Category Archives: Development Diary

New Portraits

Ouch, ouch ! The week has been hard !

I did the Paladin specialization tree, but it took me longer than hoped, so I didn’t have time to finish the Priest ; I designed all his abilities & talents, but I implemented only 50% of them, and once all will be in the game, I’ll also have to test & tune them to be sure he has about the same efficiency than the Druid, else the game would get too hard or to easy depending of the specialization we choose for our healer.

Anyway right now I’m pretty happy with the Paladin ; it has been a bit hard to design him, as I was not sure where to go with him ; I ended with a classic setup for the Paladin : a mix between magic and melee combat, with a good hint of protection spells ; he got only very few healing abilities though, to avoid unbalancing too much the healing needs when there’s a Paladin in the party.

So next week, I’ll finish the Priest, and then hopefully do in full the last healer specialization : the Necromancer. This one will be really special, but I already noted tons of ideas, so his design is already nearly complete..!

Considering the current rate to create the specializations, I might put on hold the Rogue class. I’ll add it at a later point, once the game will be ready to release (ie: everything else will be finished & polished), or even in a free patch after game release, if the game is popular enough. It’ll depend on how much tiring & stressing the final rush will be in the incoming weeks.

PS: you didn’t get the reference of the title and you’re a fan of the Ultima RPG games ? Then head to the Ultima Retrospective Video Reviews , and watch them all starting by Ultima 0 (AKA Akalabeth) and ending with Ultima 9. You won’t regret it : it’s hilarious, it’s extremely well done and it’s a massive blast of nostalgia..!

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Intro : a Long Descent

Intro is done..!

Nothing amazing, but it nicely sets the mood for the game. You can see a glimpse of it in the screenshot above.

I didn’t start on the new specialization trees, but I updated the save system, so now it’s possible to deeply modify the levels and still make the saved games work. It will be useful in case of patch once the game is released. Right now, it’s useful to do a few fixes in the Dungeon without losing my saved games (I’ll need them to test the new specializations).

So it has been a pretty intense week but I’m really glad with that intro, and it means now the game is playable from beginning to the end, more or less features complete, for the default party..!

There’s still need for some polishing (mostly the GUI) and the new specializations, and it’ll be done. I’m _super_ impatient to see this game released, but I’ll try to keep calm while creating all the needed abilities and talents.

Goal for this incoming week : create the Paladin specialization for the Warrior class, and the Priest specialization for the Healer class. I’m not sure I can do all that in 1 week, but I hope so, else it’ll mean I’ll still need too much time to finish everything…

PS: yup, from the Doors to an ex-Spice Girl for the post title reference, the fall is harsh..!

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Kaboom !

I usually almost never write about my life in this blog, but I’m going to make an exception this time.

A couple of weeks ago, the management of my apartment building decided it would be a good idea to fix the roof so water would stop to infiltrate into my room & another one.¹

It sounds like a great idea, right ? Except here, in Thailand (where I’m living for the moment), it’s the rainy season. And they started by destroying the roof without putting any kind of other temporary protection first.

The result ? After a few days, I got more and more water flowing into my room ; I put buckets and stuff, but as it was dripping a bit from everywhere, there was still some water getting on the wood parquet.

Then what ? The wood started to swollen…

Enough was enough, we couldn’t stay in that room anymore, so last week, with my wife we had to move to the next one, spared from all that watering issue. It took the best of 3 days to move & set up everything in the new room.

But the problems didn’t stop there..! Apparently, this new room is a den for singing pigeons, who like to train between 6 & 9 am everything damn morning..!

So my nights have been sharply reduced. I’m trying to go to bed early, but it’s not always possible, so I missed a few hours of sleep…

So as you can see that last week has been eventful and busy on the personal side. So the professional side took a hit, and I didn’t do half of what I hoped.

I put almost everything in place for the intro sequence though, so I’m relatively confident I’ll be able to finish it this week (except if the bad mojo keeps going on ). And I may even be able to start on the new specialization trees & classes, which is the last main part missing to finish the game..!

Oh, also last week, the 2D artist delivered the game logo. I tuned the color theme by myself, and I think the result is pretty nice ; you can see it at the top of this page, and if you hadn’t noticed it so far, I’m putting it againt just below :

That’s all for this time, see you next week with better news I hope !

1. this issue has been going on for years, and they haven’t been able to fix it so far ↩

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The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians’ Boxshot

Another week that went as planned !

I did the rolling credits screen, nothing special, just the classic stuff.

I then did the ending scene. The ending is very low budget (ie: there’s no 5-min CGI movie), I just worked with sound FX, music & dialogues ; but considering that, the result isn’t bad, it could even be seen as refreshing and original. At very least, it should be a bit surprising..!

