Saturday, August 31, 2013

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #19

Hey guys, back with a new development log! Lots of new stuff to show so I'll get right down to it.


Selatria:

We've been putting in a lot of hours into development of Selatria. While we have the main scenario of the game planned out, Tuesday we were able to split up the second-to-last chapter and put it into sub-sections. From there, we will make dialogue out of it for the voice actors and then implement into the game.

Starting off with some brand new art of upcoming main scenario characters, designed by Jennifer Gilliland




New Selatria Characters designed by Jennifer Gilliland


If you played the Version 1.3 demo on our website, you'll notice a new surprise in the opening of the upcoming version of the game with some new sequences that I hope you'll enjoy!


Matt has been working on mapping out one of the upcoming regions of the game, and adding a lot of battle content. Including taking feedback from some players to adjust boss battles in chapter 1, as well as come up with a lot of new exciting battles against Selactite foes. Many of them throw curveballs and might be too difficult during a normal playthrough. As they're optional, they will bring a lot of added challenge to the game for those who are fellow completionists in RPGs!

Jon has been adjusting a lot of battle content, and came up with a heck ton of abilities. We put together a small video last week that shows some of the abilities that are in development.


Selatria - Battle System in Development Video: Check out the Battle theme variations!

I have been working on some of the needed game functions. I have been designing a party management system in order to swap out party members at any save gate. Rather than have it be a window where you hotswap party members, I'm thinking of integrating the features straight into the gameplay. For example, you can see what your party members are thinking at the current point in the storyline before you ask them to join or swap out. They will also make snide remarks at you if you decide to "bench" them, so to say. I want to have every aspect of the game to be as fun as possible, even when doing things like managing your party or exploring.

An example of Luis being belligerent if you decide to keep him out of the party. Placeholder room.

Also what I've been working on is Chapter 3-1. You have to have a meeting with the council in order to warn them about the upcoming attacks from the Empire. However, the council isn't willing to talk to ordinary townsfolk, so Mage uses the celebrity pop star named Harmony in order to ride her fame to request an audience with the people of the Council Chamber. However, Harmony is only willing to do it if Mage uses his magic to power the visual effects for her concert.

Harmony's Concert - Still in progress. (Yay, debugging scores!) The concert music is a placeholder for now.

Last but not least, voice auditions! We've gotten a lot of them in the last month, and us as a development team were able to limit it down to a few choices for each character. I'm going to email them for call backs on lines in order to determine who will be the final picks for each role. Once we have the finished cast for the new roles for each character, I will post it publicly.


ANTics: 


For the first time we have a public demo for the game to show! ANTics will be a mobile/casual game that will require you to protect your hordes of candy from incoming bugs that try and attack it.

Lead programmer of the game Gerren Willis really took the helm on this game and made it run very nicely. There is still art needed to be worked on for the user interface, namely with buying powerups and icons, and that will be completed in the very near future. Paul Diggs worked on the art style for this game and the small CG scenes and animations, it came out looking great, as you'll see in the video below! The music was composed by Christopher Nuno who also did compositions for Selatria as well. As always, it's just magic coming to the ears!

We will be reworking a new user interface design into the game in the near future with icons and a unique window design in the near future!

The build you're seeing below is showing off levels 1-4, level 5 hasn't been implemented yet, but there's a special surprise coming soon that will show that off!



First public build of ANTics. Take a look at the credits for the dev team!

Look for ANTics to appear for PC/Mac/and your handy Android device or iPhone very soon.



---

And that's about it for this development log.  Until next time!



.

No comments: