Over at our Incubator Games website, we’re running a little art poll for Tribes of Mexica. We’re giving the game a bit of a makeover, and we’ve commissioned various artists to present their unique vision for the title.

My personal favourite, the "sinister Cipactli."

Check out the rest of entrants right here, and vote for your favourite!

First of all, we finally have a brand new site! It’s where all future Tribes of Mexica updates will go, but since I started these art posts here, I figured I’d finish off the series with one more entry.

In part 3, I finally got a background and all the necessary character artwork, but there were still plenty of missing assets that had to go into the prototype.

Our controls/tips screen used stock controller/button images supplied by Microsoft. These were edited a bit and given unique backgrounds to better fit the style of the game.

I asked my younger brother (who’s a graphic designer) to do some menu backgrounds and a custom font for us. Larabie Fonts is a good place to snag these or look for templates, so I didn’t expect it to be a huge amount of work. I gave my brother $100 and figured he’d be done in a day or two, but then the requirements kept on piling up.

Button icons, a tutorial screen, custom battle messages, etc.; none of these had to be done from scratch as there were plenty of references, but the quantity of UI elements grew to be far more than a weekend of work could cover. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I gave my brother another $100 for all this extra work.

Some spell icons...

We also needed some icons for the spells and status effects, so I asked Alice (who did our cover) to help with these illustrations. I also liked the Street Fighter esque health bars my brother did as they gave Tribes of Mexica a fighting game vibe, so I requested a few portraits to accompany them.

In total there were 12 spell icons, 12 status effect icons and 8 portraits, with a bit of palette-swapping/layering to cut down on the work. Alice was quite comfortable with this and we paid her $200 for all the images.

Finally, we needed some spell effects. Initially we wanted to have the same studio that did the character art to also create the spell animations, but they were too busy. We asked some other artists that we knew if they’d be interested, but they either didn’t have the time or were not well suited for the task. In the end, I posted another ad on ConceptArt.

...and some enemy portraits.

Out of all the responses, I chose to go with Rafa? Kwa?ny. Rafa? seemed like a good fit as he had some impressive CG animations and was willing to do the work for $200. I paid him a $75 advance and we talked over the details of all the spells, but then he simply disappeared. I e-mailed him a few times but never got a response, so I filed complaint with PayPal. Eventually PayPal “recovered” $0.53 of the $75.00 and promptly closed the case.

With just a few days left until the deadline of the DreamBuildPlay competition, we had to scramble to come up with an alternate solution. We bit the bullet and implemented some particle effects which I didn’t think there was time to do, and I paid my brother another $100 to create some static images for this system. This was the part of the game that got the least amount of polish, but I was still quite happy with the end results.

On top of all this, I also messed around with a bunch of art stuff myself. I trimmed, cropped and resized some of the UI pieces, and — having previously asked for our background to be split into multiple layers — created 7 different arenas from one template.

4 of the 7 backgrounds in our prototype which were all based on a single template.

This was done by moving, flipping, scaling and cloning individual layers and altering the level/colour balances of the entire image. These edits were somewhat noticeable if you took a closer look at the final backgrounds, but they were not the focus of the game and the rough spots were worth the extra variety.

Overall we created Tribes of Mexica on a shoestring budget, and the artists involved contributed partly because they were interested in the experience and the project’s visual themes. I wouldn’t necessarily count on the same level of support in the future if we couldn’t raise a bit more money, but it was definitely a positive experience that helped to frame our approach for dealing with contract work.

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Having decided to move away from pixel art, I returned to ConceptArt.org to search for higher-res artists. Although my preference was for a style resembling Alice’s, I was open to other interpretations. After all, the characters would have to take on more deformed proportions to properly fit the dimensions, so there was no point in disqualifying CG renders, sketch-animations, etc.

Warrior concept by Daniel Hansen.

