Mad King's Lair: Tome of Destruction (03s.09)

"I've spent about... 4,000 hours on this project at this point. Which... is both a lot, and was less time then I spent playing either Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft. I was a video game QA for a very, very long time. So repeatable, redundant tasks are something of a professional way of life now. I've tried five times in ten years to produce a full scale game. It wasn't until 2018 that I decided to wholly dedicate myself to an engine. I chose UNITY because it was the most 'Indie' friendly. Everyone in Unreal seemed to be pursuing AAA, and I was absolutely not. There's something about chasing AAA 1999 that's a very different journey."

Mad King's Lair began as a Table Top card game. It still is... it just didn't sell. It's a very competitive market, and to be honest our Kickstarter didn't do terribly well. (Despite the thousands of dollars I spent on the advertising). 

But the IP is so SOLID that I couldn't bear to not move it to a different game concept. So we chose to create an extended universe, and converted the work we'd done on the SEA OF STEAM mmo project, and the ADVENTURES OF KAPPA project and bring them together into one game. Something with a solid definition of what done would look like. And *poof* Tome of Destruction was born.

It's meant to be the best of Majora's Mask, Dark Cloud, and Elder Scrolls Oblivion IV mixed. But that's a crazy aesthetic to build. So I spent about 9 months building the backend. (Menus, Time & Travel Systems, Weapons, Puzzle Elements, etc) before I ever cracked ground on world building.

But we're firmly intrenched in that World now. And for the First Time the World is beginning to feel like a world. 

My strengths are firmly planted in Story Telling, and Voice acting. I'm more excited by the Elder Scrolls style questing, and lore building that ANYTHING else. Which means I'm required to do it last. I have to focus on getting the world built and built well. 

What started as floating Icons to make the sky system work (Because the game is a series of Sky Islands circa Kingdom Hearts) have become full blown levels. Librus, the second hub, has more Biomes than any other in the game. Which means it's the most complicated. So we hit something of a roadblock in time as we're creating the Teleport Mechanics here. And, while we were at it, we might as well build the chests as well. 

Like the temples in Yesterday's video these chests open just like the temples do. Save for the fact that they leave behind rubbish when they're done. And though they reset each time you reset the Days (Travel back in time to Day 1) they'll be persistent through the levels in the same run of the 3 day cycle. 

What's fun about this is that I'm a blender moron, and don't want to learn 3DS max. Like most of the tools that I use, I'm using some random, obscure, out of date silliness. In this case 99% of my 3D design happens in Sketchup thanks to a collection of plugins which basically convert it into a workable Game Creation platform. I have other toys, and I do some of it in-engine within Unity. But complex retexturing, or in this case a fundamental redesign of a mesh (model) to match a different game element happens in Sketchup.

Knowing that I use Macromedia (Adobe) fireworks for my Color Tweaking of Textures is also pretty fantastically silly. I'm adept in Inkscape, and can manage in Photoshop. But Fireworks is my beau for quick PNG tweaks.

So lest you wonder... I'm a mutant, and my game reflects that. It's Squirrely. But I'm fighting the good fight for cohesion in the creation, despite the ongoing balance to make sure that everything functionally works. During the forthcoming streams you'll see how much I've customized Unity to match my needs. On its own it's fairly helpless. Without about 20 plugins running customizations to the engine there's no way I could do this work as one person.