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Donations for a startup? Are you serious? You should be offering equity if you are going to profit from this.
1. It celebrates 'creation' as opposed to performance. The lose-control-of-performance-during-fight is an aspect that puts the performance of the character squarely in the court of its 'designed' attributes, rather than 'performed' action.
2. It is very intuitive and even 'humanist' if one can dare... Imperfections in character created by user translate into performance (or lack), and tend to become logical extensions of its behavior. Thus, this product becomes a celebration of this very imperfection - in the same manner that flaws in human nature are what make us human.
3. This product celebrates the hand. And how. It seems to capture the nuances of hand-drawn art, and I hope it eventually discerns medium - the quality of paper, the weight of the finger, and the stroke of the pen. If one can dare to think of the ideological similarities between the arts of calligraphy and sword-play - and if this product can begin to map those aspects, these will be very interesting times to live in.
The negatives [or fears, actually - being the incorrigible cynic one is]:
1. I am curious about the level of human intervention from the product-developer end once a user submits a character. I can imagine figuring weapon-attributes, body-limitations, some vectorization and animation 'rules'. If Cornelius can do all this himself - over time, if not immediately - it would be great.
2. The nature of 'conflict' - from the demos I see so far - each character's primary objective is attack-and-kill. If human-centric intelligence becomes a gradual attribute of the character - knowing its strengths and limitations, knowing the same for its opponents, being environment and constraint conscious, etc - it would be a great build-up. I am talking experience here, with which a character grows
3. Where do we go from here? I already see this becoming a cult activity. It can go further from there into the leisure/gaming/media end. It can also become a basis for a better tactical combat simulator. This is where the creators would have to answer the question - is this a product that treads the path of creation, art and design - or goes in the direction of solving(?)/mapping(?)human combat and conflict
There is something really cool and compelling here, but I found it deeply disappointing that I wouldn't be controlling my drawings in battle. That makes it less of a game and more of an animated art gallery.
I'm really glad you brought that up, many of people say that when they first hear the idea. However, we assure you by not controlling your drawing, its actually much cooler. Its not really about me vs you, its about my ninja vs your dinosaur. We are bringing these drawings to life. By letting people control the characters it would belittle the intelligence behind the game and be like every other fighting game out the…
It's like when you give your kid an large expensive toy, and you help them unpack it and show them it, and they then spend the day playing spaceships and forts with the big carboard box it came in. You can't dictate fun, and the cool features you managed to script in the background are great and all, but if you get hung up on them and they block people having fun with it then you killed 100% of it because you got fixated on 30% of it.
There was an old game "kind of" like this. It had EVERY character imaginable; like a Waffle, DBZ, Street Fighters, Pirates, Ninjas, EVERYTHING. I'll find the name and post it if anyone is interested. I think it would be more appealing if you let the people control their characters. The problem with this is it will require more CPU work on your part- expensive for a start up. You could have them scan the characters in…
Thanks alot for the input. Is the game your thinking of MUGEN? it was an old school open source fighting game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.G.E.N
There is something really cool and compelling here, but I found it deeply disappointing that I wouldn't be controlling my drawings in battle. That makes it less of a game and more of an animated art gallery.
I'm really glad you brought that up, many of people say that when they first hear the idea. However, we assure you by not controlling your drawing, its actually much cooler. Its not really about me vs you, its about my ninja vs your dinosaur. We are bringing these drawings to life. By letting people control the characters it would belittle the intelligence behind the game and be like every other fighting game out the…
I've worked on a lot of video games (indie and commercial), and this is a perfect example of something that is much cooler to you (the programmer) but not to the player.
You 100% need to have a player-controlled vs mode or the whole thing is a waste of time. You can ALSO have the autoplay strategy/design/creation (what does that even mean?) if you want. And maybe it will emerge as the winner.
But don't take my word for it. Spend two days and make a simple versus mode (two players on one keyboard, for example). Sit down five or ten random people from your target audience in front of each one and ask them which one they like better.
This whole "you can't control the player" is a bad idea, it doesn't drive the usual gamer and you're going to find that maybe it's exciting for people to watch their creature fight the first time but there's no repeat value in that (watching the same moves over and over and over again just isn't exciting).
The perfect blend of your idea and the wishes of the masses is to have your 'Cornelius' algorithm analyze the drawing then return a skill set. So it gives the player 6 movies + 10 combo moves based on their drawings attributes. You get a combination of the "my ninja vs. your ninja" as well as the ability to actually influence the outcome and promote replay value.
This looks really awesome. I mean, I really like this. I can't wait to see how my little guy will develop and behave. EDIT: The $5000 pledge on your Kickstarter page says that you get to design a character that defies the visual rules other players are held to. But I didn't see any visual rules on the site, and the "Send us a sketch" button just opens an email. I'm afraid my character may violate some rules. Just let…
Right now we aren't limiting drawings with rules because we are gathering data for all the different types of drawings that can be thrown at it. On Kickstarter the reward means you get a character that can pretty much do anything you can imagine, because we can program specific moves for it that are not in the move pool.
A graFighter that "defies the rules" would be one with animation, with multiple forms, with unique behaviors - things you can't convey in a sketch.