Hey guys,
Short story update for you today. It's not complete yet, but I didn't want to delay any longer while I work on it. It's called Open and Shut Case and features Detective Ford of the Sunrest City Watch. It's slightly NSFW.
This one's certainly been the hardest to write so far. Still fun, though. I think I'm better at making characters than I a...
2016-11-11 23:54:19 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Had more family things to attend to on Saturday, but Vahn and I found some time to work yesterday.
Since Crimson's sweeping optimisations and the overhaul of the UI, it's been a bit slow putting the new UI together as well as patching up the back-end, since with the new systems a few areas were left nonfunctional. Happily I can say that we now have the battles functional again with the new UI. Work from this point on will be adding new things rather than (drastically) improving...
2016-11-07 17:59:29 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Time for the bi-weekly update once again. It's got some dirty stories I wrote over the weekend, featuring a new character and both Marley and Griggle, some lore stuff, and the post also includes some important news about the site for this month. You can read it here: Forum link!
2016-11-02 08:42:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
Other things have been keeping us a bit busy this week. I've had family over from the US whom I hadn't seen for 12 years, so that was a nice surprise.
I've been chiefly working on more armour ideas today. 'Adventurer' type armour has been mentioned on the forums, so I wanted to give that a try, as well as playing around with more traditional RPG leather armour. Given the nature of the material, I think it should be something highly modifiable and look as if it's worn and lived-...
2016-10-28 05:43:54 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Over the weekend Vahn, Crimson, and I worked on the UI and battle system. For the most part this was Crimson walking us through the battle system's code in detail, learning how it controls its state and how to send and receive messages between different parts. This is important to get right, and means that Vahn is now better able to create and maintain the parts of the GUI he has built. It was a long and not all too fun process to go through, so some appreciation is due to both of th...
2016-10-24 20:52:53 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Managed to spend some time with Vahn this week building up the new battle GUI. It's very enjoyable to watch him work, as he has deep enough experience with Unity's GUI system that he can put things together and have them behave properly very quickly. It's almost all in place already, what needs to happen next is another little meeting with all three of us in order to hook up the buttons so that moves are displayed, pressing them sends the right messages to the right places, and the c...
2016-10-20 18:11:02 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Bi-weekly update time! Forum link
2016-10-15 16:04:16 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Apologies for being a little late. I've been a bit under the weather, and both Vahn and Crimson have been pretty busy.
So far the main goal has been to get Vahn and Crimson set up in such a way that allows them to work as independently of each other as possible. This means getting everyone set up correctly with the git repository and with the right information about the game's current structure. It has meant trying to find times when everyone is around and free, so it's been a ...
2016-10-12 06:57:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
Time for the bi-weekly update on our forums, which you can find and read right here!
Extra thanks to everyone who's pledged on here, you really keep us going. Thank you from all of us. <3
2016-10-05 20:53:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
Recently I've been working at some redesigns for our user interface, based on both feedback from you guys and from Crimson. The biggest problem to solve has been time, as the current layout, although quite functional, really works against what Unity's GUI system can do and as such has been a headache to get it working.
Dividing the screen into quarters instead of having central elements allows us a lot more flexibility, as well as nicely supporting Unity's simple vertical layou...
2016-09-28 22:38:19 +0000 UTC View PostActually a bit more of a Dev Diary today. Crimson is currently using what time he can to do some major refactoring of the game's code. This will help in the immediate future, as the change will make creating new UI elements much easier to plug into the game, as well as eliminate the need for a lot of extra code. It'll make it a simpler task for anyone else working on the project to add and change things, such as myself and Vahn - the very kind and awesome developer I menti...
2016-09-25 03:26:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
Last few days for me have been busy with financial things, long phone calls with my accountant making sure everything is in order (which it is), as well as discussions about the future and myself looking at other ways to generate income.
Everyone backing us on Patreon continues to be a massive help. Without that support I'd have much less time to keep working, designing, and writing, but there's not enough to support both Crimson and myself once the last of the budg...
2016-09-21 04:06:27 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Time for the bi-weekly update on our forums. There's a couple new things, some that were requested a few days ago, such as a world map and more information on Sunrest. :)
2016-09-16 19:54:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
Thanks for all the comments and feedback on the last one. I think I now have a good idea about how to handle armours in terms of programming, which should also give us some nifty things to use in terms of text descriptions as well.
Essentially, each 'main armour' item, be it the Sunrest Watch Armour, or some basic Iron Armour or suchlike, would have some flags attached. This would be either on, off, always on, or always off. There would be a flag for crotch, rear, chest, and I'...
2016-09-11 19:37:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
More rough concepts for Sunrest guard outfits today. Rather than work on something new I've been chipping at them and thinking over how best to make armour work in CS.
The two bottom rows show a (sort of) progression from least clothing to most for a standard male and female. After some feedback I wanted to include a kind of overshirt or something for covering the chest proper. However, after looking at all the possible combinations, it looks like perhaps a better solution than...
