Semester Ends, Time to Really Get Some Work Done

We were forced to take some time off from working on the game the last 2 weeks due to the semester ending. We had to focus most of our time on finshing up projects and taking tests and that kind of boring stuff. I wasted about 3 full days working on a 'Toll Booth' programming project in java for one of my computer science classes. The worst part about doing programming projects for classes is that you have to put a ton of work into it, and then when you are finished, you don't even have something cool. You just have some stupid worthless program that isn't even fun for anybody. But it may come in handy if I'm able to somehow fulfill my wildest dreams of becoming a toll booth operator (the ability to open and close a little gate, I can feel the power surging through my body just thinking about it.)

We were able to sneak in a few hours of working on the game though, and there are still some updates that I haven't talked about yet since the last post.

The coolest update is probably the new ability for Elkwood. We have given him about 4 different powers now, but keep changing which one we want him to have. Since he is a main character and you get him near the begining of the game, we want to make sure his ability is useful, but not too powerful. He is now able to make the player dash, by pulling on his shirt. This gives the player a short boost of speed and also allows him to dash-jump, so he can jump farther distances.

And, you do an awesome flip whenever you dash-jump.

The other abilities that we had Elkwood doing before will most likely go to other companions that you will get later in the game.

I also just finished the story document that is the closest thing to a design document that we have so far. I wanted to write out in detail all of the scenes and everything that needs to be known to fully understand the story. I'm glad that I'm finally finished writing it, it was drug out for about a month (and it's only about 14 pages long.) I don't really like writing this stuff down too much because we like to have the game sort of develop itself as we go along. At least now we have the main points written down and other people (such as a musician) might be able to get the idea of what we envision the game to be.

Did some more level editing too. Going to be working on a different section soon, hopefully, and most likely they won't take as long.

Fixed up and finished most of the cutscenes for the starting part of the game. I spent a lot of my time tweaking and trying to get them to look exactly as we envisioned them. It takes surprisingly a lot of time to do this though, but it will be well worth it. We still haven't come up with a good starting intro cutscene for the game. I spent a couple of hours making one before, but didn't like it, so we decided to axe it completely and start over.

Here is a shot of one of the scenes. It also shows the new text system with a new font that nate made (a few fixes have been made in the font since this screenshot.)


So now we are on break so we will hopefully be able to make a ton of progress on the game. Next up to work on is the companion menu system which will allow you to equip/unequip different companions. We are also about to add in the first boss soon. Really soon. Like I am just about to start working on him after I finish this blog post.

And that means that we are going to want some testers to do a run through of what we have of the game so far. I mainly want to make sure that the game runs well on other computers, as well as get feedback on what other people think about it so far. So get your testing fingers ready!