Description
Xoul is a 2D Metroidvania game. The player need to explore this world with complexed landscape, kill enemies, discover his true identity and undercover his past in a mystery world
Xoul aim to create a stylized 2D Metroidvania game with dynamics and engaging combat system with highly fluid control. The game focus on visually striking boss fight, distinct environment and fluently game control. Through encouraging the player to defeat varies of strong enemies with different combo, giving the player a sense of achievement.
Early Concept
In the early concept, we want to create a distinct Metroidvania game. We implemented two method to do so.
The first method is the aesthetic method, for the whole scene, character design, environmental design, even character attack animation, we choose the hand drawing style, although it created more pressure to the artist, but we feel this is one way we could make the whole become distinct from the other Metroidvania game, and create a unique feature.
The second method is to make the combat design more likely to be action game. We have mainly two attack method, the character ability such as magic, and the character normal attack like slash. The highlight of this combat design is that there's combo that can be play through the combination of these attack method. By adding a more variety way of attacking and encouraging the player to use combo, the game have a more complexity for the combat design.
The Attack Effect concept
The early concept of the game aim to achieve stylization, the right side image show the concept of the attack effect, beside these attack effect, we also created a amplify effect
The idea and aesthetic style behind this concept was that, we tried to present two conflict properties in these attack effect, the sense of crystal, hard and metalic, and also the sense of water, floating and moving.
After generated the concept, I started working on the effect, by using PS, unity shader and blender, I created the follwing attack effect.
Implementation