The requirements for the job stayed about the same:

• 1 background, 1280×720, with some decorative objects that could be moved around.
• 1 “unit” type consisting of 4 different colour versions, with each version comprising 8 angles (3 of them simply flipped) and 4 animations per angle.
• 4 different enemy types, with 4 animations per enemy and one or two special animations.

I kept the $800 as the initial offer for this work. I was prepared to see this figure fluctuate based on the utilized style and its requirements, but I also thought it was good starting point.

As I found out prior to making my post, ads that pay more than $500 have their own section on ConceptArt and require a $50 fee to be posted. Since I previously had a positive experience with the site, I decided the price was worth it. Our IncubatorGames profile, though, listed us as a group, and I made the payment under my name, Radek Koncewicz. As a result, there was some confusion over the post and it didn’t initially go up, but the matter was quickly resolved after I contacted some of the forum administrators.

All in all, the ad generated about 50 responses.

Animation mockups by Jesus Garcia, Tom Garden, IMGNATION and Decebal Tache.

Now the thing with pixel artists is that most of them create tiles, objects, animations, etc., as a matter of course. However, with illustrators animations are much more of a specialty. Lots of submissions showcased amazing background and character work, but very few contained examples of animations. This had me a little concerned, so I decided to request some mock-ups. Not wanting to alienate any of the artists, I offered $20 each for a simple animation test. It wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing. From our point of view, it also quickly added another $120 that we had to spend (although one of the artists was nice enough to actually send the money back when we didn’t choose him).

This turned out to have been a very good idea. The results were varied in style and quality, and really helped to showcase each individual’s ability to interpret and produce based on our directions. I realize that extra mockup payments might not always be feasible, but I highly recommend this extra step if things seem uncertain.

In the end, we decided to go with IMGNATION, a Brazilian art studio that had worked on videogames in the past. They accepted the $800 fee, with the only “extra” being a request to be credited in the game (which I was going to do anyway for all the contractors involved).

The finished background. I ended up playing around with it in Photoshop to create the 7 different backgrounds we had in the demo.

The people at IMGNATION who worked on Tribes of Mexica were Marcus Severo de Moura, Rafael Batista Sarmento and Orlando Fonseca Jr., the studio’s project director. I only ever talked to Orlando, and initially he broke down the tasks as follows: background, 30% of the work, units, 20% of the work, and enemies, 50% of the work. Eventually the workload proved to be closer to: background, 20% of the work, units, 30% of the work, and enemies, 50% of the work.

Working with an actual studio meant that it was a bit harder to play things by the ear, but it also meant that — as a business — they’d work hard not to miss any deadlines. Gearing up for our own deadline, it was definitely nice not to have to worry about art deliverables being late.

The final background we received was great, and the animations were nice despite relying a lot on transformations (movement, scaling and rotations that are the staple of Flash “tween” animations). Granted IMGNATION was working on these animations while we were putting together a rough system to play them in the game, so things were not as optimized as they could have been. Hopefully this process will be improved in the future as we develop and fine-tune more tools.

With the core and concept art out of the way, we had all the vital components. However, there were still plenty of other visuals missing, which I’ll cover in the next entry.

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With a concept artist in tow, it was time to get some in-game art.

I’ve always been a huge fan of pixel art, and not just due to nostalgia. I really like the style and its use of colours and textures, and its overall ability to convey visual information. To put it simply, I think it’s charming, and it would’ve made a great fit for Tribes of Mexica.

Over the span of the last decade, I’ve worked with about a dozen pixel artists at two professional game companies, and met countless others while pursuing hobbyist projects. I even enjoyed my own time with DPaint; I was decent enough with tilesets, but horrible at animations. Unfortunately, all these artists were either too busy or were working under non-competitive clauses that prevented them from helping me out.

As such, I had to find someone new for the job.

A group of 2D games that were never meant to be. The above list contains mocked-up screenshots from various pitches we worked on at my last company (art by Eric Vedder, Ben Henry and Joe Pendon).