2016-09-06 18:27:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
More concept art today. I'd like to do more but it's been a couple of bad pain days. Things are improving though, so more art soon!
Anyway, armour in Carnal Souls is a strange thing by normal game design standards. Essentially I now think of weapons and armour as just 'gear' - everything has attack and defense stats, the only difference really is that they each are equipped to different slots. Since weapons can be defensive, like shields, and armour can be offensive, in the cas...
2016-09-03 01:19:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey guys,
Been a long time since drew stuff proper, so forgive me for the roughness. Wanted to have a pass at roughing up some concepts for the Bullyan family - you can read about them in the Codex under Boven.
Thoughts and feedback are welcome, as are any suggestions about what you'd like to see next either for concepts or more Codex entries. You can leave comments on Patreon here or on...
2016-08-31 20:43:56 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Bit of an early bi-weekly update, you can read everything here: Forum link!
2016-08-28 23:20:07 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Crimson's been getting acclimatised with his side project, so while he's been doing that, I've taken the opportunity to actually have a couple days off. I forget how much they're needed.
Despite that I've had a few ideas form for more lore stuff, so I'll try to get those typed up soon for the Codex, which you can find on our forums. We've had a quick meeting today so we know what we're getting on with tomorrow, which should be another CSV importer for our moves list and further...
2016-08-24 20:44:15 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Things have been a little slow here recently, due to Crimson finding some other part-time work to do. This is important for us, as anything that keeps us fed and housed keeps Carnal Souls going. So, while this may cause a reduction in pace, it does mean our immediate future is a little more secure now. At least, secure enough that we're not in a permanent state of panic attack any more. It's also in no small part to the amazing support we've gotten from everyone on Patreon. <3
... 2016-08-19 19:08:08 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Today's update comes in the form of a long update I've posted on our forums. Check it out!
2016-08-16 18:30:04 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
First of all, thank you everyone who has backed us before and continues to back us on Patreon. The reported figure on Patreon just tipped over $1,000, and every cent of that is helping us massively. Thank you, all of you <3
We've been working hard to earn that money, too. The inventory system nears its prototype completion. We now have an interface which you can open and close either in the map view or the battle view, browse your stuff, and equip or unequip gear. This is al...
2016-08-12 14:07:28 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Apologies for the slightly delayed dev diary. The past few days have been mostly administrative work on my end, dealing with the end of the month costs and getting everything squared away in the records, and trying to squeeze everything we can out of what's left of the budget. I've also been catching up on the forums and making sure everything's running fine there, and noting down bug reports posted elsewhere.
Crimson's had to take a couple days to start preparing to move house...
2016-08-08 23:47:33 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Just pushed the new build, you can find the full update here.
v0.0.2 Changelog:
Hey guys,
The game continues to move forward. We're pretty close to the next build now. Crimson's been wrestling with Unity's GUI system; while it is a massive improvement over their OnGUI system of old, it does have some very glaring shortcomings which have made life difficult for him. For instance, right now it seems impossible to anchor any GUI element to another element, without them being a child object in the hierarchy. So, for instance, if you wish for a popup menu to be anchored to...
2016-08-04 17:00:56 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Instead of a Dev Diary, we have the full bi-weekly update. If you guys prefer I can paste them here, but Patreon's post writer doesn't seem to handle any formatting very well. It used to, but doesn't recently for some reason, so it's much simpler to link to the post on our forums:
https://forums.carnalsouls.com/threads/august-update.99/
2016-08-01 22:11:22 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
So after some time spent in the weeds, arguing with Unity about things, we're back to making progress. Crimson's been hard at work creating systems for the equipment database and moves database, as well as bending Unity to his will. Unity is a fantastic piece of kit, but not without its weirdness.
We can now have a character equip something by storing the ID of the equipment in a particular slot. In...
2016-07-29 22:34:02 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Seeing as we've gotten some key frameworks in place recently, the next task has been to optimise and improve. Being an arty type, I tend to think of it as sketching it out to make sure it all works, then committing it to the picture with linework and colours.
Crimson's own description of what he's been doing:
"Previously, when connecting state stores to game views, and game views back to state stores, I had to attach all of that stuff manually in the editor. ...
2016-07-26 14:12:40 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
The battle system is now working in its most basic form. We can spawn an enemy, go to the battle screen, have a fight (consisting right now of punching eachother until the enemy dies), then returning to the map screen.
This has involved a lot of back-and-forth between Crimson and I about the minutia of the battle system. I had had in mind a system similar to Pokemon - both parties choose their action, then both actions are played out in order of current highest speed st...
2016-07-23 18:48:19 +0000 UTC View PostHey guys,
Crimson and I have been making some good progress on the battle screen GUI and some of the back-end behind it. We also took a long look at how Unity renders text, since we had a lot of reports that it was blurry unless fullscreened on the character creator.
We were able to get it sharper, but everything other than the blurry default seems to mangle the characters with strange pixellation and artifacts. So, for the moment while we're building it, we've made the smallest ...
2016-07-20 16:45:54 +0000 UTC View Post