Revival of public domain superheroes: why and how

There is a method to the madness. Though it it a fairly common thing to revive golden age characters in the comics, the potential for doing so on other mediums is mostly ignored. I once jokingly prodded Asylum films to try it, but I am amazed they haven't.

My approach to this idea is to always try to put my own take on this characters. Make them so that my version of them will stand out.

In order to get a feel for where each character would be coming from I've developed short, rough origin comics. Eventually I will post them, one by one.

A second, self mandated law is that, in this universe most of the heroes whose stories took place in WW2 will be modernized. I think WW2 is kind of played out, and if I can avoid it I will.

Also, I'm trying to make every Captain an actual Captain,  every Dr an actual Doctor and every Black actually Black. However...whenever I can think of something better than that, this rule is overridden.

Seeing as many old comics had vastly varying origins for the powers of characters That sometimes don't make that much sense after a science class or two, I have arrived at two distinct origin generation devices. One is a mistery mineral that in the vein of certain old cartoons, will generate context sensitive changes to human physiognomy.  I was always fascinated by that certain mutagenic compound that, whatever being it touched, the result was always new characters. The other is a genetic predisposition to superpowers that comes when certain chemicals or radiations are presented. So if the guy gets magnetic powers because he touched some high voltage wires? Genetic. Guy is turned into a water avatar because he mixed water and sulphuric acid? It totally was laced with unobtanium. That is not to discard alien, magical and tech origins. Just to streamline everything else.

I'm choosing for a more cohesive world. While heavy inspiration comes from the overrote and loaded histories of the big 2, my game can't itself be overwrote and loaded. I AM trying to get people interested, and I can't assume people want a bunch of background before they've even gotten the premise.

So i leave you with some images. Can you recognize the characters?

If no...then it's working!

 

Developer Diary 10/11/12 A discussion on design, immersion and potential, featuring two old games

As I plan, mostly in my mind, the arduous task of making a game, 2 very different  examples of gameplay, come to mind: Death and Return of Superman and X-Men 2: Clone Wars.

On the outset, besides starring famous comic book superheroes they are plenty different. DAROS is a story focused beatem up up in the vein of Final Fight meant to coincide with the "influential" Death of Superman Saga. X2CW is a plataformer and a sequel to another Xmen plataformer.

But I am not looking at genre differences: I'm looking at exploitation of potential gameplay.

You see both games where given a franchises with several characters to use. DAROS, perhaps uniquely for it's time, sold a long story where player choice was  determined by stage. X2CW had the full range of the X-Men franchise.

X-Men plays the difference of it's characters up to the maximum. Psylocke  has a melee one hit kill and a wallcling, whereas Cyclops is  has an advantage using the kill beams that his eyes generate. The difference is more than merely functional in game, though.  Each character manages to immerse you further into their shoes by playing up their powers, and it still blends organically to the rest of the gameplay. If it sounds like par for the X-Men course, remember, that using a single character template is easy, and can and has been done to the franchise. Aditionally, designing a stage and a game and an enemy type around a type of gameplay is easier than designing a game around a single type of playstyle.

This is never more uncommon than in the Beat Em up Genre, which is why DAROS is at a disadvantage.  Even so, despite every character neatly fitting a singular gameplay type(And all having either Super or Man in the name), diferences in focus where possible, yet ignored. One of them could be a rushier character, and another could be more projectile focused. The only notable difference is range, which is unavoidably  larger in the hammer wielding (and personal favorite in the whole saga/game)Steel. But Daros chooses a more story focused aproach,  following different characters going across the story. True to the source material, the game has a handfull of boss fights against Doomsday as Superman before letting you play as the  traitorous Cyborg, Overly cool Superboy, Armored everyman Steel and Kryptonian kill bot Erradicator before letting the resiscitated, black clad Superman close the story. But it's a cosmetic difference, which is fine enought, but fails to immerse in the gameplay.

