I’ve been able to get a bunch done in the last month and I’m getting closer and closer to my short-term goal of having a playable first 4 levels. This update includes new character animations, new attack icons, an updated character select screen, intro movie updates, and pinch/zoom functionality.

I’m at the point of development where I feel I have a rough, yet playable, version of the game’s core functionality. I’ve built the intro, menu system, world map, battle maps, and character selection. I’ve created a playable, yet not very fun, game. And that leads me to my next big challenge which is to make the game fun.

After working on the intro, world map, and combat layer, it was time to work on the character selection screen. My short-term goal is to have 4 playable levels and the only major missing piece is the functionality to manage your heroes. Everything is still in a bit of a rough state, but here’s a look at what I have so far.

In the last update I demoed the latest version of the game’s battle layer and I’m comfortable with how that part of the game is progressing. There are still bugs to squish and polish to add, but now that I’m confident in the game’s art, animation, and general flow, it’s time to give audio some love. I’ve contracted the pros to help me out in this area, and with their help the game has gotten some fantastic ear candy. Here’s a look at the latest build with the new audio enhancements.

Many of my UI elements have been pretty ugly so far, but those days are soon coming to an end. I’ve now received pretty much all of the game’s artwork and in the last few weeks I started implementing the UI portion of that work. There’s still plenty of polish to add, but here’s a look at the battlefield UI in its current state.

Even though I missed my goal of releasing a game after a year of development, I still have a pretty solid foundation to build upon. And by foundation I mean an intro video, start screen, working world map, and very basic, yet playable battlefields. There’s still a lot of work to do, but here’s a look at those key foundation areas put together in the form of a simple game.

I’m happy to report that I’ve received the first 30 seconds of game music and that my ears are happy with what they’re hearing. It’s amazing what a little sound can do to the intro video and I can’t wait to see how the future music adds more depth to the game. I’ve also continued to experiment with some memory concerns and making scene transitions as smooth as possible. That’s required a bit of a re-write, but the game is heavy on texture memory usage, so it’s important to tackle this issue sooner than later.

I said I wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t help myself and took another crack at the intro video. The main practical reason is because the game’s music is being composed, and it kind of all derives from the intro song. The main impractical reason is because I hated the first video and couldn’t help myself from trying again. Here’s look at the second attempt.

I have a lot to share this time around, including icons, character animations, splash screens, world map animations, music and sound, and cut scenes. But the biggest achievement over the last two weeks was completing the first take of the game’s intro video, which you can see below.

Knights, Ninjas, and Wizards… If that title didn’t get you hooked, then you’re in the wrong place! I added some great sprites to the game in the last two weeks, but a man can only play with sprite sheets so long before he loses his sanity. I didn’t want to lose my sanity, so I also worked on my intro scenes in an attempt to regain control of my mind. I’m really happy with how everything is turning out so far, and you can see what I have so far after a quick word from our sponsors.

The good news is that I’ve received a ton of artwork over the last two weeks. The bad news is that I can only demo a small portion of it because there just isn’t enough time to get it all into the game. That’s a good problem to have, though, and what I can show you is some pretty cool cut scenes, some character animations, and this sweet footage of a knight putting the beat down on an evil ogre.

I feel like I made some really solid progress for the first time in a while, and I have some exciting stuff to share. A ton of little things were done, but the big accomplishments are the implementation of some awesome attack animations, battlefield animations, and world map animations. I also received some great new artwork and I gave my marketing efforts some much-needed love.

You can view all of this week’s updates with added commentary on YouTube or continue reading for a quick breakdown of each section.

With the holidays upon us, I wasn’t able to get much done over the last couple of weeks. But when I did get the chance to work, I made it count. I’ve been putting off character dialogue and scripted scenes for a while now, but I’m happy to say the framework to achieve that is now in place. Here is a brief example of a couple of characters engaging in a well written scripted scene, full of deception, intrigue, and suspense.

It’s been a little while since the last status update, due to the holidays and a mean case of strep, but I have some pretty cool stuff to share. I had hoped to add the functionality for dialogue into the game, but my animator got back to me with some awesome animations and I just couldn’t wait to implement them. So here’s a look at 4 of the hero character animations hot off the assembly line.

