Has it been more than a month?!…

Yep, it has… Between Christmas and work overload afterwards, we haven’t exactly worked a lot on “Grey”…

We haven’t stopped, it’s just that the output rate wasn’t that big, and even when it was, it wasn’t “show-worthy”… Anyway, we’re back to blogging!

We came into the new year with extra motivation to finish a game (something we’ve been lacking the last few years at Spellcaster Studios)… We had some discussions about the possibility of dropping “Grey” temporarily and focus on an easier game to build (with less content, simpler game systems), but decided against it… seemed like some sort of defeat, and on the other hand, “Grey” is a good solid idea that needs a ton of work to get up and running, but I’m sure it’s going to be worth it!

Anyway, as you might have noticed, Rincewind has been working on concepts lately (and he finished the Blood Fiend model, but I want to do a “shader-pass” on it before showing it). The first one is some drafts for the Lightkeeper, a monster that’s keeping the Light Wisps trapped in the graveyard of Calabeth. That will be our first boss fight in the game…

Afterwards, we have some studies on patterns for the architecture in the city of Calabeth… Calabeth used to be a city of a thousand different cultures, so we decided to move the main part of the game to the inside of the Kalvan Academy in Calabeth, so we don’t have to design the assets/content for a city that has little reuse of geometry and textures… It doesn’t impact the story that much and will allow us to do a more polished piece of work on the structures. The Kalvan Academy is a huge place, so nothing is lost there.

We have also some concepts for the pirates we found in the beachhead next to Calabeth.. They’re shipwrecked there and will need some help to survive the attacking hosts of monsters from the city. We wanted to make pirates that didn’t look that much with classic pirates, and I think we’ve succeeded…

Below, there’s some concepts of Wraiths… At the moment, they’re just a mess of ideas that we’re still undecided about… The humanoids are too “skeleton”-like, but we already have skeletons in the game, but the less humanoid will probably require a lot of work in terms of shaders/effects; so we’ll have to balance these two ideas…

From a technical perspective, I’ve been working mostly on top of our Indie Speed Run entry (Purgatory), since it’s not as complex as the scriptbase for “Grey”, but it shares all the codebase… It makes it easier to test things on; loads faster too!

Anyway I’ve completed the load/save system, and I’m quite proud of it… every part of the game state is saved and restored exactly as it was… the only issue is that all “threads” are restarted when we load back a save game, which forces me to build reentrant coroutines, which is fancy speech for functions that can be invoked over and over again without spoiling the current state. It’s not as clean as I’d like, but this should only pose an issue if I allow for saving the game state during cutscenes (AI coroutines, for example, are reentrant by nature, the cutscenes are very linear).

Anyway, we have the system working properly on Purgatory (and I just have to add a couple of functions on Grey’s scripts to make it work there), and in the process I got a nifty system for reloading scripts on the fly… so if a script fails to load or finds an error somewhere during execution, I can just change it on my editor of choice and when I save it, it gets reloaded on the player while the game continues on… This allows me to test the reentrant coroutines and improves my development speed in terms of script writing (which will be the main part of the development in the future, since there’s nothing in the codebase that is directly linked to Grey or Purgatory).

Hopefully, we’ll be able to get this game finished nearer the end of the year, so keep your eyes peeled here!