I also got the boxshot finished by the talented 2D artist hired a few week backs. You can see it above. Pretty awesome, right..?

So next week, I’ll do the intro scene. I’m not sure I’ll able to do it all in 1 week. There’s a bit more elements to create than for the ending scene. But we’ll see..!

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Noisier Than Before!

Pheeeew, 3 weeks ago, there was 40 sounds in the game, now there are 450 !

I nearly have my ears bleeding¹, but now I’m finally (almost) done with the Sound FX !

It’s a bit strange to hear the difference ; now, there’s growling, explosion and whzzzz everywhere in the combats, and it makes wonder how I didn’t miss all that while beta testing the whole dungeon a couple months ago²…

Anyway, now my planning just dropped under 2 months of work, so you should be able to enjoy all that soon. I guess it means the release date for end of September is still viable, although I might take 1 week of holidays in August to avoid my head exploding during the final rush. My planning also doesn’t account for the many little things needed on release (like setting up the payment stuff, packaging the game with an installer, etc.), so it might delay by 1 more week. It’ll also of course depends of the accuracy of my predictions for the final tasks I have to do.

The next one is to create the ending & the credits ; I hope I’ll be able to do all that in the incoming week, although I’m not sure it’ll be possible or not, as I’ll have to complete the little scripting engine I created, so it’ll be able to handle the special stuff I want to do for the ending sequence…

Same as usually, we’ll see where I stand in 1 week, cya !

1. I’m from the South of France, we have a slight tendency to exaggerate over here  ↩

2. ok, I know why ; it’s because there was already all the sword sounds & a few grunts, so the battles were far from being completely quiet, and there were also the great ambiance tracks to accompany me during the exploration ↩

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Dare to Jump ?

I’m back on track ! (or almost)

Start of last week has been a bit hard, as I was still sick, but after a few more of days of tests & tries, I finally managed to understand what I should do for the sounds, and how to do it !

So now a good bunch of mobs already have their correct sounds, and in a couple of days, all should be done. The mobs are a lot more convincing & frightening now that they yell, scream & grunt all the times..!

I also added a few other sounds : for the inventory, the force fields, etc… Once I’ll be done with the Mobs, I’ll do the sounds for the spells & abilities, and then the weapons, and it’ll be all done, and it’ll allow me to do a new gameplay video.

On another aspect, I got the armor loot created by a 3D artist freelancer, so that’s 1 thing less to do.

That’s all for now, cya !

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Slash & Big Slash

Ouch, last week I got sick, so I wasn’t able to work for the best part of it…

I got some kind of bad throat-ache with fever & all, and right now I’m still not 100% healed, but fever is gone and globally I’m almost alright so I’m ok to work today.

Nevertheless, last week, I started to work on the audio improvements. Footsteps are now much better. Throwing items does a woosh sound, and a poke sound when they touch the floor.

I also started to look into mob sound. I had hoped to find some game ready sound library, but actually, the existing ones are very low quality, so I had to get a more advanced library ; quality is much better, but I’ll have to adapt (or remix) the sounds so they can be used in game. Overall, I guess it’ll be better for the game, but it’ll take a lot more time than planned initially to manually handle each sound creation. I’ll try to do all that this week and see where it goes.

That’s all for now, cya !

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I’m on Fire !

Woh, last week went exactly as planned !

So 1st, you can see on the screenshot above the new Scorch visual FX, which is pretty neat ! And you can also see the slash effect for all the melee attacks (some attacks produce a bigger or smaller effect). This allowed me to create the 1st gameplay video of the game. Check the previous post if you want to watch it.

For the 2nd part, the story, it hasn’t been as much easy. One year ago, when I was thinking about it, I imagined a ton of stuff, but it’s pretty hard & long to put all the stuff in the game, especially without creating specific 3D models & environments to match the story details. So I did the bare minimum to get a little story going on, all that with dialogues and a few notes (and a tomb with a dead body ). My 1st hope is that the players won’t think “oh doh, it’d have been better to not have anything at all instead of this”, and my 2nd hope is that the players get slightly intrigued and curious to know how all that will end.

Building the story into a game is very different than writing a book. I wrote a couple of books, also short stories, but in a game, the story telling is much different and requires a lot of visual support, so it requires a lot of effort & thinking to put all the elements together, even when there’s not much to tell.

Anyway, it’s done now ; maybe I’ll polish a bit some details after the Beta Test reports, but it probably won’t change much.

This week (and possibly a part of the next one), I’m going to work on the sound FX. It is long due, as they didn’t change since the Alpha 1 ! If I can manage to do everything I want, this should greatly enhance the game atmosphere (and will deserve a new video! ).

Cya next time to check how all of this will have turned out !

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