In this character preview we’ll talk about our very first character: Joe “Eagle” McGuire. In the following months we’ll go very in-depth with all characters spreading out everything there is to know in several articles.

This week, we’ll talk about Joe’s story and general character design.

Sometimes, when creating a character, the simples idea is the best one. This is pretty much how everything about “Eagle” McGuire came to be.

Before thinking up any of the characters in ACES OF WWX, I spent an entire afternoon on Wikipedia… Something that happens a bit too often these days! My main intention was to figure out who were the greatest pilots of World War II. After all, AWWX is at it’s barebones a satirical parody of those events and it would only make sense to draw some similarity lines between the characters as well as the locations and happenings.

Right off the bat my intention was to have 2 American characters and 1 British, with at least one of the 3 mirroring a person that really existed and fought as a pilot in the war. This character turned out to be the very first one.

Through this research I found that there was an extreme disproportion between Allied pilots and Axis pilots. First of all, successful German pilots went back to fighting, right away. They were sent off on missions until death in almost every case. Allied/American pilots, on the other hand, were often re-routed or sent home after distinguishing themselves, making it basically impossible for them to compete with the number of kills the Axis aces were accomplishing.

Because of this and many other factors, you have to scroll down a list of 40 something German and Japanese pilots before running into a single American ace. One of them, though, is Thomas McGuire. Sound familiar?

Thomas was, to say the least, an extraordinary pilot. Throughout his career he obtained a total of 38 kills on duty, an extremely high number for most pilots.

He loved flying so much that he spent his entire life, even after WW2, trying to topple his compatriot’s kill record, the USA Ace of Aces Richard Bong, who still holds the record of 40 kills.

Unfortunately for Thomas, he was never able to beat the record, as he died after a crash during a battle above the Philippines. He had ordered his fellow pilots to reserve their tanks rather than take out the unit that was attacking him, which ultimately decided his fate.

The same won’t happen to our friend Joe, who shares the same surname for obvious reasons. The sense of honor and duty that Thomas McGuire encompassed was exactly what I was looking for. And Eagle is the result.

If you’ve ever played a video game with a strong focus on story or character development, you’ve probably noticed that one of the best ways to go about telling the story or describing the character is human contact.

This is only natural. It’s done in basically every form of media imaginable. Through a contact that is not physical, but emotional, the author/designer/director creates an attachment between the end user and the character. By living through a character’s life, experiencing their stories and listening to what they have to say, you create a bond.

The trouble with doing this in a game like ACES OF WWX is noticeable the instant you start playing the game. Throughout the game, you’re not controlling a character, you’re controlling an airplane!

Sure, you could say the Aces are pilots of said planes and thus, by logic, you ARE controlling the characters themselves and not some inanimate object, but this is not relevant to the task at hand.

This all sounds like incoherent rambling (it probably is) but when you put it in this perspective, it’s incredibly difficult to create some sort of attachment between you, the player and a character you barely ever get to see.

This is why it’s very important to create a different form of character individuality, one that you actually CARE about! And the way to do this, of course, is to give the characters very different play styles!

I’ll be talking more about this Friday, with a very detailed post about our main character: Joe “Eagle” McGuire! You can expect a detailed character preview every Friday after that.

Next week, we’ll start talking about the enemies you’ll be taking out, aka the Nasties! Also, a quick reminder that we’ll soon start working on a quick interview with our fantastic artist, Morgan Eagleton! So please let me know if you have any questions for him… Don’t worry, he won’t bite (Or will he?)!

Sorry for the wait everybody! This post has been a long time coming, but I’ve got several more in the pipeline for you so expect a nice and steady flow of new info!

What I would like to do with these write-ups is not only give you some insight on how the game is being developed and what the basic concepts behind it are, but also simply discuss with you about exactly how much it takes to create a videogame, even something as simple as an arcade shooter. From designing the enemies to composing the music, I’ll be slowly but steadily guiding you through the entire thought and work process that will bring you our very first game. The first of many, let’s hope! : )

Today I’d like to talk to you about character development. This is a long topic to discuss and will most likely be divided up to several posts.

From the moment I started writing down concepts for ACES OF WORLD WAR X, one of my top priorities was to have likeable and interesting characters as the main protagonists. This is a lot harder than it sounds for several reasons.

First of all, AWWX is strictly being designed as a classic arcade game. These type of games hardly ever delve deep into character development or story elements, mainly because developers also had to keep in mind that more gameplay and less talk meant more coins being dumped into the machine.

You won’t need any quarters to play AWWX, but it was fundamental for me and the team in general to keep that arcade feel, which mostly meant that we had to sacrifice some options in the process.

With this in mind, I came up with 3 very basic concepts for our characters, these were then sent to and discussed with our extremely talented artist, Morgan.

In the most vague terms possible, we were looking for:

• An American war hero. The classical archetype of the goodhearted, brave and talented (if not a bit cocky) pilot, whose patriotism and skill rises above the rest.
• An English gentleman, in his later years, talented and experienced, bold and courageous but also confident in not only his skills but of his righteous cause as well.
• A comedic relief character who is not a joke by any means, but is somewhat nonchalant in his fight, despite being constantly put in a dangerous situation.

These guidelines are fairly simple, all things considered. However, as explained earlier, this is an arcade style game, which means we are allowed at the most several occasions to inform the player how these characters act, what kind of people they are and why they are that way.

These moments include:

• Opening cut-scenes for each character (at most 10-15 seconds each)
• Short monologues before each mission (at most 1 or 2 lines of text)
• Short monologues before a boss battle (at most 1 or 2 lines of text)
• Ending cut-scene.

