Kandria
It's a new year for Kandria!
In case you missed it, I wrote a summary of the most important things that happened for Kandria in 2020. You can read it here. Now, on to the new year!
Nick - Concepts, Effects, and Items
The start into the week was slow for me, as expected. I don't think it's unusual to have a hard time getting back to work after some holidays. Anyway, I started out with the character redesign for Fi.
I also did a sprite version of the final design, though it was really hard to settle on a proper colour choice. I'm still not entirely certain, to be honest.
Next I got started working on fixing some bugs, and implementing a particle system. That's been on my todo for a while, so I'm glad I finally got to it.
Finally this week I worked on an inventory system. Enemies can now drop items, which you can pick up and use if they're consumables. Right now I'm intending on having four different kinds of items – consumables that give you health or other timed benefits, quest items that you need to hand over, valuables that can be exchanged for "money", and active items that give some other change that you can turn on and off, maybe cosmetic options or something, not sure yet.
Anyway, I also got started on the UI part for that, so there's a quick-use menu now that activates a neat slow-mo effect:
I'm still deliberating on the full UI with a categorised view of all items, as well as a quest logbook, map, and all, but I should get started on that next week. After I'm done with that (and some more bugfixes/tests) I need to get back to working on tilesets!
Fred - Catherine
It's fun to focus on a character and get a whole set of anims going. Catherine s pretty fun to animate! Looking forward to doing Jack whenever that happens and give character to his walk and other moves.
Tim - Quests
I’ve been getting back into the swing after the holiday, and getting my repo setup properly after we migrated from GitHub. I’ve ported the character bio document onto the server, and also been discussing some marketing strategies with the guys. I’ve also been planning out the quests for the vertical slice, which will essentially fulfill act 1 of the story; this has involved clarifying the goals and constraints, working through suggestions with Nick, and planning them out on paper with a view to scripting them soon.
The Plan™
I don't think there's gonna be any big plan updates for a while from now – or at least I hope there won't be! Right now we're full ahead on the vertical slice, which will cover the beginning of the first act of the game after the prologue. It'll require modelling the main camp, as well as parts of the desert and first underground section. The Stranger, Catherine, and Jack all need to be fully modelled as well, with a partial or full model of Fi as an extra. In terms of enemies we'll need to finish the android zombie and busted drone, as well as reintroduce the wolf I made so long ago. All in all we're currently planning on at least two mainline quests and at least one side quest, though I feel like we'll have time for more.
Right now the focus is entirely on our purposes – meaning that we're doing this primarily to see how long it takes us to produce content and how well we get along with planning and realising everything. Once we're done and happy with the vertical slice we can think about turning it into a demo usable for marketing.
Engine-wise, the following features still need to be implemented:
Quest logbook
Item logbook
NPC scripting (make them go somewhere)
Walk & talk system (to allow NPCs to talk while you're both moving somewhere)
Overview map
Music system (per-region and per-event music with proper fading)
This is all in addition to plenty of bugs that still need to be ironed out and existing features that still need more tuning. Anyway, I'll update you here as things progress.
That's it from us. How's your start into the year been?