen One approached me with this project, he had a little demo to show off and upon first seeing it, I immediately recognized it as a Bug! clone. I was on board right away after that.
My collaboration really started in April, with baby steps at first, and then accelerating with the game closer to release.
So it's roughly like the Saturn platformer, but in hi-res (it runs at 800x600 on full screen). Imagine something running on Ultra HLE, that's how it looks to me when I play it. The PC spec requirements are very modest which, for a game of this type, is the way to go, IMHO.
Early on, there was a lot of wranglings between myself and TCO concerning the design of the characters. There was, for example, the issue of proportions. All platform games I knew had little munchkins for characters, with tiny limbs and all, but TCO wanted something different and since it is his project, I had to go along with it. It works, but creates problems like animation (more on that later).
TCO had a very clear idea of what the characters should look like. He showed me lots and lots of images, all from animes, but he didn't want them to be too anime-ish. That was all good to me as I'm not a fan of the style (I never posted any anime drawing at GA. Ever) so I could create a bastadized style, more evident with the male character rather than the female one, match it as closely to TCO's vision as I could. If the Japan worshippers at GA don't approve, that's a good sign.
Some of the characters I didn't design, most notably the bosses since they are 3D in-game. Someone else designed those. I was not supposed to design the standard enemies, but after some discussions, I had to quickly create and animate those, delaying my contribution for the rest of the game.
While most classic, hand-drawn platformers have the same amount or even less animation cells as TCO's project, because the character is bigger with large limbs, the need for more cells was evident when I first tested them myself. So for the walking and running sequences I will double the amount. For the rest, I think it is overkill. One area that is definitely overkill are transition cells in most situations. This is something I learned the hard way with TCO's first project (that was brought up in this thread). There's a very good reason why you don't see those in other platformers.
Developing a game at a distance (I don't live in California like TCO) can be a bit challenging. For example, animation in this game is not merely producing the cells and then sending them to CA. You have to know about the frame delays and stuff and we've devised a system with animated GIFs that shows him how I want the characters animated. Another area is with using Flash, you can distort polys and sprites. I think this is in large part what makes the characters appear stiff since they are not animated with exagerated motions. Hopefully, this will be something to be ironed out in the final stages of development.
Finally, one major reason why I accepted this project is that it allows me to produce dozens of stills, my real area of expertise. I'm not sure if they will be seen in the demo, but in the real game, the story is illustrated with large, colored pics complemented with voice acting, similar to Keio Flying Squadron 2 and Astal, two of my favorite platformers on the system (I don't know why Nintendo still snobs voice acting, if done well, it enhances the gaming experience). It will be like illustrating a childern's book, except you can use Flash to move the characters and backgrounds independently from each other. I'm really eager to see how this will turn out. The storyboarding is almost finished and I look forward creating the stills afterwards.
And, for God's sake, no waterpack. It's better that way.
