Key Events
• Detailed polish to cutscene.
• A rough "game"

For the past year I’ve been working on a bunch of different code bases learning new concepts. For this update, I decided to piece together a first build of my “game” to get rid of redundant bits of code. I’m left with an app that has menus, navigation, saving, loading, and cutscenes. While it’s still far from an enjoyable game, it’s cool stuff to have a foundation to work with.

To see everything in motion, check out the video below.

Bringing Cutscenes To The Next Level

The original plan for this update was to do another round of polish on the story. Fortunately, I had a friend in town — Brian from Secret Powers. He specializes in trailer / movie making / special effects, so was able to provide just the critique I needed. He actually came up with the gif below to show how much better the story could be.

Now that I’ve seen the true potential, I have a better idea of what direction to go. Also, I’m considering working with Brian on trailers and cutscenes for the game because the improvement is so noticeable.

Foundation of a Game

Because I’m on hold until I find out to what extent I’ll be working with Brian, I decided to move back to code. I took each of my separate projects (story, battle, tests) and started merging them into one code base. That provided the appearance of a game as you can see below:

The cool part about this is that the following now work reliably:

• Saving
• Loading
• Scene management and caching
• Conditional scene ordering
• Data accessors (i.e: what troops are currently in my army)
• Basic UI framework (propagating buttons, action callbacks, etc)

I haven’t finished bringing the battle into this project yet, so that is where I’ll pick up. Once that is complete, it will feel like I have a real project that I’m building off of.

Other Things in Motion

I’m moving on to my last week with Scott, our illustrator. With this completed, design and thought has been put into all maps, merchants, heroes, upgrades, camps, and units. I’m in a fairly good spot, and even though it is over budget the time restriction on this contract has been nice to enforce scope.

Aside from that, I’ll be starting music in a couple of weeks, and I have postponed voice because of the story uncertainty mentioned above. Nothing is planned for sound yet. My rough thinking is that when music is done, I’ll just focus and get a fun, functional game working. Then, I’ll revisit working with contractors to add that much needed polish.