Nothing special here yet. To keep it traditional for such a game, it will be about aliens or super computers going nuts or something like this. Like we all know, there's of course some organization to handle the problems. So they'll send some troops, which get lost soon after arrival and now it's up to you to get things right again.
characters:
Just the same stereotypes here: toss in a muscular tough guy with big guns, a neat female heroine and for the sake of good old Alien Storm put a robot in there, too. Keep in mind, that the charakters only differ in looks and weapons they have, but their abilities, like walking speed or health are identical. Even the weapons only differ in effects and some small things, but are of course the same, too, when it comes to basic behavior.
Work on Tough Guy is finished. My first walkcycle looks quite ok for such a low rez mesh. Only some small tidbits to do. Especially the bandana drives me mad. Can't get it animated to look good... Damn. A little bit chibi-style here (big torso and arms, small legs), which can easily be changed if it looks dull. The char and especially the texture is tailored to work in the tilted topdown view. The char is rigged and can be animated. It has 286 faces and uses a 128x128tex (will be reduced to 64 or even 32 square pixels).
I'am still not sure how to build the player characters. They have to be able to walk and shoot in different directions. So they can either use a few different animations for all directions, which will need more memory (for more animation), but look better. Or I can seperate the torso and the legs and animate them independently and they can twist in what ever direction they want, which will mean lesser animations, but surely a bad/robot-like look. Still, both techniques are easy to do.
game modes:
There's a single player mode with about 6 to 8 stages. I'd like to include one or two special stages, too. Imagine a gigantic train running on some energy tracks high above the landscape. The player rides a hover bike or something and has to destroy the entire train (little bit like the huge ship in stage 3 of R-Type). A boss-rush-mode would be nice, too.
If possible, it would be nice to have a two player co-op mode via wifi (I know, this is quite complicated). But this could add very much to the gameplay, because there are much more and new possibilities for challenges and obstacles, if two players need to work together.
There are at least three differen characters to chose from: the heavy duty dude (very much the contra-style guy), a female character and a android/ robot thingy (once again: quite old-school). The characters DO NOT have any differences in their abilities. Maybe they have different weapons or special attacks. But they are all equally fast, have equal health and so on. They have just different looks.