When you put it that way, conveying all those points I posted above isn’t exactly a simple feat. So how do we show you, the player, that Allistar Baker III is a refined gentleman pilot that serves England and fights for the Queen?

The answer lies in the way the characters look.

If the character is designed and portrayed properly, the player can tell what kind of person he is at a glance! While it is impossible to convey details such as nationality or skill in flying, one can make many assumptions about a character just by looking at him.

We’ll be talking about all 3 characters some more at the beginning of next week. I’m also looking to arrange a nice little interview with our artist, Morgan Eagleton (I know, I also wish my last name was as awesome as his). If you have any questions about the game’s art direction, or just art in general, feel free to fire away in the comments and I will make sure I put those in the interviews as well.

Until next time, Fight the Good Fight!

Starting this week though, I’ll be back in full force because I want to start talking about the brand new game I’m working on! It’s the first release by Atomic Sloth Games and we’re all very proud of how it’s looking so far!

We’re currently aiming for a Summer 2011 release which means I can finally start telling you what this game is all about!

ACES OF WORLD WAR X is a top-down, arcade style WW2 parody bullet-hell… Or in other words, a schmup with a sense of humor!

If you’re a son of the 80s and 90s you might still remember a time when arcades in the western hemisphere were still a very popular and fun place to be. Back then one of the most popular genres was the top down (or sometimes horizontal) shooter, also known as schmup.

You might remember the most popular of them, games like 1942, Gradius, R-Type or even the more recent entries like DoDonPachi and Radiant Silvergun.

As of late the schmup (or “bullet hell” in the case of the more hard core titles) has become quite niche and you don’t really see much of them anymore unless you are an enthusiast of the genre already.

When I started Atomic Sloth my goal was to create games that gave you the arcade experience that is so hard to find nowadays. To somehow take you back to a time when games where all about fun and getting as far as you could with that one quarter, that’s exactly the philosophy behind ACES OF WWX.

Everything in AWWX was designed to give you the classic arcade schmup experience, from the grueling difficulty (don’t worry, we’ve got an easy mode for all you casuals, if you don’t mind your friends making fun of you) to the musical style, sprite based graphics and massive bosses! All with a modern twist thanks to the stunning artwork by Morgan Eagleton.

Next week, I’m going to start talking to you about our dev team! Who’s in it, what do they do and most importantly what’s our favorite kind of pizza!

Oh, we’ll also talk about a beta of the game we’re gonna release sometime… And screenshots!

I can finally, finally get this off my chest and announce to every AKS fan out there that my newly founded game studio: Atomic Sloth is finally live and ready to make some awesome games! You can find us at our new website where all the cool announcements will happen. I’ve been working on this for months now (hence how quiet the blog has been) but it’s all up and running at last!

We’re working on several cool projects I can’t wait to show you, first of which is ACES OF WORLD WAR X, an exciting top-down arcade style shooter! We already have some concept artwork to show off on the website so please feel free to check it out! I’ll also be presenting myself and the rest of the team on the site as time goes by. We’re working on releasing a closed beta version for the game sometime in April and I will be personally sending out invites to all the awesome fans that stuck around AKS and the blog for so long.

We’re also going to be taking an open development approach for all of our work, which means that almost everything about the projects will be published and previewed for you as the games are developed! This will happen both on the Atomic Sloth blog (with music, artwork and the likes) while the more technical stuff will be discussed here on my own dev-blog. Hopefully this can also help the large amount of people that have been requesting help/suggestions/tips on developing games!

Again, thank you guys so much for being so patient about the whole process. Also, in regards to AKS2 development, it’s currently not making much progress. For that I really apologize as this new project has taken up so much time and will power it’s becoming very hard for me to continue.

That being said: it is definitely not the last you’ve seen of A Knight’s Story… And that’s all I’m going to say about that!

I know the blog has been a bit dead since the re-design but I can assure you a lot is going on behind the scenes!

2011 is going to be a very important year for me and I hope it will be just as great and happy for all of you! I simply can’t wait to show you everything that’s in store for you next year!

Thank you all once again for the immense amount of love and support… I’d be nowhere without all of you!

Now the blog is back up, as colorful as ever! It’s not much like the old DevBlog at all, and because of this I want to explain a couple of things!

This isn’t quite a Development Blog anymore… That functionality will be moved to a different website altogether, which should be launching in the first week of December. The same will happen to any info concerning “A Knight’s Story”. I also removed the forum that was originally here, since that will also be moved over. I don’t like announcing anything ahead of it’s time, as it’s lead me to problems in the past, but in order to explain this in the first place I needed to make the announcement I’ve been holding back for quite a while. One of my lifelong dreams is finally starting to come true: I’ve finally started my very own development team! The details on that will be announced soon, I don’t want to clog up this blog post as it’s a pretty obnoxious wall of text already. Just rest assured I’m extremely excited to let everyone know about this!

Development of “A Knight’s Story 2″ has not ceased at all. In the move, however, my most recent backup of the game’s code was completely trashed. If you recall, the latest version update was CU4. Unfortuantely I had to completely re-write that version of the game before I could move on to the much promised and much delayed CU5. All I can say is, it’s coming. I’m not leaving the game and most importantly I’m not leaving the fans! You’ll finally be able to spend that enormous amount of Gold you’ve saved up…

With all that out of the way, I really want to thank everyone who’s supported me, contacted me or even asked me “What the hell Colino where are you?”. Well, I’m right here. And I’m not going anywhere for at least a while…

:D