Finally, some art

Fullscreen capture 3302013 115220 PM.bmp

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.

Daily Art

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.

Construct2 and the widest market

http://www.scirra.com/construct2

Construct2 is a game engine. I know I go through these things like a hot katana through butter, but this one has a certain benefit: it’s output is HTML5.

What this means is that unlike RenPy or Unity, we could feasibly publish a game to essentially anything that has the internet. That’s a pretty wide market. It also lowers the barrier to entry, so that all a potential user/reader has to do is visit the site. That’s a pretty powerful marketing tool. The more free, the better, the easier to access, the better. It’s all about making it so easy to get into the game that it’d be silly not to. Like World of Warcraft. It’s harder NOT to sign up than it is to actually sign up.

Diagram of Construct2 Visual Novel SysemAt any rate, here’s an interesting chart. I’ve found that there’s not a lot of people doing visual novels on Construct2 but it seems to be able to support the concept after a day’s investigation. So here’s our plan of making it work. It involves some ajax loading and csv funkiness, but ultimately, we’d be able to write games in open office and publish them out into Construct2. Pretty slick. Now I just have to roust my lazy artist self to do some real work.

 

Hawa: Textures

As I’ve noted before, I’ve been working on a D&D character for the last week. Here’s about 15 hours of progress on her, model and texture complete. I’m going to be adding a ton of props, and maybe even build out some environments for this game, cause its cool as hell.

Textures complete