Month: January 2016

Why, hallo thar! Been a while, it feels, since we gave a development-style update. Chalk it up to the holiday season taking everyone away from the warm, glowing, warming glow of their computer screens and toward family-like things. As for me (NickyD), I went from Seattle to Atlanta, to a little place in Pennsylvania called Altoona, back to Atlanta, and will be back in Seattle around the time this goes live. What a trek!
During my pseudo-vacation, I got to work directly with our UI/Battle Animation designer and complete several more animations: buffs/debuffs for STR, DEF, AGI, and DEX (strength, defense, evasion, and accuracy, respectively); basic elemental attacks for fire, wind, ice, and lightning; and discussed the plans for Linked Skill animations and some extra "juice" to give them even more style. We were looking at animations used in other games for reference — it was actually a lot of fun because we got to dig deep into our memories to recall which games had the attack animations that came to mind that truly represented…"wind," for example. There's not many other reasons to look at YouTube videos of Quest64, anyway… Full disclosure: that game is a guilty pleasure of mine. Anyway, above is a mish-mash of some of these animations: you've got Emily raising her STR, a crow with heightened AGI, and two enemies getting hit by wind and ice attacks. Sorry, no gifs this time; still trying to keep things a fun surprise for the demo!

Aside from battle animations, I had a few phone calls and email sessions with two music composers for the game. I want a lot of these tracks to remain a fun surprise for everyone who plays the demo when it's complete, but why not give you a sneak peek (or sneak…hearing) of the general battle theme? It's modeled after Japanese-style rock, sort of like what you'd hear in an Ys game or earlier SMT titles (DDS, Nocturne). This isn't the final mastered track, so what you'll hear in the demo will be a tad different; just an FYI!

Let's see, what else is new…? I've programmed most of the event scenes that take place in the chapter being considered for the game demo; it's a lot harder than I thought! When scenes have more than three characters in them — which the demo chapter does since it introduces most of the party — it's really tough to keep track of their positions on-screen, who gets swapped in and out, et cetera. The more personal or smaller-scale scenes were a snap in comparison. I did hit a snag at one point in limiting the number of choices a player can make in a given scene. In certain parts of the game, you only have time to make two choices from a larger set of options (think SMT: Devil Survivor, but without an actual clock) in order to learn more about the world, specific characters, et cetera. Anyway, in these sections, I asked the event scenario programmer to help me out and we developed a new way to get this to work. Now it's as easy as hitting a big red button!

I'd post a video of an actual scene showing this mechanic in play, but it'd show off another music track…and my travel laptop can't handle HD video capture too well. Guess you'll have to wait another week for that, sorry! Instead, above is a basic desktop recording of the internal debug scene we made to test the new limited choice mechanic. It's silly and fun! Yay!

Mr. Tired as a company is going to be diving deep into tax preparation this week, so depending how long that takes, we'll have one of two things to update you with next Tuesday. The ideal option is the unveiling of our Prefundia page! Speaking of, if you are a registered member of The Dungeon — our online forums — then you will notice that we've created a private topic in the Undead Darlings Dungeon where we can build the Prefundia page together in the coming days! It's like early access to an early access of a crowdfunding for a game's development! That's probably the deepest layer of "making a countdown to a countdown of an announcement" as you can get. So please! Register, come talk with us, and let's make sure that the game is described in such a way that you'll be more than willing to tell all your friends about it!