Before that could happen, though, I was determined to tick off a few goals that would hopefully aid me in my search. First, I wanted to hire a concept artist to do some work that would serve as a reference and a token of my dedication to the project. Next, I wanted to code a “tech demo” that would not only be tangible proof of ToM, but would also help me figure out some of the art requirements (such as dimensions and animations). I also wanted to get a single music track for the demo and make a video out of it as it’d be a useful tool for showing off the game.

Finally, I needed to do some research.

One of the reasons I thought pixel art would be a good fit for ToM were the sizes of the in-game entities. They ranged from 36×36 all the way to 200×200, making them very suitable for pixel art. However, the backgrounds weren’t. My prototype ran at a 1280×720 resolution, which was huge even without any scrolling. I certainly didn’t need a tilemap, but this would still be a potential problem. I discussed it with some artists I knew, though, and they assured me that it was easy enough to draw and scale a background, and then paint over it with a somewhat limited palette while avoiding smooth gradients, blotchy brush strokes and anti-aliasing. This would give the background a somewhat pixelated look that would blend in fairly well with the entities.

With all that out of the way, I posted a job ad on the Pixelation, Pixel Joint and IndieGamer forums.

My initial request consisted of the following:

• 4 backgrounds, 1740×720, with some decorative objects that could be moved around.
• One “unit” type consisting of 16 angles. Well, 9 angles, really, as the other 7 could be flipped/mirrored without any extra work. Each angle would contain 4 animations, 2 of them single frames, and the other 2 comprising 2-3 frames. Each unit would be 36×36 in size and would need to be provided in 4 coloured versions via palette swapping.
• 6 enemy types with 4 animations each. Once again, 2 of the animations would consist of single frames, and the other 2 would be 2-3 frames each. Enemies ranged in size from 36×36 to 200×200.

Konjak made a name for himself with Noitu Love 2 and various other hobbyist and professional games. Although we never talked before, and he was quite busy when I sent him an e-mail, he was also nice enough to quickly respond in a cordial manner.

I didn’t post a specific fee for these as neither I nor the other Incubator Games guys were sure of what the price ranges should be. We didn’t have a specific budget set aside for the in-game art either, so we decided to roll with the punches. If the offers we received involved sums that we could immediately afford, then great. If not, we’d either have to scale down or look to pool together some more money.

The lack of a specific fee in my post probably meant that we wouldn’t get as many offers as we did via my concept art ad (at least not initially), but I was OK with that. I also noted that if artists were only interested in doing the backgrounds or the animations, they should still apply. Obviously I would’ve preferred to have a single artist do all the work, but I knew that some would be experts in only one area and would want to avoid the other.

What quickly became apparent is that most pixel artists judged the budget of a work strictly by the amount of pixels it involved. What this meant is that the price tag of an image grew exponentially with its sizes. For example, if a 50×50 image cost $10, a 100×100 image would cost $40. This lead to quite a few misunderstandings over the backgrounds. I would’ve been crazy to expect artists to create these large images one pixel at a time, but that seemed to be the overall impression I had made. I was forced to repeatedly explain that I did not want these to be pixel art, but rather drawn/painted, and then touched up to blend in with the pixel work.

Following the first batch of offers we received, I decided to scale down my request. It wasn’t so much an issue of money as of time. Despite the 5-week deadline, some artists expressed concern with the amount of work involved. To accommodate for this, I changed my requirements to include only 1 background and 4 enemies. Ultimately, I also took down the background size to 1280×720 and the amount of angles for the units from 16 to 8 (for a total of 5 angles per unit if you don’t count the flipped versions).

Of all the artists who expressed interest in the project, I was particularly fond of Jim Jansen's work.

Since I posted on multiple forums, it was a bit difficult to track all the responses via Private Messages and e-mail. All in all, though, I received roughly 25 offers via Pixelation, 15 via Pixel Joint, and 5 via IndieGamer. I also personally contacted about 20 artists, although only 5 of them responded. The monetary estimates in the responses ranged from $400 to $1100 at rates of $15 to $40 an hour, with one or two that were significantly lower. The breakdown for my requested assets was generally the same: the units cost the least, followed by the enemies (the 200×200 enemy was more than all the units combined), and finally the background. Based on these estimates (and feedback from artists I knew saying that the work shouldn’t take more than two weeks to complete), I edited my original posts to include an $800 price point.