I really enjoyed working on the game over the last few weeks because pretty much everything I did resulted in visual progress. Adding code and manipulating JSON files is good and dandy, but programming is a lot more exciting when I’m working on something that my family and friends can visually experience.

As planned after the last update, I was able to add scene management, loading and saving functionality, and the ability to view the game on a physical device. There are also some pretty cool new battleground maps and my first character sprite .png animation to check out below.

As planned, I was able to continue programming over the last two weeks and add some more features and a new character to the demo. I also spent a little time working on some new character concepts, battlegrounds, and animation preparation.

For the first time in what feels like forever, I was able to get back into actually programming. I had no idea that hiring artists, researching art direction, building design documents, and working with contractors would take so much time, but it does. I can understand why studios have art directors and game designers because those two jobs take up just as much time as programming. Anyways, I was able to spend a full week programming, and here is a video update on where the game is at:

I had just started working with an illustrator when I last left off, and most of my time over the last two weeks was spent designing some pretty cool characters and battlefields. I was also able to contract a character animator, who is now working on the game’s first character animations.

When I left off last time, I was working with an illustrator to see if he could create the style of art I hope to use in my game. I’m happy to say that he exceeded my expectations and will be playing a large role in the game’s development. In addition to formally contracting the artist, I spent a little time playing with game mechanics and a lot of time preparing for the art that’s about to come rolling in.

Up until this update, everything that I did was basically learning and testing basic concepts that could be applied to many types of turn based games. Characters moved, attacked, died, etc. I’ve known that I wanted to make a turn based game, but I didn’t know exactly what I was going to build. That all changed this time around, because over the last two weeks I decided what game I want to build, created an art design document, and contracted an illustrator to draw preliminary sketches.

After the last update, I had plans to build out the HUD and add new attack actions to my characters. I added a new attack action to the archer and was feeling excited about all the new awesomeness about to go into my game. Unfortunately, my excitement was short-lived because I quickly realized that my code needed to be refactored before adding new action functionality to all my characters. Warning: This article gets technical.

This update was delayed by a week because I took a “vacation“, but I’m back in action and hard at work again. After the last update I had some concerns about making my game work across multiple devices, but I’m happy to say that Corona makes multi-device support pretty easy. It was actually so easy that I was not only able to make my prototype work across multiple devices, but I also had time to start adding some basic HUD elements to the game.

I’ve added a lot of pretty cool changes to my prototype in the last two weeks, including new characters, attack animations, directional movement, death animations, and sound effects. The game is still a very rough prototype, but as you can see in the video below, I’m now able to actually play a complete level from start to finish.

I was really excited after the last update because I felt like the foundation of my code was relatively solid and the core game mechanics were working. With that core work out of the way, I was free to focus on polishing what I had built and thinking about what type of game I ultimately want to build. In the last 2 weeks I was able to fix a bunch of bugs, add obstacles, add art, and switch the camera point of view. Add all of those together and you get a game that’s starting to look pretty sweet in my unbiased opinion.

I’m a little over a month into my game now and I feel like I finally have something that resembles what will one day be a playable game. When I left off last time, I was hoping to add some AI to the game, and I’m happy to report that the AI system wasn’t as hard as I had originally feared. In the last two weeks, I was able to add archer and mage characters to the game and also give the enemy characters some intelligence.

To see where I’m out, check out the following video.

When I left off two weeks ago, I had the goal of adding some bad guys to fight my valiant knight. The good news is that those bad guys can now be seen and attacked, but the bad news is that for every step forward, I’ve had to take about 0.9 steps back. If learning was the name of the game before my first update, refactoring is the name of the game this time around. I knew there was going to be a price to pay for plunging into my game without much thought given to organization and structure, and it was time to pay the piper.

But in an effort to stay positive about game development, let’s celebrate the visual progress I’ve made.

I’m two weeks into game development and I’ve realized that making a game will require a lot of learning and hard work, and this is going to be a lot of fun. I know so little about game development that it’s difficult to even know where to start. What should be a seemingly simple task, like animating and moving a sprite, can be challenging due to amateur hour mistakes.

All journeys have beginnings and today is where my journey starts. While I might not be as useless as the n00b MTG card above, I do lack most of the skills required to build a video game. Advancing from beginner to competent game developer will be a difficult task, but I’m hoping that’s where this quest leads.