gladiator

links:

deviantart.com
blenderartists.org
pikabu.ru

it all started in may 2018 when twitch has announced a contest of making overlay extensions.
i was a part of team of friends and the idea was to create a game with turn-based gladiators fight with rpg elements like the variety of armor, etc.

my goal was to create pre-rendered sprites with parts of bodies, weapons and armor to put on a skeleton (a complicated way) or just pre-rendered actions of different characters in different poses (the easy way).

i was given a freedom of art and design and at the same moment i realized, that i want to make something in cel shading style, like ‘borderlands’, ’torchlight’, etc.
also i thought that just gladiators is too boring and proposed them to be trashy and colorful looking and found some inspirational images for moodboard:

and started with something like this egyptian-ish mummy-ish necromancer-warrior sketch.

everyone said the idea was dumb and i should focus on more realistic gladiators, but cel shading was approved by everyone, so i’ve started to design a stylized cartoonish cel-shaded gladiator.
here is a sculpt of the head.

this face is not my design, in fact i wanted to practice sculpting of real faces, and found this awesome work of Steve Wang.

this is how the game should have looked like on stream:
(yes, i can’t draw)

the body was made of different ‘make human’ bodies.

long story short, coders made a working concept of overlay game where your gladiator has hp, power of hit and so on, but due to the fact, that it was a fun project, most of the guys (including me) lost enthusiasm and this game was abandoned/frozen.

also tried another version of the face, it turned out even worse, can you believe that?

and a slideshow with some auto saved renders.

i had numerous ideas of how i can revive this project, but never actually work on it.
my thought was to create mobile game with top-down camera, with a small arena where you can drag your weapon trying to hit your enemy in a very clumsy and goofy way, like it feels in Gang Beasts.
while visually it could be something like Superfuse: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1770080/Superfuse/
or like Winions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsPJnlwm_ks

thank you for reading!