Way back when Rimworld came out with programmer art, I thought I’d try making my own Rimworld-clone but with higher fidelity characters and an overall larger “scale” to the game. [1]
This was years ago and all I have are the sprites I drew up and some old design docs, though re-reading them now, they feel too specific.
H.O.T.D. stood for Highschool of The Dead [2], the game’s setting was a highschool in a zombie post-apocalypse. There’d be raiders, hunger, thirst, exhaustion and rejection.
The player’s “pawns” would:
- Gather weapons, food, water, building supplies
- Produce chemical distilleries, make farms, make water filters, grow trees
- Construct weapons, cook meals, make medicine, filter water, build defenses, construct beds
- Use weapons, eat food, apply medicine, drink water, defend themselves, sleep
The end-game goal was to create enough resource gatherers and crafters to build an armoured bus and escape to some place nice.
Here’s the first bit of art I put together for the sprites, a “practice” piece I’d base the actual assets off of. [3]
I got to work in Unreal Engine making a pannable 2D world, a clock, a calendar, and for whatever reason, button-clicking sounds. I’m not sure why this was so high on my priority list.
Then, I got to work on the “fun” part: making sprites.
I drew up a basic torso and a rifle, one head-shape, hair-type and helmet, then made a bunch of eyes, mouths, glasses and a couple face-addons like freckles, a single tattoo and a scar.
Emboldened, I made folders and folders of sprites:
- Beards
- Body-shapes
- Body-bot (clothes that’d sit at the lowest z-order above the body-shape)
- Body-mid
- Body-top
- Bruises
- Burns
- Decals (cuts and bullet-wounds)
- Equipment (weapons)
- Eyes
- Glasses
- Hair
- Hats & Helmets
- Head-shapes
- Marks
- Masks
- Moustaches
- Mouths
- Particles (just a set of images for a single muzzle-flash animation)
- Pupils
- Scars
- Tattoos
- Torso-shapes
With all those made, I made some more mock-up characters before moving back to Unreal to build a character-class to actually hold all these together.
Realising I’d have to make variants of every piece of clothing for each body-type I made, then getting stuck on this idea of how to hide hair properly under hats & helmets, drained most of my teenage-interest in the project. I moved on to a 3D FPS based on Unreal Tournament and Guitar Hero.
Still though, lots of sprites were made, and I never did get to show them off anywhere, so here! A bunch of the sprites I drew up, free for anyone and everyone to use for anything and everything, while stocks last.
I’m not uploading all the sprites, since a lot of them are just blobs or really simple shapes, and server-space is limited.
Ultimately, I think it’d be fun to revisit the idea of a colony-sim game but with an emphasis on encouraging player-content creation and freedom of narrative.
The todo-list grows…
Notes
- Back then I thought every game could be improved with higher-fidelity assets, though now I think there’s a bell-curve of fidelity that’s just not great. Games with such low-fidelity that you can’t even see what you’re doing, like Dwarf Fortress and to an extent Rimworld are great at letting the player imagine what’s going on, while games on the other end of that curve are so visually stunning that most of the time imagination can’t keep up. Then there’s the middle of the fidelity curve, where a lot of games (including HOTD) would sit. These games are visually detailed enough to prevent you from imagining the visuals yourself, but not detailed enough that it’s impressive. Not only that, but now you spend a lot more time and need a lot more skill to develop art-assets that won’t impress anyone.
- I named the project HOTD in the hopes I’d find a better name with the same abbreviation by the time it was done, one not stolen from an anime.
- I’m not sure where he got the brodie helmet, since this game definitely wasn’t set in England.