Still alive and coding!

Title says it all. Had a pretty big personal loss recently and though I haven't been very active on this blog as of late out of mourning and taking care of business...it's time that I turn the engines back to full throttle and get fired up as sanji about pushing through and finishing up Journey to Westshire! Taking the time away from development has opened my eyes to several game play features and issues that I will be implementing and resolving, so I guess it was kind of a good thing. Upon reading an article that for some reason I can't find now to link to you..... I am actually going to cap the game off at about a third of the way into the story and release it as a demo. The article championed the use of demos to build an audience for the game and get people excited to play it, as well as have those people point out things that maybe you want to change or edit in the full title. My full title will be for sale by the way. I'm still debating on a price though. Gotta pay for all that ramen and coffee I've been consuming to make this happen lol Thanks for following the blog, if you have been, and I promise to make weekly updates from here on out. Back to doing the dev thing!

Things I've done since my last blog?
-Finished up the mapping of the entire game
-Finished up the eventing(or placement of events) for the demo
-Started balancing item/gold placement, skills, enemies, and bosses.

Disappointment

I gave it my all but in the end I missed the deadline. Truth be told, I need another 4-5 hours more to get to a point where I'd be content with it. Sucks....I really pushed hard to make this happen. My entire table is full of coffee cups and tiny bottles of five hour energy lol though I am disappointed in myself I will push on and finish up the game anyway. I may not get the attention I was shooting for or whatever secret prizes the contest had(one of which was some love on a popular podcast!! =_( oh well...) I will be posting up a link for download and I'm sure some of the community will throw in some reviews when I post it up on their normal finished project threads. What did I ultimately take away from this experience? 1. With more practice I can design pretty good maps in minutes 2. It's good to stay organized throughout a project, because in those moments when you've had too much coffee and you lose most higher brain functions due to lack of sleep you can still get stuff done without creating too many bugs. 3. I need to work on managing my time better.

The Contest and The Deadline

So I am down to the last 25 hours before the project, Journey to Westshire, is due. I'm starting to see what all the books I've read up to this point have been talking about when they say that they have to make a lot of sacrifices in the game just to get it out on time. I always thought that that was stupid and that they should always take their time on games, it's done when it's done n' all. Though when important opportunities like contests that'll get your name out in the spotlight appear and you have to finish by a certain time otherwise it won't matter, things change. I started out with this project to test gameplay elements that would come straight out of Blue Grimoire to see what people thought of them. In the end, I took them out because I felt that it made the game too complicated and wasn't going with it's flow. I'm still not finished and I haven't even begun testing for bugs yet. My hope is to finish by midnight tonight, get a few hours of sleep, and debug until the deadline 6pm Sunday. I hope people will see my skills with this and I also hope to get criticized where I need to be criticized so I can grow as a developer. Well, I'm off to go get more coffee. I'll link everything up tomorrow evening ;)

Journey to Westshire

Once upon a time I went to college for game programming and I was forced to write a text based game in python(that's a programming language :P). For those who can run such a project can find my old .py here. Would you believe that the project was actually supposed to be rock, paper, scissors? lol I was kind of an overachiever back in the day. Anywho, my point, is that the community that I am apart of is having a "Release Something Weekend" and since Blue Grimoire is quite a ways from becoming a playable demo I was thinking that I'd reboot my old python project via rpg maker vx ace and try out a few gameplay elements in it that I plan on using in Blue Grimoire just to test things out. I'm giving myself a week break from Blue Grimoire to get this thing out there and I think my mind could do without witches for a bit after all the research and conditional branches I've been working with lately lol Look forward to the release of "Journey to Westshire", the story of three adventurers Zeke, Erik, and Raven who are taking a mysterious package through a dangerous forest full of thieves, beastmen, and magical creatures all for the almighty gold piece.

I have decided on a name!

That's right. The mysterious game project previously dubbed Modern Witch Project now has a fitting name...*drum roll* "Blue Grimoire". I know there will be several of you out there that will probably ask where they came from so I'll go ahead and tell you. The main character, Joanna, was given a blue grimoire by a man who used to walk the path of a mage killer. He "passed" the grimoire to her via touch, so there is no physical copy, it's all in her head. She will need the knowledge of the blue grimoire if she ever hopes of being able to take down Anastasia, the powerful witch who murdered her family. The Blue Grimoire itself is a major gameplay feature that will handle upgrades, gathered information, etc. I felt it was the most fitting title out of the large amount of possibilities that came to me during my title brainstorming sessions. It's catchy, could easily have a ":" added for sequels should the possibility come up, and it's a major gameplay feature. So I'm going with it.

I also wanted to bring up that now that I have a title I'll be able to commission an artist to make a title screen for me. I have a pretty good idea of how I'd like it to look but we'll see what happens. On another note, I picked up a pretty good book the other day which has helped me take a more professional turn for the development of this project. Which translates to me now working on a concept document. Not to be confused with a game design document. The concept document is used mainly for pitching the game for funding which is something that I will be trying to do. Pretty much have most of it worked out, but nothing is set in stone just yet....that's kind of how development works, haha. Example, I thought I had everything worked out the way I wanted it and thought that the ending would be badass since you'd have multiple choices and could choose how you wanted to end things. Then I heard the latest podcast by FinalBossBlues which made the argument that such endings were horrible because it would make all the decisions the player had made up to that point meaningless, a la Mass Effect 3. So I have a bit of rethinking to do on how I'm going to handle the gameplay ending and storyline ending. That's all for today though. Hopefully I'll finish up the concept document and get started on the proof of concept which is just a mechanics demo, not a full blown demo. All these terms!!

Artwork for the unnamed project!

Not being able to give the project a name is really starting to bug me. I need to like, light scented candles and zen meditate to game OSTs then maybe something'll shake loose lol

Anywho, remember a few posts ago I spoke of how I commissioned an artist to draw up some concept art for the Modern Witch project? Well, Michael Tran came through and here is my main character and both stages of her fire elemental, Grom.

Comments, Critiques, whatever. Will post more on gameplay and what not as development continues!

All or nothing gamble

What I'm about to write might freak some people out and they will tell me it's MADNESS but honestly I don't have much of a choice...I'm putting in my two weeks at my job today.
"Why? How will you survive?!"
Well, sadly my father can no longer take care of himself and needs round the clock care. I can't afford it and the places that I could afford I wouldn't want to put any human being through. My only option is to take care of him myself along with my siblings. Coincidentally, this means I'll have more time to work on my project...when I'm not pimping myself out as a jack-of-all-trades with electronic repair and helpdesk or selling stuff on ebay/amazon/movie exchange. It's a hell of a gamble, my project could fail and I have nothing for all the effort and money I've put into it, but I feel it's worth it if it means I can spend time with my father. Seeing him happy to be home after the months in hospitals is worth it all in spades. Wish me luck, I guess!