For the Game Academy Project, our team “TeaCoffee Overdose” chose to do a Bomber man-copycat with a theme of 20’s rubber hose-animation, and so was born the working title RubberMan. The idea was to play as a robber, blow up banks and police, and eventually get into the getaway car with the money when all the banks at the map were blown up. The name switched eventually to Robberman.
The team was thinking of making the game for local multiplayer with only one keyboard (oldschool style), but when we dropped the idea at the first steps, we started to make the game as a classic bomber-man game.
Early concept art
We were thinking assets like hidden exits, abilities, power ups and flying SWAT-force coming from the sky with old helicopters, shooting grannies running at the map etc, and the robber we had an idea for using the money he gets from the banks to use it against cops by throwing money bags on them. After all, the game took the shape that it has now.
Our programmers played around different techniques to make the levels easier etc random level generator, but due the time limits we decided to handmade them from the start. We used a tiling map to make the levels look neat and consistent.
Art style was decided from the very start and stayed consistent. Some of the characters changed their appearance but overall our style stayed the same from start to end. We wanted to focus on good looking animations and keep the feeling on hand animated look.
We chose our main color scheme to be black and white to respect the original art style, but with some effect colors on the money.
