In the game
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Artistic Director Mu Fei breaks down the animation of an on screen game character into different movement blocks. |
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| Violinist to ski at Sochi |
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| Standing up for laughs |
"We went with a sci-fi theme. I preferred sci-fi - I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, martial-arts fantasies and the like," says Mu. They rounded out their team by hiring a programmer and a musician - the latter turned out to be a childhood friend of Mu.
As Crystalides progressed, the little-known duo failed to get media attention for the project despite winning independent developer awards. During this time, Zhou was still working full time in Canada.
When the opportunity for C-Wars came about, Zhou had quit his job in Canada to pursue the game-development dream. Mu also devoted his time to working on C-Wars.
Both young men grew up in Beijing playing video games. Zhou was a PC gamer, recalling such games as Tapper and QBert, whereas Mu was a console gamer whose favorite game as a child was Super Mario Bros.
Their passion and history playing video games led to the art direction for Crystalides, and the selling point to their new game C-Wars. Work on Crystalides had progressed to a point where the game was playable, so Onipunks picked out the best part of the game and expanded on it. They used and extrapolated on a retro pixel-art style, where each image is made up of blocks built upon blocks.
Learning from the problems of Cyrstalides, Zhou turned to a site that was exploding online, KickStarter.com. That popular crowd-sourcing website allows developers, inventors and the like to circumvent traditional forms of fund-raising in favor of asking the masses for money.
