Now in Technicolor

Our subway is getting bigger and more complicated by the day. I'm constantly thinking of new goodies to add. Right now my favorite part is the busted out wall that leads to... well, you'll just have to check it out! AND! We have rats! They are kind of static at the moment, but they are definitely killable. Wayne's still working on getting them to move around. (That is, when he's not pulling his hair out over the insanity of Facebook. But I digress.)

Also! I made a couple of game-play videos which are posted on our Youtube channel. Feel free to check them out!

Maps and monsters

I've spent the last couple of days developing a whole new map area. I'm having a blast with it. I think I worked for about 12 hours on the new tile set - and it was my only real day off of my actual job this week! It's just so satisfying to spend hours in Photoshop, then in the map editor, then actually get to run around in a world we've created. Had some bugs with the map editor, but Wayne got those all fixed up for me. He has also been hard at work on abilities and animated map tiles. He does a lot of other stuff too, of course, but it's programmery stuff and I have no idea what half of it means. What I do know, is that we shall soon have stuff to KILL!

Oh, yes. I added the "Find us on Facebook" thingy over there on the sidebar.So If you are reading this and you haven't yet officially "Liked" us, feel free to get that taken care of. I have no idea why it's displaying duplicate fans, but it is. Not my code, so I couldn't fix it. (Haha, like I'd know how to fix code anyway.)

It lives.

Yeah, so we're still around. We got kind of burned out there for a little while, I guess, but we're back at it now. Lots of new stuff has been added. Wayne did a TON of work on the map editor so we have a new map in the game now. Yay! Not that you saw the old one, but trust me, it is an improvement. He got some attack animations in and even some abilities. Very cool. Now you can kill and rez yourself. Not that it will stay like that, but just getting the abilities in is pretty damn nifty. The ability icons themselves need much love and attention as they currently kinda suck. And the casting animation is horrible. I have to look into it and see wtf is going on there. We reworked character creation so you can start as one of four classes now, instead of just one default class. And we also worked on... oh, I don't know. A lot of other stuff!

In other news, I made a strange discovery today. There is apparently ANOTHER husband-and-wife team here in Austin working on a fantasy RPG project they are calling "mana punk" as well. I believe theirs is a pen-and-paper game. Still, a strange coincidence. When we first came up with the concept there really wasn't a lot of "mana punk" stuff online. Just a few references. So glad we could snag manapunk.com when we did!

The Verdict

Did we get to beta in a month? Yes. And no.

I know I haven't done such a great job updating in the past few weeks, but we have been working on the game. Did we get to beta? Well I guess that depends on how you define beta. Which we probably should have done before starting this endeavor. Are we miles... light years... ahead of where we were a month ago? YES! Is it ready for people to start testing? No. But we're still working away. The beta-in-a-month thing was more of an attempt to keep us on track and motivated. And mostly it worked. I personally have strayed some, getting distracted by books and crafts and comics and looking for a regular job, but I still love this project and want to see it succeed.

One of the things we did learn from the last month is it is HARD to make a video game with three people. We knew it would be, but sometimes when I think about the massive amount of artwork that is still needed (and, oh yeah, some content) it is a little overwhelming.

In other news we went to visit my parents over the weekend. They have custody of our cats, Fatty and Blackie. (Yes, we are very creative with the naming.) As soon as we got there on Thursday we were informed that earlier that week Fatty had died. He had been sick and it turned out he had feline immunodeficiency virus. It's very sad. He was the best cat ever (with Blackie coming in a close second of course) and we will miss him A LOT!

Sir Fatticus Mowbuckle:

An update and an introduction

Things are still moving along pretty steadily. Wayne is fixing things, then breaking other things to fix something else. Then going back to fix the things he broke. Vague enough for you? Rest assured though, there is method to his madness. Or so he tells me!

On the artsy side of things, I'm working on map tiles. So many map tiles! Yesterday it was all about potholes. Today it's about... well, still about potholes. And other street-related objects. My friend Kirsten has jumped on board and created a few tiles for us, so that's super cool of her. Hopefully I can twist her arm and get her to do more. Here's a tiny preview of what we've been working on. (Please pardon the lack of proper grass. But enjoy the viney flowers - those are Kirsten's handiwork!)

Burgers and abilities

Today, while I was sleeping, Wayne fine-tuned collision. This means I can now make models BIGGER than we had originally planned. Awesome! Of course most will stay basically the same size, but now I have more room for animations. An interesting development indeed!

After I woke up (and also after we went to Phil's Ice House for awesome hamburgers - or in Wayne's case an awesome veggie burger), we started in on class abilities. And boy did we get a lot done. There's, like, a color-coded flow chart and everything. We got about 90% of our starter class to a point we are both happy with. Still a couple more ability trees to go though. We also fleshed out some pretty unique ideas for how faction might work. Overall, a lot accomplished.

When we get on a roll like we did today, time just flies by. I looked at the clock and it was about 10 pm. Then the next thing I knew Wayne was yawning and saying he was going to bed. It was 1 am. What?! How did that happen? I worked on this project from about 4 pm until 1 am, except for about half an hour while we watched Soap on Hulu and ate dinner, and another 20 minutes while I went on a coffee run to Starbucks. Wayne put in even more hours than I did because he is crazy and wakes up all early for some reason. The point isn't the number of hours we're putting in though. It's the fact that it doesn't feel like work. At all. I hope this feeling continues for a very long time. And I hope it shows in the game and people like what we are doing. Yep, that's what I hope.

Having said that we will probably take most of tomorrow off (okay at this point it is "today") because it's ROLLER DERBY DAY! The last bout of the season. Bummer! Can't wait til it starts up again next year.

Running into brick walls (in a good way)

Today was pretty productive. Wayne worked on tile interaction, including collision! So now we can run into walls instead of running through them. Swamp tiles now slow your movement. Very awesome. It's starting to feel more like a "real" game!

Fong has been working on lore and let me tell you, what he has so far is awesome! I so want to play this game.

I worked on player character models (though I don't know if you'd technically call them models because it is a 2D game). Fong started these particular models awhile back and I took up where he left off. Not that he left them unfinished, we just needed them in a different format than they were in so I had to change them up some and chop them into layers. I got two sets done, but that is just maybe a fourth (or 1/324th, who knows where it will end up) of what we need for one sex of one race. I haven't even touched melee combat animations and we currently only have one spell-casting animation. So yeah, lots to do.

I also did some research for combat abilities. Now Wayne thinks I'm obsessed with knife fighting. But I'm not. Very much.