Today I’m busy polishing up a small demo for the team to display next Tobsday (see above for what tobsday is) — so you’ll be getting a SNEAK PEAK at the game itself! Work is going at a tremendous pace, and don’t forget to leave your suggestions for bosses, ideas and more either over on our facebook page (link on http://www.tobgame.com) or here!
Empowering Artists = Great Game
What is all this empowering business? Well, typically in game development, artists have to create assets or design levels with huge restrictions due to the code. You’ll be stuck with 32×32 tiles (which will look boring in the end) or have limitations on how they can develop the game.
We’ve thrown all that out of the window
1. Artists can just draw whatever they want in Photoshop, at any size, and we’ll convert it to a layered animation.
2. Colliders are not linked to geometry so we can get really creative. Artists can just pull out artwork and place it down at any depth in the editor and group them. They can add a parallax script live in editor and see it happen. They can tweak any part of it at any time.
3. There’s no limitations on anything. If an artist wants a pigeon to do a little poo randomly with a 30% chance of doing one, then they ask me and I do it. I don’t moan, I don’t make a fuss, I just get off my ass and do it.
4. Effects and particle systems that are FULLY animated as well – so you can have fully animated hand-drawn wisps of smoke, and fantastic environmental effects without the headaches.
5. They can add anything they want in any part, without any restrictions. So what is the catch?
The catch
The catch is the programmer (me) is slowly going insane. It takes a tremendous amount of effort and polish in tools and level design ease-of-use, but in a way it can be seen like I am also directly contributing towards the art goal of the project. If I can free artists to just be themselves, it means that they spend more time doing what they do best, and less time worrying about a script or going crazy over restrictions. This increases the amount of art they can shift out… Which means TOB is FULL of unique artwork, just about everywhere!
But if I’m crazy about one thing, it’s your fun. We need TOB to be a massive celebration of retro gaming, with cues taken from the history of retro games. There’s a little bit of influence from everything in here – see if you can spot them. One thing this game isn’t is… a clone. Expect the unexpected!
Please offer feedback and ideas, you never know, you might be the one to influence a level or enemy. And stay peeled for an early test demo on our livestream this coming tobsday.
Soon I will be talking about the render to texture technology the game uses and why, plus some techie AI talk (that’s right, these things will be pretty smart!)
Our facebook is http://www.facebook.com/theotherbrothersgame - give us a friendly like and post some words of inspiration, we will read every comment 
http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=2263136&postcount=20