There's an art to crafting everything the first time. In order to make a game cohesive, I have to produce an experience which gives you each UI element, and each mechanic one at a time. I'm so grateful to all of the fans who have taken apart The Zelda Games over and over and over to do such critical analysis. 2023-10-30 21:52:31 +0000 UTC View Post
I foolishly labeled this Cleanup. When in fact, what this really was was a Wiring and Continuity Pass build. I've played a LOT of Elder Scrolls Games, and I was an MMO QA tester for the birth of instancing as a conc...
2023-10-15 17:39:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a quick post while I'm doing the Sun/Moon wiring on our custom sky.
We have received an invite to have a booth at Fan Fest next year. As the deadline fast approaches, I'm going to look at what it would take to get a Demo of the first part of the game up and running by Q1 of 2024. We have about 60% of what I would call our Ocarina demo. The rest would be AI and marketing.&n...
2023-09-13 18:36:48 +0000 UTC View Post
3/21 of the Time Travel Rigs remain. This milestone has been WILD!
COMPLETED TASKS
And so we return to the Developer Room (Palace? This thing is looking more and more like a Persona dungeon by the day).
Today we broke back into the revised Time Frame Wiring for the Deciduous Delve zone. Which we've eloquently dubbed C1 in the Dev Docs. (This...
2023-07-09 19:09:01 +0000 UTC View PostThis is so incredibly exciting for me. The Artificer Wheel is so central to the functionality of the game. It's our Ocarina of Time, our Blitzball, our Master Chief Suit... and it's so super cool.
The wheel it...
2023-07-05 21:13:46 +0000 UTC View Post
The Artificer Wheel has a connected book called the Lexicon UI. There's a Page for Each Zone which contains NPCs from that Zone, and pages for Major Abilities, Places, Things, Events, and Enemies of note. Each skill, when clicked, spins the Wheel to the correct characters, but doesn't spin the wheel for you.
Unfortunately, from the Development side, this requires 700 variables, and 26 UI screens. And each screen requires its own art assets.
Long s...
2023-06-26 20:19:52 +0000 UTC View Post
I spent some time in Sketchup... can you tell?
One of the things which made Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask so utterly addicting was that you had a magic tool which was your constant companion. Despite the game being relatively simple you always had this little blue trinket which could control all of space and time at a whim. It had its limits, but you felt like you would be able to control every polygon of this little world if only you had ...
2023-06-22 17:41:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Not much can happen until we're done wiring up the Time Travel System. It's required for forward progression. We coded it back in MILESTONE 2 last year. But it's just been sitting and waiting. You can see the first half of the wiring video from yesterday here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1846967383
For now, the Hub is built, with teleport gates to each nest of D...
2023-06-17 05:05:24 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s taken a long time to reach this point. One of the hardest things in the creation of a game or new IP is the foundation of a unique sense of universe. I’m a huge advocate, as a writer, that a solid narrative is founded not in the words, but in the sandbox you create. Adventure happens where you are. But when I look at games like Kingdoms of Amalur or Fable or Dungeon Keepe...
2023-06-10 04:16:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Big announcements are always the best ones. Our friends have gathered to let the community know that the Design of the Overworld is now 100% complete (barring a couple of small fixes discovered in Post).
Over the next week, we'll do a lovely 'World Tour' video, and a Stream on Twitch to match. So that anyone interested can see the design of each world, along with a Sample of the Race who lives there.
Our 90's Cartoon Inspired cast will flush out, one character at a time, a...
2023-06-05 22:18:45 +0000 UTC View Post
THE LOSTLANDS
Personally, this is one of my favorite zones in the game. It's Greco-Roman themed (in the sense that the ruins there are) and has a tribal theme for the race that lives there. You'll remember that we talked about the URRD last time? Well the Lostlands are the home of the AARD, the stokenekin anthro-animal race who emulates the Mortal races. The Aard traveled for many years to find their pl...
2023-05-28 21:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
...a phrase which is incredibly fun to say. 0.1 was Infra. 0.2 Was UI and Core Functionality. Those each took about two months. So for the first four months of the project I had this little tiny test room, with pads to test things on. (A space we will rebuild/return to when it's time to perfect combat and Puzzle Tools in 0.4 & ...
2023-05-25 21:24:47 +0000 UTC View Post
I WONDER IF IT'S LIKE THIS FOR OTHER DEVS...
I spend every free second I have Developing. I am not sure what that means for others. For me, that means taking the TB of assets I've accrued/created/repurposed and slapping them together around an idea I scoped out on a napkin in February, then massaging them (Changing Textures, Remaking Colliders, Writing Scripts or Creat...
2023-05-21 15:30:55 +0000 UTC View Post
First and Foremost, I confused Emberspark for Heavensreach. Don't ask how but during the creation process I mixed the home of the Scienifelves with the Gobots. I created one, giant, amazing, hybrid zone.
At first, this was a problem. HOWEVER, after some noodling, I think it's cool if you enter the zone from two sized, and eventually unlock the ability to travel between. Heavensreach will be the home ...
2023-05-03 02:24:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Librus is huge. It's genuinely the size of the overworld in ES IV. Which is... both cool as heck and incredibly challenging.
I genuinely didn't understand what went into lighting a scene. Which is to say, you would THINK you were just dropping lights, and those lights would render. And that is 100% an option. But then you end up with the CDP Red issue where your game is... what is the word... unoptimized doom.
THE REALITY
3D object hav...
2023-04-22 19:22:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Oh world design, you magnificently challenging task you.
We're finally at the half way point of the world buildout. It's one of those tasks that has to be done at the beginning of the development process. We created a Pinterest at the onset of the project, to collect ideas, and things we liked. To be honest, it was filled mostly with Ankama art.
From there we moved onto c...
2023-03-27 18:26:37 +0000 UTC View Post
"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... 2023-03-21 17:28:58 +0000 UTC View Post
So the work on Librus continues well. With movement, quests, compass, maps, UI, Inventory, and Camera controls out of the way (and having one of two roads for AI and Combat chosen) it's really about completing the world at this point.
CREATING PORTALS & CHESTS
The process of creating Portals and Chests is a fairly large deal in the game. We're using