Don’t Sleep: Capcom on SNK
Lately, I'm been doing a lot background technical research for my pending game project. Right now, I've been focusing on art direction. This is a big issue because I can't draw for crap as of right now and I really need to figure out which way I'm going because learning two styles isn't an option consider the time contraints. It of course, led me to think of beautiful 2D games and Street Fighter (with their upcoming Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix).
I was thinking to myself earlier, although a lot of people have spoken on the topic about Street Fighter IV not being 2D but artistically shaded 3D, I'm going to cut Capcom slack -- doing high-definition 2D graphics with 60 FPS is something only a production studio like Disney can think of doing.
Just as I think something so ridiculous: SNK has to prove me wrong.
What the hell SNK? Why did you decide to just spank the mess out of Capcom. This has completely stolen all the thunder I had behind Street Fighter's art direction. If you watch the HD trailer, those visuals are disgustingly sick. And between the original 3D renders and high definition sprites, there should be no problems with collision detection. If they wanted the 2D graphics could just be an overlay for the 3D meshes so that attack range and collision ends up being near-perfect.
This is exactly how I would love to do a fighting game (or any 2D game) today. I thought of modelling and then spitting out 2D renders but I didn't consider re-drawing over-top the 2D renders.
The downside of this technique is that although it cuts down significantly on the man-power necessary to do HD 2D, it's still a lot of work. Artists are only getting through 1.5 frames of animation a day. I don't have that kind of time. I need to kill an entire object of animation within a few days.
I still have a lot of time before I scheduled development to begin so we'll see what turns up.