Wednesday, December 31, 2014

No idea how I should name this post

Well, I guess I'll do this as game progress status report and personal life report all together?


Personal stuff:

Anyway, lets first get the ugly things out of the way.
Originally I wanted to get right back to working again after a couple of work free holidays.
That's when my mom called me, she's been in hospital the last couple days and... it looks like she's going to die soon...
The short version is:
She has blood cancer for more than 18 years now (with chemotherapy and everything that goes along with it). It's quite impressive that she made it this far, but it really looks like this is as far as things are going.

Of course I was well aware that this day might be coming soon.
But still...

At any rate, don't worry about me!
I've gone through a lot of worse things throughout my entire life (like almost everyone else does, right?).
So I'll be fine.

It's just a bit difficult for me to concentrate on programming, so stuff will take a bit longer than expected. But I'll do it, I can do it, and I will do it!
I'm also responsible for the webcomics script and stuff, and all of those things should be fine as well.

Since I'm driving to my parents place to visit her one last time, (~1000 km throughout the country) there's a chance that webcomic pages might be delayed by a day or two!
We should be able to pull it off to release them always on time.
But just so you guys know:
There "might" be delays!
In case there are delays, we will definitelly deliver those missing pages afterwards!

 I just figured I'll inform you about those"possible" delays and the reasons behind it.
(but as I said, we should be able to release them on time!)
And yes, don't worry, I'm fine!
I'm really grateful to have everyones support, and there really isn't anything I need right now.
Thank you very much, everyone!


Game Status:

I was able to program the basic combat stuff of the "test game" before Christmas.
All that's left to do is add some enemies (Cres already provided me with the graphics) and then add the random generation stuff.
Depending on how things are looking, I'll might throw this testing game out to the public sometime in january.
(I'm not sure about this though, maybe I'll do it, maybe not)

But please keep in mind, that this game just consists out of simple graphics and placeholder graphics.
As well as a lot of sketchy stuff.
It's pretty clear that this is a "test game", never intended to be a full-game.
The games main purpose is to figure some programming stuff out.
And it greatly helped me in understanding how dynamic lighting as well as random generation works.
(well, I haven't programmed random generation stuff yet! Just read a bunch of tutorials about it. It's the next point on my list of stuff I'm about to do, so as soon as I'm able to focus on this complicated stuff, I'll get to it right away!)

Hopefully we're able to get a lot more work done on the Sion and Medusa game in january.
That one will be a "full game", and we're intending to speed developement up as much as possible.
Originally I wanted to do a blogpost on some of the game mechanics I had in mind for that one.
But I'll get to that some other time.
It will mainly be a post about "how" I intend to use the random generation, and stuff like that.

Aside from that, I wish everyone of you a happy new year!
I hope each one of you guys and girls will have a wonderful new year, with a lot of good stuff that happens to you!

See ya in 2015!

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Merry X-Mas!

We all wish you a merry christmas!


And here's a little present for you guys and girls:

Ferania: "I'm absolutely not doing this for you guys!"


Other than that, small status report:

I managed to get dynamic lighting to work as intended.
And I also improved some performance issues and other things that existed before.
(dynamic lighting is actually NOT needed for the Sion and Medusa game, I just did this because I was curious and wanted to learn stuff about it)

And I did several other things, which I experimented with in a "test game".
However, since this test game just consists out of place holders and some sketches, it's not really something I want to show.
Or rather, there's not really anything noteworthy to see.
(not sure if I release it at some point or not, it's really nothing important and I'd rather speed along work on the Sion and Medusa game)

The last couple days this year, we'll be most likely celebrating christmas, finishing webcomic pages... and... well, it's unlikely that there will be any major things happening this year.
Though I planned to do another blogpost about some game mechanic stuff this year.
But I guess that's it.

Other than that, I need to learn how to "randomly generate" some stuff.
Not entire levels!
But at least the content of each level.
That will be my goal for the next couple weeks, and yup, this is going to be used in the Sion and Medusa game.


Sunday, December 14, 2014

Status Report

I'll keep this post simple and short:
We're still working on the game, but progress is slow.
(well, it's christmas time, and things get really busy at this time of year)

And yeah, we're also working on the webcomic and other stuff (commissions) as well.


However, I've spend the last couple weeks with getting back into programming.
I've optimized and finished some of the stuff for the upcoming game with Sion and Medusa.
Mainly the CG script thingy (difficult to explain, but it's the script that is responsible for displaying CGs, effects, and text etc.) and some other stuff.

Lately I've been throwing all those things into a testing-game for testing purposes.
But since this only consists out of place holders and stuff, there's not really anything to "show".

Anyway, things are working as intended.
I'm going to do some testing and programming on dynamic lighting and random generation in the next couple days/weeks.
(dynamic lighting just for the lulz, while random generation is needed for the Sion and Medusa game)

So, don't expect any demo release in december.
But we're still working on it!


P.S:
Please tell me if you're interested in my thoughts about the stuff I'm programming and about the progress I make.
It's not much to write blogposts about.
But I might consider writing more often on Twitter about those things!