October 30, 2012

Update #6

My weekly update is a day late, hope you guys dont mind too much :P

well... as i previously stated... school is my upmost highest priority, Alex was in edmonton last weekend, selling art and shenanigans at the con. I was applying for early admission at the university of Alberta...

School and studies have been really stressful lately and i haven't had much time for myself, let alone working on the game.

I'm still progressively working on C# and XNA... but things are moving along slowly. There isn't much to show at this moment except for code... that doesn't do much.

The whole technical side of the game will be long behind the art side. I am also working on the story and the characters in the game, I can say that part is moving along quite well,

There may be a epilogue of some sorts coming your way :)

Anyways, that's all i have to say for now :3

-Brandon

October 28, 2012

Another update

Alex here. Things got a bit wild on my part.Comic Expo in Calgary, as well as a few events all night, and inventory at work. But I'm here again to give an update.

I'll try to stick to the update schedule, but that might be harder than imagined, but regardless, I think it's do-able if I keep focused.

Not a lot has changed since our last update. A few ideas added. I counted the amount of different enemies that will be in the game, roughly. I could have overshot, or undershot. But it will be around 1500. That includes variations of one type, and different tiers of each. So I do have a loooot of work ahead of me, but that's al-right. I love to paint :3

Speaking of painting, i'll release yet another type of enemy art into the public's hands.
I'll probably work on it more, But for right now the idea is there.

The demon worshippers will be found throughout the flatlands, with camps, and secret sacrifices being made in the middle of the night, etc...

I hope you enjoy this update, and I apologize for not having an update prior.

-Alex

October 15, 2012

Update #4

Time for my update of the week. Taking all into consideration, we all can agree here that the programming side of it all is the most interesting :). Art is borring, Amirite?

Anyways, back onto subject. The project is moving along a lot slower on my side of things. My schedule is pretty full as is with my senior year of highschool. Alongside the game, i have many other projects i am currently trying to accomplish.

To put this in retrospect, let's just say, i have a lot of projects on my plate and im slowly picking away at all of them simultaneously.... slooowwwwwwwwly. Apart form everything, school remains my utmost important matter right now.

To make things more complicated, i am also self teaching myself C# & XNA, which has proven to be quite difficult at times. I find it hard to pace myself between parts of coding i do understand and the parts i don't. Everything would be a lot easier if i would just simply copy + paste someone else's code.

None the less, this is going to be quite a fufilling project and i very excited for it to be completed. The time i have to myself is already limited. Objectively speaking, i could have gotten a lot more done if i spent every free minute of my day planning and coding, but seeing as i still want time for myself, this isnt exactly reality.

There are two possible solutions to this.

1. work as much as i can on the game while i am on break from school (long weekends, christmas break, ect.)
2. Figure out a way so i would no longer require sleep, therefore gaining at least 8 hours a day to work on the.

Since the latter is quite impossible, i believe this is going to be done during my breaks. (with the aid of many energy drinks)

Aside from my procrastination and attempt to get sympathy, all is moving along in early game dev, planning for the game's story line is almost fleshed out and we have rough ideas of what concepts and UI we want and do not want in the game.

Until next week!

-Brandon

October 12, 2012

Update #3 - Blog Upkeep

Following up. Brandon and I are going to be posting twice a week, once about Brandon's side of things, and once about my side of things. My posts being on Friday, and Brandon's being on Monday.

Design choices have to be made. Ignore nothing, and never take for granted. I am talking about saving problems some turn-based RPG's have adapted. We have some initial decisions that have to be made to fix this, before we start designing levels. I did some brainstorming on the saving choices we could have. Not finalized but you can expect something (hopefully) not annoying.

I am having a hard time finding the art direction I want for the sprites. Whether to go more realistic like Diablo, or have that kinda simplified version you get from older Final Fantasy games - I am going to wait until Brandon has some textures laid down before I jump into making a decision.

Also, here is some concept art for a more magical creature in our game. No name yet, but we are working on that. It is broken up into three layers. The monster itself, the crystals, and the aura surrounding said crystals.
I'm not sure how much concept art I want to be showing, but for the sake of getting people behind the project, I think I might have a creature or monster of each species posted over the course of the development. - Alex

October 11, 2012

Concept Direction

I’m going to be creating a couple more character concepts for the main characters. As well as brainstorming for some types of monsters and enemy types. Orcs? Demons? Bandits? Goblins and Minotaurs? Fairies? Imps and Trolls? And undead! Oh this will be fun. Thinking of creating a mass of 15 different species or enemy classes per realm. Which will all have their own variation of types. Example : Fire Orc, Shadow Orc, Ice Orc etc. - Alex

October 3, 2012

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog!

To start things off, we're a small group (currently 2 active members and a tentative music producer for sound tracks and effects) oh and have some links Alex's DeviantArt

When we both come to the realization that we would both love to start coding and creating a game, we got started almost right away.

This is going to be along the lines of a dev blog, where we would be keeping anyone who will be reading this blog informed on where we are in this project :)

on that note, i would like to highlight the fact that we are in the very beginning of our game. We are currently deciding wether or not to create our own engine.

We have quite a bit of concept art and a rough story line.

The game will be along the lines of a 2.5D RPG game, with a turn based battle system. why 2.5? we dont want to have a basic side scrolling game, but we dont want to opt out for the complexity of a 3d game. with a 2.5d we are avoiding the isometric shenanigans we would deal with in a 3d engine.

Finding an engine with what we are looking for would be tedious in itself, and finding an engine that is update would be even harder. On top of using a opensource engine, we would need to re write some lines so it would fit, basically said... too much work for little to no results

Writing our own engine will be quite the task with very little knowledge of C++ or C# language.

-Brandon