(Kickstarter) InDee Toons - Customizable Animated Game Characters

Dear adventure lovers and creators,

My name is Dennis and I am running a Kickstarter for a stock of customizable animated 2D game characters, named InDee Toons.
The idea behind this project is to provide a library of characters, game developers can freely choose from and directly integrate them into their games while being able to concentrate on other aspects of development.

The characters can be dressed like a paper doll.
Creating your own unique animated game characters with InDee Toons doesn't require any artistic skills and is a lot of fun.
The animations certainly cover everything you need for an awesome adventure game (like walking, talking, interaction and more).

One toon contains:

• pre-rendered sprites
  
• the skeleton and animation data in Spine format
  
• the body parts as images that can be exchanged between the toons
  
• a custom head generator (another Spine file), allowing you to create an individual head from a selection of parts
  

More information, videos and pictures can be found on the Kickstarter page:

http://kck.st/O6IWWW

Any feedback and support is highly appreciated.

Nice idea...

They could be used for people new to game design to learn from or for people needing temporary place markers for their games. However I don't think too many developers would want to include stock characters into their commercial/indie games, not unless there was some way of adjusting the appearance of the characters. I think most of us would opt for creating the artwork ourselves, - or hiring an artist - to create the artwork as we envision it. Just my opinion mind.

Anyway, good luck with your Kickstarter campaign.

P.S: Spine support may be getting added to Visionaire Studio at some point.

Thank you for the nice feedback.
I see your point concerning stock characters.
I am trying to overcome this issue by providing a wide range of characters to choose from.
Have you seen the stretch goals and pledge rewards?
There are some really neat options for more individuality, e.g. customizable lighting colors.
And some of the limited rewards include custom appearance and animations for the toons.

Unfortunately, offering all characters in many different variations is simply impossible, due to the sheer file sizes.
However, when the characters are all available on my website, I will be open to individual customization requests.

P.S. Spine support for Visionaire Studio would be extremely amazing, but I think we have to wait quite a little for that, as the creators are still busy working on the runtimes for the really big engines like Unity, Cocos2d,...

no problem, & yeah, I know.

* edit: I know there are quite a few apps similar to spine. It was either spine or spriter - I forget which one David said.

I found a great solution!
After I received a lot of feedback from people who liked the art, but didn't want to share it with others, I have updated the project and this thread with the amazing new features of InDee Toons:
For everybody who does not want to use stock characters that can be used by other people:
You can now freely customize InDee Toons.
With the custom head generator and the source files for Spine, you can now create billions of unique characters out of one toon.
Even the clothes can be exchanged between different toons.

See how this sexy female sheriff toon gets dressed up:

Much better mate

So you are saying that we can adjust various features of the characters such as facial features, hair, hair color & clothes etc now?

Still not something I would particularly use myself (I have specific art styles in mind that I like & do not like) but it's definitely a step in the right direction; especially in regards to platform/action based games & such. You should try targeting IG Maker, GameMaker & other such engines with this sort of stuff; I think they would be a perfect fit.

Thanks a lot

Yep, there's a selection of different hair styles, head shapes, ears, noses, eyes, mouths and eyebrows included in the custom head generator (you need Spine to use it).
A long animation morphs through thousands of predefined combinations that vary in color, position and scale (X and Y) of the features, and you can even adjust all that by yourself.
The customization of the clothes is limited so far, you can of course change the color, too, but it's not yet optimized for that.
The customization of the outfit is rather supposed to work via exchanging parts between different toons, for instance replacing the uniform of the sheriff toon with a warm-up suit of another toon or something like that.

Of course it is not for everybody. I also prefer art with a more defined style, like the toons of the first version.
But many people asked for something less stylized, so I made some generic characters.

I know, adventure games are not the only thing this is good for, but as I am kind of rooted in the adventure community, I wanted to share my stuff here first.
I've been trying to target the IG Maker community, but they seem to have very harsh forum policies and considered sharing my work as advertising...
From the GameMaker forums, I haven't received any feedback so far...

We'll see.
Thanks again for your feedback!

no problem.

wasn't really sure about IG Maker but they never seemed to have a problem with shared resources for rpgMaker. I've not used rpgMaker in over 10 years though...

There are also plenty of html5/ios/android engines available too which I think this would work well for.

The thing about adventure games (especially point & click) is that the games tend to be quite personal & thus the developers tend to have a specific vision of how the game will look or play as opposed to using generic background art/characters or giving some third party artist free reign over creating the artwork.

For me, the sort of artwork I quite liked was what I saw in The Curse of Monkey Island but with more texturing detail. Having said that I'm also a fan of more exaggerated/eccentric characters/lineart such as that of caricature.

Of course, generic background art doesn't work at all for adventure games, however I think with some more customization, my toons could be suitable for more than fan adventures.

Oh yeah, I loved the artwork of Monkey Island 3, but more the background art by Bill Tiller.
The characters could have been more close to the style of the first two games. I was very disappointed back then

What style of newer adventure games do you like?

It depends... I'm not a fan of 3D art unless done tastefully. For instance: I thought the 3D artwork of Discworld Noir spoiled the game somewhat. Apparently Daedalic have used a combination of 3D characters & zBrush for their recent games to make their characters look more hand drawn/cartoon like.

The only adventure game with pixel art I really appreciated was Simon the Sorcerer. The background art & character animations were really well designed.


I don't mind vector art but wish the artists would add a bit more texture, so that the artwork doesn't look so smooth/flat.

I quite liked the art of Chains of Satinav/Memoria but I didn't really like the artwork for the main protagonist Geron. There was something off in the way he looked around the bottom of his face/neck area. I think it was because of his ridiculously long giraffe neck.


I really like the artwork in telltale's walking dead & the wolf among us. I think the artwork in the wolf among us is better than the walking dead mind as they weren't having to stick to what they originally created for walking dead & could improve on the style a bit more. Which reminds me I've the latest episode (3) of The Wolf Among us to play.

Oh yes, I loved Simon the sorcerer, too. Never really played it to the end, but I was always fascinated by the graphics.

The last screenshot you posted is awesome, I love the colors and the shading of the bald head guy.

I don't really care about 3D adventure games either, Simon 3D was horrible, Monkey Island 4 was the greatest disappointment ever.
But some of the 2.5D games with 3D characters really rock, like The Book of unwritten Tales and A Vampyre Story.

Unfortunately, Bill Tiller failed with his Kickstarter for the prequel, just like I most likely will with mine