Progress update…

After a big fight in these last nights, I got rid of most of the critical bugs in the editor, which means that me and Rincewind will start assembling the arena for our first milestone… I wonder how long until we find the first critical bug!

The idea behind the first milestone is to have an internal version of the game running in which we can test the first battle, pitching Grey and some Lava Imps against some Skeletal Wardens, Fighters and Berserkers. The UI will still be my own (the ugly, box based stuff), which sucks, but we’d rather have the game in working condition before actually working on the UI (after we actually figure out how the game plays, what kind of operations are more common, etc.).

We have some challenges ahead in this first milestone, like rudimentary AI, path-finding and (I think will be necessary) shadowmap rendering (my current shadow rendering might still be too slow for actual use in a real scene with plenty of lights).

In parallel, we also want to have finalized the game poster (including the game logo, etc.)… and we want to make 3 videos: a short teaser trailer, a gameplay video and some sort of “talk about the game video”, so we can start trying to get some awareness for the game… Hopefully this all will be completed between mid-April and May.

Our approach to game development here in Spellcaster Studios is atypical for a small indie studio (from what I’ve seen in other indie blogs, etc.); we focus a lot on tools, which means that the beginning of the project is quite slow, trying to get all the tools and basic internal systems up to speed; gameplay code is done in a very data-driven fashion, which means that internal systems take a lot longer than in “hard-coded” cases… Also, getting the art pipeline to work while the renderer is still in flux is a challenge! Still, we believe this is the best way to work, even if the beginning is slow, since the further we’re along in the project, the faster it goes (which is usually the inverse you have in most indie projects I follow).

So we have a bit more visuals in this talk-talk-talk post, here’s a couple of screengrabs of Grey summoning the Lava Imp (everything except the models done by a programmer!):

Anyway, wish us luck!