I’ve been developing this game solo for the past year as a passion project while finishing grad school, and the Steam page just went live today! It’s a physics-based party brawler where you control your sword 1:1 with your mouse/right joystick and you can use every dismembered bone as a weapon.
Steam Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5073210/BoneHeads/
If anyone's interested, this was my development approach!
I have 0 previous development experience, so I designed the game from the beginning with the approach of asking myself how I could work WITH the limitations of AI tools, rather than against them. That philosophy is what ended up informing so many aspects of the game. I wanted to build a combat game, but good combat needs good animation, and AI was not capable of that. I reflected on what a combat system without any animation could look like, and remembered this old flash game called Madness Interactive. In that game your hand and weapon floated Rayman-style, and they followed your mouse movement. I knew I could do something like that. I love sword fighting games, so I decided to lean into that. In Madness Interactive, there wasn't any real animation either - the characters' sprites just tilted.
My first prototype was with 2 cartoon knight characters with floating limbs. The characters moved with the foot sprites just shifting back and forth. I wondered that if I could get some level of animation from just moving sprites through code, maybe I could take it a step further. I learned about procedural animation, and that was a game-changer. I wanted to make a more realistic knight, so I generated an image of one and used Canva to cut up the character's body into separate PNG's. I made a body-ik puppet-style system with separate head, torso, upper and lower arm, leg, and foot sprites. However, the realistic knights just constantly looked disjointed, because there was no way to ever not have gaps.
Again, I needed to ask myself how I could stop trying to fight this limitation, and work with it. I realized that a knight character would never look good through this method, so I asked myself what type of character would look natural having some gaps in each limb. And that's when I landed on skeletons. Cartoonish skeletons having gaps between their limbs is a staple in media, so I figured it was perfect. Once I replaced the knights with these skeletons it looked so much more natural. I decided to make the body-ik more complex, splitting the legs into upper and lower leg sprites, and a separate pelvis and spine sprite. These changes allowed for me to really fine tune the procedural animation and get it looking better.
A design rule I had for the animation was that I never wanted there to be a single instance where sprites snapped/teleported at any point (i.e. in a lot of games return-to-baseline animations have some level of quickly snapping the character into place). I wanted every single movement to be continuous. The procedural animation system allowed for this (though it took months of work to get each animation perfectly smooth). One of my proudest mechanics is the step-based locomotion. Your character steps continuously with your movement input. If you let go of the input mid step, the foot naturally drops straight down. This allows for really dynamic postures. You can even pivot on one foot if you keep moving your input back and forth before the foot lands.
Dismemberment came as a natural extension of the skeleton characters - it wasn't an idea I had initially. And then using dismembered limbs as weapons followed soon after. Many of my ideas just ended up scaffolding on top of each other, all from that base of working with the limitations of AI.
Initially, when my partner play-tested the game, she would just wildly flail the sword with small movements and get a ton of hits. I wanted the game to feel skill-based and precise, so I had to figure out a way to take away the ability to just spam attacks. A stamina system didn't feel good. So I ended up making the sword a fully physics based object with inertia and acceleration, and based damage on the velocity of the sword. With the added acceleration, you couldn't flail the sword with short swings, because it now needed long arcs to get enough speed to actually do real damage. That took a lot of iteration to get it feeling weighty without feeling sluggish.
It took months to figure out a way to get horizontal sword movements to look good in 2d. For the longest time I actually had an inner deadzone the sword couldn't pass through, so you couldn't even do horizontal attacks. I eventually discovered the 2D animation technique of "foreshortening," where you make the object appear shorter and shorter until it crosses a midline, and then increases it's length again. That makes it look like the arms and sword are swinging outward across the body/toward the screen in 3D.
The collision system was one of the most difficult pieces and took months to get feeling good, especially the sword dragging across an enemy. Dynamic hit reactions using the procedural body-IK really helped add satisfying impact to hits.
Tl;Dr: Instead of deciding on a specific game idea and then trying to figure out how to make that with AI, I designed something based on the limitations of AI that it could produce competently.
