I’ve been hard at work on my game whenever I have any kind of free time between classes and homework, and I realize now that I may have been a little too ambitious thinking I’d have enough of it done by now to have a complete test level. My professor pointed this out to me, and I realize that there’s a lot of things I feel I should prioritize and finalize first before moving onto the programming aspect, such as story and designs.
And speaking of story, I decided to re-work the story into something different from a generic ‘collect the magical macguffins’ story. Instead, I decided to go back to an older concept I had for the game, where the story revolved around the Yangs as a family of geniuses and their rivals who want to see them fall. As of now, the story is that the Yang family are a family of brilliant rats and are the wealthiest and most powerful family in their fictional world. Curtis Yang, the patriarch of the family runs Yang Works, a technological giant, and lives with his family on their own personal island-theme park where visitors from all over can experience the wonders and genius of the Yang family through the many high tech attractions available. One day, however, the Yang Works Theme Park is attacked by an enigmatic group of villains calling themselves ‘The League of Shadowed Intelligence’, comprised of geniuses who all hold a grudge against the different members of the Yang family. Now it’s up to Calvin, the eldest son, to take down the evil prodigies and save the park and all of its guests with the help of his family and their various talents.
So……why rats? Well, no deep, overarching reason to be honest – Mainly as an ode to many movies and cartoons I enjoyed as a child, many of which starred cartoon mice going on adventures such as ‘Tom & Jerry’, ‘Speedy Gonzales’, ‘The Secret of NIHM’ and the movie of my childhood, ‘An American Tail’ – or ‘Fievel’ as I called it back then. The movie was about a young mouse whose family emigrates from Russia to America, but unfortunately gets separated from his family along the way. He spends the rest of the movie searching for his family while experiencing many hardships and adventures along the way. I don’t know why I loved this movie so much as a kid, but I watched it countless times to the point where I can remember the lyrics to some of the songs to this day. Looking back at it now, that movie dealt with surprisingly heavy issues I never noticed as a kid, such as child labor, the stresses of living in a foreign country and the persecution of Jews. Now that I’m older and can understand these issues, I appreciate the film a lot more than I did before – especially the part about living in a foreign country, something I’m still adjusting to as a foreign student in college.
Also, I just noticed that Fievel’s red & blue colour scheme somewhat matches Calvin’s colour palette:
A bit of a coinkey-dink, huh? Then again, red& blue’s a pretty common colour palette as well, but I like to think that some part of my brain remembered Fievel’s look and was like: “Hey! You should use the same colours as that Fievel character!”
firestyle12 