Adam Saltsman, the admin of Pixelation and a somewhat prominent figure in the indie games community, did not agree.  When I added $800 to my ad, he responded by saying “I could smell your cheap, exploitative rates from a mile away…” following which he moved my post to the “unpaid” forum. Pixelation is his to run as he sees fits so I didn’t complain too much, but this is my blog so I’ll briefly state the issues I had with this:

• Right off the bat, Adam claimed that this work was worth $3000, or even 2-4 times that amount. This wasn’t even close to the estimates I received, so it’s hard not to think of it as an inflated number. I even discussed this with some of the artists I’ve worked with, some of whom Adam knows personally, I think, and they all seemed to agree.
• Despite being rather friendly and self-effacing on his blog, Adam’s comments on my post were pretty snarky. I’m a big boy so they didn’t really phase me, but they did seem rather unwarranted.
• The $800 was called exploitative and not a competitive figure, and yet it was based purely on what the artists themselves offered. It wasn’t a lowballed amount either as $15-$40 an hour isn’t a bad rate, but Adam ignored all of this. Considering this number was derived from competing artists, I’d say “competitive” was a very apt term for it. I’d also go so far as to say that the process by which I settled on this amount was very fair and didn’t exploit the employee or the employer.
• $800 is long way from $0, so I wouldn’t consider the offer to be “unpaid.”

Anyway, in the end we had about 10 or so artists that we thought could be a good fit for ToM. This list included Jim Jansen, Miguel Angel Perez, Joshua Astorian and various others, but we didn’t pick any of them. The reason for this is that the commission was for only one part of the whole game, and we wanted to hire someone that would end up doing a lot more work. The pixel stuff was doable for a demo, but ultimately it would require too much time and money for what we had in mind.

Instead, we decided to go with a different approach, which I’ll talk about more in the next post.

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RPGs and fighting games matched what I had in mind for ToM — i.e., combat-heavy gameplay with a variety of tactics — so I browsed through their toolboxes for inspiration. From these, I could safely assume that stunning an enemy or implementing recharging spells wouldn’t be a problem. My match-three core mechanic, though, relied on rotating concentric rings, which was a bit more unique. As such, it was a key focus for prototyping.

Programmer art of three sets of matched units rushing in to attack the enemy.

Granted as soon as I got this idea, I was flooded with visions of various units performing distinct animations that matched their respective Aztec gods. This sort of stuff was fairly rooted in aesthetics and not gameplay, though, so I had to set it aside and concentrate on cold, hard mechanics.

Here’s a bullet-point overview of those early prototypes:

• I started off with 4 main colours on account of wanting to associate four major Aztec gods with the face buttons of the Xbox 360′s controller. This is a relatively small number for a matching game, but adding more didn’t seem to make sense. I wanted to maintain the relationship between the gods’ “spells” and the face buttons, and throwing more colours into the mix just broke this symmetry.

  I did briefly experiment with more unit types (the coloured circles) to see if I could add non-attacking troops. In Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, for example, the blue hexagons simply fill up your shields, but this muddled things up. It seemed confusing that some units didn’t directly attack the enemy, and any benefits they granted could simply be implemented via a regular yellow/red/blue/green spell.

• Most colour matching games only need 3 or more consecutive colours to register a match, and that seems like a magic number. If it’s 4 or more, then it takes a significantly longer time to spot a possible match, and it makes randomization of the game board that much harder to balance. Because of this, I decided to go with 3 rings of units (at least for the core mechanic). This also had the added benefit of making it quicker to select any single ring, i.e., the player was always only one click away from selecting his desired ring.
• 6 units in the first ring is pretty much the minimum possible number. Any fewer, and the player doesn’t have enough parts to perform the matching mechanic in any satisfactory fashion. I didn’t use any more units than that, however, as they’re humanoids that take up more physical space than your typical gems or spheres. They also need to be recognizable and exude some personality all the while accommodating for lower resolutions (for possible PC/Mac/Linux ports and the TV Safe Area issue), but I think I’ll further experiment with this number when I get the final animation sets.
  

