So, now that you know the basic premise of this game, I feel like delving into some of the aspects of pre-production that could turn such a wild idea for a game into a reality.Düm Bot’s pre-production phase had some hurdles, certainly, but first I’d like to share about the early stages, specifically story.
Story: Düm Bot
The biggest issues I ran into when coming up with the why’s and how’s of this game pretty much took care of themselves during the initial creation of the idea in the first place. The idea for Düm Bot came about around 5 years ago now, I wanted to come up with an idea for a side scroller that was an homage to old school games, but had a much more unique and interesting story than what is usual. Zombies we’re becoming huge pop culture at the time and I thought it would be ironic to use them in a silly way, I always had a soft spot in my heart for robots and decided they were two great things that went great together. The logic behind mixing them stemmed from the thought that if The Doc took the brain from a ravenous zombie and popped it into a giant robotic death machine, the result would be a perfect killing machine, no empathy, no emotion, but the leftover instincts of a zombie, made sense to me.
This driving force behind The Doc’s evil plan made the story just follow along naturally, what would be the thing that made Düm Bot a unique character? Something trips up in his brain implant and suddenly, his mind has reverted back to it’s human form, no unquenchable hunger for brains and such. That alone wouldn’t be enough to make a memorable character, that would just be a normal robot good guy then… Why not make the brain implant trip up even more and revert back to the human brains childlike state? Now we have a basis for a ridiculous and silly character that has a completely unique way of moving and interesting reasons to base all of it’s decisions off of, essentially, it’s a very, very stupid robot, compared to an adult human that is…
Düm Bot will be an interesting main character to see take on an apocalypse, but what Düm Bot lacks in intelligence it more than makes up for with sheer power. The character won’t actually be talking during the dialogue, with the wiring issues that caused the mind to do what it did, the speech capabilities of Düm Bot we’re taken out as well, now whether this is something in the mind that can’t be healed or a simple mechanical issue remains to be seen, but Düm Bot will be communicating through … dramatic pauses, and sheer force of will.
Düm Bot will be lumbering through levels with the innocence of a toddler, and the daintiness of a dump truck.
