The game concept
Robo Rescue is about a robot character who needs to save his friend from the clutches of Evil Robo, the villain. The game is a blend between action and puzzle, where the player sometimes needs to solve simple tricks to finish a level. The action is based on rolling around with your spherical shaped character, requiring skill and timing.
The initial game concept was focussed heavily on the use of Arkanoid like bricks in the levels. However this was abandoned early on so the name was changed to Robo Rescue to hint at the story plot.
The design phase
The conceptual design for the Robo characters was done by our new talent Kirsten.
"It was nice I didn't have to do the concept art and production at the same time. Kirsten came up with very effective designs so I let him take care of it." Chris van der Linden - Creative Director
We spent some time early on thinking of ways we could dress up the characters, yet have them be as simple as possible. Somehow the characters looked better with 'less' about them. They are very striking and people seem to remember them easily.
In the game menu the player can customize his character by selecting Male or Female and a collection of different 'skins'.
Game production
The production of the game was taken care of by an entirely new team so we had to cleverly call our shots and carefully select the things to build. We chose to build a level editor to speed up the level production, which we decided we didn't want to 'generate' as we did for Konstrukt Invasion and Oggo's Odyssey. Maikel, also a new talent, did the programming for both the editor and the game. While learning our development flow we were also pushing the enveloppe in a few places so it was no small feat.
"This game was initially a small prototype I built in a week. It changed a lot but its what got us started" Maikel van Gulik - Game Programmer
A lot of the development effort went into creating a lot of obstacles for all the levels. These include accelleration pads, wind blowers, bouncers, teleporters and ufo's. There are quite a lot of them and they are loads of fun.
More information
More information including a trailer video will be available soon at www.robo-rescue.com. We are looking forward to see this game on Kalydo and hear what you have to say. Can't wait? Feel free to leave a comment here!