  I'm rather fond of using gradients and Photoshop's cutout filter when creating placeholder art. It's not the prettiest, but it's a hell of a lot easier to look at than MS Paint scribbles.

• Each ring contains double the amount of units as the ring that preceded it, i.e., the first one has 6, the second one 12, and the third one 24. This gives us a total of 42 units, which isn’t quite as many as Bejeweled’s 64, but we also only have 4 colour-types instead of 7.

  To give the game more symmetry, I tried putting the same number of units in each ring, but that didn’t work out very well. It greatly reduced the total number of “matching parts” and made the area around the enemy seem a bit barren. All in all, I think it stands to reason that the further the ring is from the enemy, the bigger its circumference, and the more units it can house.

• When a match is performed, the three units rush to attack the enemy, disappear upon contact, and get replaced by three new units that run in from an off-screen area. At first, I kept these fully randomized, but this created scenarios where the player couldn’t always perform his desired match. For example, if he saw two green units aligned in the second and third ring, he’d naturally look for a green unit in the first ring. If the first ring contained no green units, the player would feel a little cheated and would have wasted time seeking out the third green unit.

  Since the player’s spells fill up as their unit counterparts perform attacks, this also meant that — at times — the player simply wouldn’t be able to execute certain attacks. A lot of intended strategy of the combat is picking specific spells from a common pool and casting them at desired intervals, so I had to make sure that each ring had at least one unit representing each of the 4 colour types.

• A lot of matching games rely on planning ahead and visualizing the game board’s arrangement following a move. This is used to perform multiple matches at one time, or to plan ahead cascading matches, i.e., when 3 blue gems are matched and disappear, the gems above them may fall in such a way that 3 more yellow gems are matched automatically.

  Since the units are all attached to the rings and don’t move within them, this sort of planning was very limited and difficult to visualize. Furthermore, due to the controlled nature of the randomization, the player couldn’t know what new units would run onto the field until a match was actually executed. The ring alignment basically prevented planning “combos,” so I ultimately decided against making them an integral part of the gameplay.

• Making sure that each ring had at least one unit type also increased the amount of accidental matches. Unless these led to infinite loops, though, I was fine with them. They presented a quick reward that the player understood visually, and resulted in the player feeling like he got a lucky break.

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As a kid, I used to excel at various visual arts. I enjoyed sketching, drawing, painting, etc., and some of my work was even briefly displayed at a quite silly our-children-are-the-future event. As I grew older, though, my interest in art waned and I eventually abandoned it for other hobbies. These days I can draw a stick figure as good as anyone else, but that’s about the extent of my skills. As such, I definitely needed some help with the visuals of Tribes of Mexica.

I wasn’t sure what was the best way hire artists, but I figured ConceptArt.org was a good place to begin. The site was filled with varied portfolios, a lot of them by professionals from the videogame industry, and its message boards were very active. I started off by making a post asking for some advice on Mesoamerican art, after which I scanned the jobs section. I read the FAQ stickies so I wouldn’t make any introductory faux pas, and I checked out a bunch of the other offers just to get a rough idea of the pricing.

Then I made my post.

Alejandro's concept for some of the characters in Tribes of Mexica.

What I asked for were two illustrations in a painterly style — one for a boxart mockup, and another for the game’s title screen. I had some rough ideas for their compositions, but I didn’t dwell on those. Instead, I focused on details such as: theme, compensation ($200 USD, half upfront and half after completion), due date, payment method (PayPal), and delivery format (Photoshop PSD files, with the title screen divided into various layers).

