Kandria
Going underground
Nick
Well, the first thing I did this week was draw some concept art for the first underground region. Being fairly close to the surface it has to be modern in looks. Something that's both futuristic and practical, but has also clearly been put through a lot of strain, both from the effects of the calamity, as well as from looters and vandals taking it apart. What I ended up with is this, at least for the tunnels:
I also wanted to do some concept art like this for an interior space, but I felt doing this was already taking up too much time, so I instead went straight to hashing things out in pixel art. The full sketch of that was only completed yesterday:
This includes the caves, tunnels, as well as three separate types of rooms (from left to right): an office type space, mostly used for desk jobs, a factory with manufacturing machinery, and a living space. All of this had to stay true to the minimalist palette and large shapes style everything has been building towards so far. I also wanted to have the look be clearly authoritarian and oppressive. I hope I somehow managed to satisfy all of these constraints.
Today I worked on extending the extracted tileset from the sketch with more broken variant tiles, and started building some first rooms.
I'm pretty happy with the look of the tunnel, especially now that I finally have an excuse to use the more advanced lighting system that's been in the game for a long time without being used. I'm not happy with the caves yet, but I also spent the least amount of time on that, so it's due for a revision sometime soon.
For now though I don't have time to work on this further. I need to switch to putting together all the chunks using what we have for now. I also need to get these drafts out fast so that Tim can get to work hooking up the quest in the proper locations, and so that Fred and I can get to work testing out the combat system again and getting that back up to speed.
Doing the tiles took the vast majority of the time this week, though I did also spend some time implementing fixes for feedback from the community (thank you!) and for other stuff that was needed at the time, like some improvements to the dialog system. I still hope to turn that into a documented library at some point, but I already have too little time as-is.
I really wish I had enough funds to hire another programmer, that would help a lot!
Speaking of hiring, if you are a musician or know any musician friends looking for work, we'll be putting out a listing for a composer/sfx engineer sometime in March, so keep your eyes open for that!
Tim
The first quest is now playable from start to finish, with the ending dialogue written too, which introduces Fi to the player for the first time. I’ve refined the scripting, with new learnings from Nick (I’ve been nagging him on how to do certain things in native Lisp code, which is unusual compared to the C-based languages I’m more familiar with). There are still a couple of to-dos (not least porting it to the full region area when the level design drops), and I’ll need to factor in feedback from playtesting, but it’s feeling pretty good. Depending on if the level design drops next week or not, I may instead move onto the next couple of quests, to at least get their frameworks scripted.
Fred
Working on architecture and environment this week. Figuring out a credible interior space that can be used in tile format and match interesting exterior designs is pretty tricky. It's the kind of thing that will take some back and forth with playtesting and level design to figure out.
Conclusion
Well, next week should have a lot more in-game stuff to show off, and hopefully some good improvements to the combat to show as well. For now though, I'm very tired as I've been working a lot even after hours this week, and I'm all too eager to turn my brain off on Sunday tomorrow.
I hope you have a nice weekend, too!