Joey Caco was an attempt to build a "console inside game" thingamabob game mockup. The overall idea was to bring this feeling of old 8-bit flash games. Games like Spelunky Classic, Acid Factory, Hacker VS Hacker and so forth. The challenge was to create compact, charming graphics on an also compact pallete while presenting with a concept of a console that would look adorable and a good balance between retro and modern. So I needed to represent the impossible to see LCD that displayed the name of the cartdrige, the washed out yellow on the frame, along with some small scratches. But also wanted to show four buttons for actions, along with a left and right trigger, present in most contemporary handhelds All that was left was to come up with a charming name, so it was born the Joltan Handheld Game Console, or to simplify, the JOLHANGAC. I don't have a clue on how to spell that.
The mini-story inside this mockup is that Joey Caco, our pizza delivery boy, went to deliver some garlic pizzas to a party and went to the wrong adress, which was actually a vampire tomb having a party and waited for their vampire delivery boy deliver some fresh meat! Luckily, he was well equipped with a stack of zas to throw at some starving vampires.
My initial task was to choose a recognizable shape and color for the main character, and develop the whole concept around it. I'm very attached to the PICO-8 palette and wanted something that resembled it when it comes to saturation and brightness, so I started with a very bright yellow, a solid black, a brown for shades and another very contrasting color to the define the character.
With the concept above, I went with the somewhat generic red cap and red sleveless puff jacket over a white shirt and denim jeans, to represent this american 80s suburban delivery guy.
And then animated the whole thing. There's 4 walking and idle directions to this guy. A ranged and a close attack animation. A hit received and a death animation, just in case, in any day, that I end developing this into a small game.
In the end, the trickiest part was to nail down the style of the handheld console. I wanted to give it some depth, like you were looking down on it and to insinuate that there was a screen beneath the frame. But I did not want to make something that would resemble a Gameboy or a PSP, but to either have it's own unique identity. So I tought of these small extra LCDs that displayed things like the battery and also the name of the game on a small screen. So, here's a small timelapse:
