Episode 28: Project Monkey's fastest character

      When it comes to racing games, one of the first things people want to know is "who's the fastest character?". In my game, speed isn't everything because there will be all sorts of terrain and some will be better suited to swimming, burrowing or flying characters. But in any case, I want to present to you the fastest character in the game, Khuutra!

Khuutra, the half wolf, half fox

       Khuutra has two flame-tipped tails and flames on his feet and mane. He has the beauty and grace of a vixen but the speed and strength of a werewolf. As I've said before, I created all these characters years ago for a big budget adventure game which I hope I would make in future, but for my debut game which is a simple obstacle course racing game, I'm using only a few of their abilities and non of the back-story behind the characters.

A shot of the model for Khuutra in the game

        For his special attacks in the game, I'm using only his thermo blast, which allows him to shoot either fire or ice. Since it's a racing game, he shoots fire at those racers ahead of him, but drops ice bombs behind him to slow those trying to catch up with him. The ice bomb attack will use up all of his energy bar for just one bomb so that the player can't spam those behind him with ice bombs. For his special ability, where Goshawk flies, Electrizard climbs walls and Mmiri swims, Khuutra will SLOW DOWN when you press his special ability button. I figured that since he moves so fast, the player might actually want to slow down at some particular times.
       I'm still trying to decide on a name for the final product as Project Monkey is just a development codename, and you can help out by voting for a name or suggesting your own name here. I've decided to make my Project Monkey posts more frequent and also make each post shorter than the posts I used to make last year. So next weekend, I'll be posting the game's menus and I'll talk about the process of designing them. On a final note, Khuutra's model has been the toughest to create so far (my younger brother makes the models). That's mainly because of the fiery parts of his body, especially his mane. Each individual strand of hair has to animate dynamically and independent of the other strands. This takes time and effort to pull of and we're not done with that aspect yet. I'd love to hear your opinions, so sound off in the comments section below.