Now $200 USD isn’t a very large amount, so I wasn’t expecting too much interest. Maybe an application or two from some talented speedpainters, although I suspected that even those might be turned off by my desired level of detail.

The post was eventually viewed 1000+ times, and I received 90+ individual offers. I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least.

At least half of those responses came within the first two days, which I spent almost exclusively browsing portfolios and answering e-mails. I responded to every submission, and I was genuinely surprised by the lack of links to amateur-ish deviantart galleries. Everyone seemed fine with the price as well, with a few notable exceptions. One person offered to do it for $175, another requested $300, and one individual (with no link to any works) complained in broken English that it was too little money and I wasn’t going to find anyone for the job.

A lot of the submissions were not necessarily in the style I envisioned, but there was a lot of talent being displayed. In the end, I decided to pick out 5 “finalists” from each sub-style, i.e., dreamlike, blotchy, hyper realistic, etc. This would allow me to weigh the pro’s and con’s of each approach, and eventually come to a decision on the look of the game as a whole.

After mulling it over for a few days, I needed to make a choice, so I asked each artist if they’d be willing to provide me with a quick sketch of the boxart motif. I couldn’t really offer much money for these concepts, so instead I proposed to write a blog post (this one) about my experience and maybe get them some extra exposure. Three of the artists agreed, with one stating that he was too busy at the time, and another refusing to do it without some monetary compensation. That was understandable, though, and I hope you still check out their websites.

Here they are in chronological order based on their submission date:

1). Davy Van Verdegem

Davy was actually the first response I got, and it certainly started off on a positive note. His incredibly textured work had a very storybook feel to it, and although he didn’t have many examples of character art, his stop-motion animations were very impressive.

2). Alejandro Gutiérrez Franco

Alejandro has a lot of commercial experience, and his style — which combines pencil drawings and digital texturing — is certainly unique. He’s also done quite a bit of background and character work, with some of his pieces resembling the setting of Tribes of Mexica, and he actually resided in Mexico City!

3). Alice Duke

The proportions, colours and overall style of Alice’s works reminded me of James Jean’s famous Fables covers that have been renowned for years. Theirs is a very iconic look that worked wonders for that series, and I thought a similar approach could make a great fit for my game.

4). Kamjar Fadai

Although Kamjar’s strengths are not his characters, his background work is simply amazing. The animation of the above image — complete with flowing water and falling leaves — was exactly what I had pictured for my title screen.

5). Mélanie Bourgeois

Mélanie didn’t have a lot of examples in her portfolio, but her ethereal, dreamlike illustrations were instantly appealing. It wasn’t quite the style that I envisioned for Tribes of Mexica, but I could still see this more whimsical look fitting the game quite well.

Alice's final version of the Tribes of Mexica cover, sans the title.

Overall there’s a few quick lessons I learned from this experience:

• ConceptArt.org is great for recruiting artists from all over the world (aside from Antarctica, I received responses from every continent on this planet).
• It’s best not to do ask for help on a tight deadline. You never know what might come up or how long it will take to find someone you think really fits the project, so I’d advise posting an ad well ahead of schedule.
• Although it’s great to have one artist do all the work to ensure a consistent look, scope and time constraints might prevent this from happening. Furthermore, visual arts are a very nebulous field, so it’s likely that you might find artists who fit one part of your requirement but not another.
• Finally, if you haven’t settled on a concrete look for your project but feel pretty confident about the quantity of potential responses, feel free to skip out on stylistic details. You might be surprised by the offers and find an ideal style that never even occured to you.

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Well, as the title suggests, I’m currently developing Tribes of Mexica as an XNA game. Considering the somewhat poor sales of XNA titles, this might seem a bit perplexing. After all, no matter how much one enjoys creating games, it’s nice to get paid as well.

So why did I choose to go with XNA?

