Author Archives: Arcandio

Finally, some art

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So, we’ve got a lot of progress on Assault Magister Tactics, including saving and loading the game, starting battles from a hub level, spawning at start locations, and a host of other cool stuff. But we just started on the artwork tonight; we’ve got a prototype character in there now, and she’s adorable. We’re drawing from Final Fantasy Tactics and Sprial Knights, super-deformed characters with big, chibi heads and expressive designs. Hopefully Unity’s new Mechanim will help save a bunch of time for our animations.

Scalemaker

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So I work as a designer, largely with windows applications, largely using WPF as our framework. Today I spent a bit of time learning the ins and outs of Winforms to bone up on my C# skills. For synergy, I coded an app that returns a Scale and the chords in that scale given a key and a scale/mode type. I’m pretty sure that most of the modes and melodic/harmonic minors are broken, but it did it’s job as a learning project.

Winforms is very easy to work in, but as a designer, I want to start getting my hands in XAML as soon as I feel comfortable. Winforms is BORING.

Long time, no see

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Okay, so if you remember, I was working on NaNoWriMo last time I posted, making it about 5 months since my last post. Gomen ne.

Voidspiral is working on a new game, called Assault Magister Tactics. It’s combining a lot of our old projects in to one coherent idea. We’re prototyping it right now, and its coming along well. Voidspiral is also publishing commit messages from AMT to twitter, so that’s cool. We’ve also got a kanban board for development progress over here.

I’m also learning C# finally, and I have to say, I’m perfectly comfortable there already. Yes, there are things that are better in C# than Unityscript. Yes it’s more powerful. Yes, it was more intimidating. No, there’s not that much different between C# and Unitscript. All told, I’m happy to add another language to my resume. I haven’t worked in it extensively yet, (aside from about a thousand lines on AMT) but I feel like I can solve any challenge given to me with enough time. Now, if only I had some books on well structured code…

I’m also finally getting around to music theory. I bought The Everything Music Theory Book, and it’s fantastic. So is Hooktheory.com. I’m learning so much from these resources I hardly have time to actually attempt making music. I’ve been doing practices, rhythm sequences, chord sequences, etc. My sheet reading is still very slow, but I’m getting the theory at least. I want to make AMT something I can do completely myself… Thought NGui looks soooooo good. As a designer, and an indie game developer, I want it so hard. I’m really trying to be frugal on this project though, so I haven’t gotten it yet.

I’m considering going freelance at some point, to spend more time on indie game dev and design work that I can enjoy, but that’s probably a long way off.

As for NaNoWriMo, I did win, and I topped over 80,000 words in November 2012. Total, that story is almost 100,000 words. I’m working my way through editing it, but I’m a little afraid that I like the story too much and I’m not being hard enough on it. I’m always picking at the details rather than the structure or events. Well, anyway, that’s still going. Someday I’ll bookstart that thing on Pubslush or something.

One last thing,  I’ve been trying to grapple with setting up Koken and using it for a new portfolio, but I can’t get it running in my test environment, so right now its a no-go.

Still on the table:

  • Oubliette 2 (Stalled at the Kickstarter Video Phase, I’m terrible at recording myself and talking to a camera about my games.)
  • MEK (Stalled at the Kickstarter Video Phase, Same Reason)
  • PixelTails (Stalled on the massive updates thing)

Thats it for now, and I promise to update more frequently. Again.

NaNoWriMo Impends

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Like the Sword of Damocles, the beginning (and thus the end, 30 days later) of National Novel Writing Month is only a few short weeks off. We’ll be participating again this year, and we’re going to win. If anyone’s interested in keeping up with us, or potentially being writing buddies, here are our user names:

Spellguns

Silira

Time to make sure our outlines are nailed down. See you at the end of November, in the winner’s circle.

Daily Art

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Once again, I feel like I need to get cracking on my art skills. So once again, I’m going to start doing daily art: Sketches, sketch models, simple assets, textures, whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. Just enough to keep me in shape.

More Voidspiral Games

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We’ve added a couple of our other long-term projects to Voidspiral. Pixol is in the process of being ported to Android, and we’re finally working the kinks out of Exonomicon: The Ritual. Bounce on over and check them out.

[Edit]

Also, we’re in the process of getting some Trello boards up to date with our backlog of projects, so people can see where we’re at.

Codename: Astram – The First Two Weeks

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Hello everyone, I’d like to introduce a new project we’re working on here at Arcandio. The working title is Astram. It’s a touch-style diablo-clone for Android. We’re two weeks in on it right now, and while there’s plenty not implemented, we’ve gotten a lot done in two weeks.

We will be updating the site as frequently as possible, but our Trello Board for the project has the most up-to-date info on it. If you’re interested, drop by and check it out. If you visit, make sure you vote for your favorite features!

Features completed

  • Player Movement
  • Enemy Movement
  • Enemy selection and basic attacks
  • Basic Gui
  • Player and enemy stats
  • Large list of item prefixes, types, and suffixes
  • Saving to XML

Next few features

  • Equipment Gui
  • Add Non-Equip items (Potions, quest items, etc.)
  • Rescale tap area for characters
  • Character Art!
  • Level Art Design