A year ago today, I was with my close group of friends in a garage in Highland playing Overcooked talking about how we were going to tackle what we *thought* were going to be our hurdles of 2020.
Oh, how wrong we were.
We all had to make sacrifices of some kind this year, more than we might have been used to. It would be hard to find someone to say that their life *hasn't* changed this year.
For me, I am incredibly lucky. My family is OK, my close friends are OK, and I'm OK - but it also was a wake-up call for me to try something different. To not take opportunities for granted - to use the time working from home and not commuting to learn a new skill or to get that exercise or work on my projects that I didn't have time to do. I'm less fatigued and less tired.
I'm hoping the tech and game industry will continue to trust and hire people to work remotely/from home. It will really open up a chance for me (and others) to move or live anywhere... as long as it has good internet. Something I really never considered before 2020. And I think embracing technology and more opportunities to work remotely were one of the very few wins of 2020.
I hope 2021 is better for everyone - We can all really use a win next year. I'm glad we made it through 2020.
Hi everyone! I hope you all had good holidays so far and are staying safe. I’m going to resume doing monthly updates on our projects aiming for the first of every month to give some updates on what we’ve been working on. Note that some of this information will be cross-posted to our project page on Kickstarter for our backers.
---
Spellbearers
We were able to reach our goal on Kickstarter, and we are very grateful! One of the first immediate issues we wanted to tackle from our prototype demo with funding is to improve the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) for Spellbearers. The reason why this is a priority is that a good UX and UI will be the foundation for implementing the character selection screen, where we will implement the story, a better first impression for pitching the game, and makes for an improved polished experience overall.
To accomplish this, we brought on Jessica M. Jacuinde to the project who is a talented graphic artist and video editor who worked on our prior projects and developed our company logo and trailers. She joined the Spellbearers project in the last month and was able to begin work on the mockups for the UX.
With Jessica on the team, she was able to turn initial mockup flowcharts from this:
into these!
Here’s a preview of the new title screen - Note that the illustration is a placeholder - And is subject to change and further polish.
Here’s a look at what the character selection screen will look like.
And here’s a look at the new pause screen. Note: The map functionality will be integrated into the new pause screen instead of being navigated through a separate button as you currently see in the demo build.
We are doing conversion work now to turn the mockups into actual gameplay elements, while the actual game may look slightly different than the mockups you see here, this will give you a good idea of what we are going for in terms of the look and feel for Spellbearers. In the next update, we'll talk a bit about some of the story and some of the level development.
If you haven't taken a look yet, be sure to look at some of the visual updates our game director and lead programmer Gerren Willis was able to implement from our earlier update.
Please look forward to some of these visual updates to be implemented in a new demo early next year.
And if you haven't played our existing demo yet, please give it a try! We would love to hear your feedback.
---
Selatria
Work also continues on Selatria. Our immediate goal for now is to finish development of the battle system and all of the boss battles by the end of the year, and the cutscenes for the main scenario early next year. I'm happy to say we're on track of reaching both of these goals. For the battle system, we have just the final boss and some extra boss battles that are left to implement (in the design phase), and for the cutscenes, we have two more sections of game and the ending to implement.
Due to COVID-19, we had to postpone being able to record and implement voices for a time, but our sound engineer Shadoe was able to implement a new setup where they can continue to record and edit voices outside of the studio space, and we're regained momentum.
While I'm still a bit wary on announcing a release date at this moment, I'm happy to say there's a light at the end of this almost ten year long tunnel.
And some new screenshots from Chapter 5, which is currently in the polish phase. The theme of Chapter 5 is all about going back home and liberating the towns from the Dakk'rian Empire. The Empire continues its invasion onto Faylien soil, and our heroes must work together to plan some kind of offensive to reclaim the towns one by one.
And what's this? They have flying boats? This has to be a bit unfair...
In the next update in the new year, I plan on showing some previews of boss battles and how some of the combat will differ for the full game.
--
Thanks for your support, and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, and join us on Discord! Until next time!