Well, a couple of reasons, actually:

• An XNA game is pretty much guaranteed to be released, and consequently to make some money. This might be a small consolation, but it’s hard to get any guarantees in the world of publishing.
• Although I’ve sporadically developed PC stuff, most of my professional career has revolved around very limited devices, i.e., mobiles/handhelds. The Xbox 360 is a beast by comparison, and XNA’s entry cost is about as low as it can get. The alternative is licensing a professional dev kit, which can be quite pricey and time consuming (and never a guaranteed thing). With XNA, registration is done online and only costs $99 USD.


The shady god Tezcatlipoca, one of the pivotal characters in Tribes of Mexica.

• The recently renamed Indie Games Marketplace is based on self-publishing, which means that you get to retain your IP and all the rights to your creation. If it flops, no one will stop you from tweaking it and porting it to another system.
• Aside from CarnyVale Showtime, Microsoft hasn’t really promoted XNA games that much. Now most of them (at least as of right now), are pretty rubbish, so that’s not really surprising. The option for future promotions is still there, though, and the upcoming ratings system might help as well. Regardless of all that, having your game available on Xbox Live! is still a great source of exposure for a brand new developer.
• Another possible reason why promotions haven’t been that prevalent is that the best XNA games have a tendency to make their way onto Xbox Live Arcade, e.g., Schizoid and The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. Publishers seem to be keeping a keen eye on these titles and have shown a willingness to support XNA developers.
• DreamBuildPlay is a good exhibition of XNA games, and has some nice prizes to boot.
• There are 200+ games available on XNA right now, and although that might seem like a lot, it’s not nearly as many titles as there are on the oversaturated iPhone App Store. The opportunity to make a game that stands out and gets attention is still quite good, and things will probably stay that way at least for a little while longer.

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I’m making a game. Here’s a video of the tech-demo/proof-of-concept:

The basic premise of Tribes of Mexica evolved from kicking around a few ideas that dealt with creating gameplay mechanics from radial menus. I have a couple different takes on it, actually, but the one I’m currently focusing on is a classic match-three approach. The reason for this is that it’s a relatively simple and intuitive concept, but it still provides me some room to be unique.

Of course the fact that match-three is almost a genre unto itself means that I’m not going for 100% originality. And that’s OK, too. Very few developers seem to be willing to point out their inspirations, and it’s a silly phobia. Also, too many titles are credited with being original when they simply use an existing formula with a new element or two. Instead, I’m committed to creating this game all the while calling a spade a spade.

Concept art for Tlaloc, one of the more significant gods in Aztec mythology.

So what’s my inspiration? Well, I think Puzzle Quest will draw the most comparisons, and that’s fairly accurate.

Soon after prototyping the ring-rotation, though, I realized that it’d be tough to make a pure puzzle game out of ToM. The interconnected nature of all the coloured elements meant that it was virtually impossible to visualize ahead more than a move or two. Typical links/chains/combos were possible, but they were usually a result of luck, not skill. The radial design also imposed various limitations that are not an issue with static, grid-based puzzlers such as Bejeweled. Still, I was fond of the core concept, so I decided to build on top of it and turn it into a combat game of sorts.

Much like Puzzle Quest, each attack fills up a colour-coded “spell” (currently indicated by the Xbox 360 controller’s face buttons), but I think that’s where the similarities end. ToM is a real-time game, requiring constant analysis and input. In fact, I think it’s more akin to Patapon than anything else; it’s an abstraction of an RPG battle system coupled with an interesting input mechanic.

The one-on-one nature of ToM also allows it to draw upon some elements found in traditional fighting games, and I’ll try to incorporate more of those as the title progresses.

Also, until we give the Incubator Games website an upgrade, I’m going to chronicle the whole experience here on Significant Bits. It’ll allow me to talk about the evolution of ToM’s design while bringing up a couple of other topics such as contracting and promotion. Too often such talking points are relegated to sentiments of “You should do it, and it’d help if you did it well,” though, and that’s not very helpful. Instead, I’ll strive to provide hard numbers and some personal opinions on the overall experience. Hopefully you’ll all find it interesting.

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