X-Men 2, however, brings a simpler story of "stop the badguys", but the gameplay execution really brings it home. Not only does it let you choose your characters, but even  adds a character as the story progresses. The game's story, though, sort of puts you in the shoes of Xavier, as all ingame story comes from   Cerebro text messages. Characters do not really participate directly in the plot until the very end, where Cyclops is pissy that Magneto wanted to kill them all for the greater good, despite this pretty much being Magnetus modus operandi all the time. You assume Gambit sat there silently.

However, the true key to Xmen Clone Wars is the multiplayer. By combining the varied  character types I mentioned earlier, it provides with plenty of chance to relive the experience in a fresher way. It is too bad the enemies are mostly 1 hit kills. DAROS has more of the satisfying oomph of landing multiple hits in the faces of opponents, where X2CW's melee combat is simplistic and it's enemies are simplistic as well, but ignores any possible multiplayer options. Now for it's genre, that's a miss.

If only it where more like X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse. Despite the unnececessary dragonpunch motions for the moves, XMA had a more robust combat and plenty of hardy enemies to try it on as well. Although it was sadly lacking in multiplayer.

These are the design matters which one must consider when making an oldschool superhero game. As I am. I have spent many hours peering into old Youtube Bossruns and Playthroughts, trying to find the right tone for the game I am making. Of course, being that my game will feature often highly changed versions of characters, perhaps I have an advantage than the characters can have whatever powers I want. I could try to fit them all in a mold, DAROS style...but I won't.

The Start of a journey

I would like to think of this first post as an introduction. After all, many of you do not follow me, and  you have no reason to. I am Gabriel Ramirez, A.K.A. Batzarro, blogger and artist of no large reknown. I have a concept and hope to eventually launch a Kickstarter campaign to see it through. But I thought if instead of going straight to the "gimmee"part of it, I would  like to tell you of how the idea was born.

Like many of you, I have grown to enjoy videogames and superheros. I grew up in a world that didn't have inmmediate access to scathing reviews of products, so in the process of choosing which games I would buy or rent, I developed something I call "The Batman seal of aproval". If Batman's face is on the cover, surely the game would be enjoyable.

While this policy got me in trouble with myself quite often, I did learn to have a taste for the licensed superhero tie in. Why, me and my brother and my cousin would sit with a stack of Pepsi Cards and shoot off into the wind about how we'd one that make a game that includes every single one of these characters. Even Quasar. Especially Quasar, whoever he was.

Years ago, though, thanks to the PDSH wiki, I discovered that there are many superheroes that have fallen into the public domain. And from the FAQ, it shot me in the face with this:

Any.Way. I. Want. Superheroes that I can  rewrite over! And yet no one in this modern world that has Avengers, Spider-Man,  Batman and Ghost Rider on the same year on the big screen, has considered to use them other than comics? We're making movies based on board games? WHY THE HELL NOT?

Since then I've had this itch to try and get some of these characters into something a little more modern. That's when I had the idea for Alpha Danger Squad.

ADS would be  a homage to the licenced plataformer, only instead of  being  licensed, it would exploit these copyright free charaters.  I don't want to give too much away without having anything to show for it, but I plan to ad at least four player local, team dynamics, and many many secrets.

As for the characters themselves, I plan to revamp them to reflect modern sensibilities, and to allow less redundance in them. They will be heavy changes. So far, I can announce 4 characters, which have been part of the plan all along. They would be Captain Courageous, The Heap, Woman in Red and Spider Queen. I plan to make each of their gameplay styles as different as possible, and ad a lot more characters down the line.

How many? Well, that will depend on you. I could knockout the game myself on a bootleg copy of Yoyo gamemaker with no regards to quality or time. But I think this deserves something more. I will outline my plan further as we go along, and if we have some support...we're going to get the game with some nice sprites from the best hobbyists the internet can offer. For now, I want to see some support. Do you guys want a game starring Public Domain Superheroes? Which ones do you want to see?  Chime on!

The Age of Heroes begins...

...And soon it begins. I have one more grand plan in me. And It's gonna take all of us to do it.