Also, shameless plug for my friend Aakash Rao, the composer of the wonderful music in Aleph: if you are looking for a Christmas present to get yourself or someone else who enjoys such music, you can't do any better than Mr. Rao's album 'Respite', which can be found on iTunes here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/aakaash-rao/id376495815
I seriously can not recommend his music enough, and I am not just saying that because he was gracious enough to compose the music for Aleph. I am saying that a person with ears.
So, what have I been working on these past few weeks? Well, lot's o' stuff, of course!
I've been writing a tremendous amount of material for the in-game books that give background lore and hints as to where to find secret/special weapons, gear, items, tomes, and so forth. I realized part-way through that I get so involved in writing the lore out that there actually are very few hints at all towards in-game items. I will go back and rectify this during editing mode. But, as of right now, I have somewhere around 70 college essay pages worth of material written up and ready to go, and a friend of mine in the real world wrote up another 5-10 pages, inspired by the ingenius H.P. Lovecraft. Though, all of this only amounts to about 25% of the total in-game books I was planning to have, so I might need to adjust my final goal. I am attempting to write shorter in-game books and stories, but it is difficult because I enjoy getting lost in writing about certain details and actions, but I realize that not everyone who will play this game will want to bother reading so much material. As always, I am sure I will find some happy balance.
In addition to prolific writing, I have worked heavily on the dungeons, the final frontier in terms of game maps. I currently have 9 out of 11 dungeons all set and ready to be filled with monsters and loot and traps and puzzles and all that good stuff that I setup beforehand. If you look at the pictures you will notice some of them have fog of war. Most dungeons and caves will use fog of war if it makes sense. Buying a torch or a lantern and oil will increase your default view radius substantially; or casting a rather low-level spell can pretty much keep the whole screen revealed for a period of time, so there are options to overcome the view constrictions.
I have also edited and updated the monsters that appear in battle. One thing that bothered me were the shadows because they looked strange on the background, so I erased those and made newer, though more simplistic ones that look nicer. I will probably do the same thing for all of the character and monsters sprites that appear on the game maps as well. I also added a small plethora of new monsters to the monster roster because, well, variety is the spice of life (or death, as this case might be).
I have acquired some new art resources to make some new kickass character sprites and such, but they will need to wait until sometime after Christmas; I have an inkling that Santa might be bringing me some new software to utilize these resources.
So, I feel I will have the final two dungeons laid out before Christmas, thus completing pretty much the entire game world map, inside and out, save for the player housing area which is a special case. The coding is 95% complete, that last 5% being any errors or bugs that might crop up and the final polish on certain lesser systems. The music is for the most part complete; Mr. Rao has been remastering some of the older tracks so they are more consistent sound-wise to his later tracks. All the monsters are ready to rumble, 95% of the items are ready to go (the 5% being whatever I need to change in the future); I still need to make art for a few pieces of furniture like tables, chairs, stools, and so forth but that isn't a big deal. So, I am going to go ahead and toss out a pseudo-specific date here for people: I would like to begin the first round of Beta testing either by the end of February or beginning of March 2012. I think I will have enough content in place to warrent the beginning phases of testing, though not all content will be present. I'll expand on those details at a later time.
I have a feeling that the few days directly following Christmas will not be terribly productive for me. I have it under good authority that I might be getting Skyrim from Santa as well. How these secrets of Santa's become so commonplace and known is beyond me. Perhaps the North Pole should take lessons from the government regarding keeping information hidden from people.
Anyways! I hope you all have a great holiday!
No comments:
Post a Comment