About the Project » Good luck!

I just finished playing the original Toonstruck and saw your website on the game's Wiki page. So I thought I'd drop in and wish you all luck with TS2. It seems like you're all still in the early development phases, but hopefully this will work out for you. Game development is a long and arduous process, but it'll be end up being good experience at the very least.

I've been working in gaming for the last several years, and looking around the site, I thought I might offer a couple helpful suggestions to help streamline your process since you still seem to be all over the place.

1. I can see in your Planning forum that you're collecting ideas from the whole team. This may seem like a good idea at first, but you really need to keep your writers to a bare minimum. Have one or two people sit down and scope out the entire project first. You need a rough draft of the script (including dialogue and puzzles) before you go around advertising your game or making big decisions. Incidentally, you might want to make the production forums closed off from the public.

2. Try to keep it simple whenever you can. Fewer characters, fewer locations, fewer puzzles, and even use simpler programs like Flash and AGS to design it if you can. I know it sounds anti-productive, but for a fan-game, it will save you years of work. As a reference, here's all the people it took to make the original Toonstruck which took over 3 years with over 30 professional animators working full-time on it. Even the KQ9 fan-game, which once had a staff of over 40 people, is still in production after 7 years, so keep that in mind when putting together the design document. The scope of your game should match how many people you expect will commit full-time to it. You may want to look up the good folks at AGDI and ask how they manage their fan-games.

Otherwise, the game seems very doable and I wish you all the best of luck with it! Take care!

welcome to the forums and thank you.
but about using flash,actually we won't use flash cus flash = cheap graphics + the game wont look like toonstruck at all.

why don't you join our team?

You wouldn't want me on your team. I'd complain a lot, eat all the donuts, and then disappear for months at a time to deal with work and family. I just thought I'd pass along some advice, hoping you don't end up in the same Development Hell that so many other fan-games end up in.

And don't rule out Flash just yet - it's a very flexible tool when it comes to animating. Any cheap examples you've seen were probably made by cheap animators. It can produce Toonstruck-quality animation providing you have a Toonstruck-quality animator. It's worth a look.

This is great advice, particularly on the storyline front. For the moment though, it would be good to keep everything open until we have gathered enough members and have a clear idea of what role each person should play. unterbuchse echoes what I think exactly.

ToonBuff, I understand that you may have other commitments, but It would help us greatly if you can be a person who "points us in the right direction" occasionally, seeing as you have experience in the gaming industry. Your advice is very insightful