A map screen. I’ve finally added something I’ve been wanting to add since the mesozoic. The engine is quite nice and updates automatically, so I only have to fit the rooms in a structure editor and everything else is done by the engine. This is also something good since it’ll take away the responsibility of doing a map that fits. I still need to finish the world to see how big it will get; I think it will be considerably huge. I’m trying to have the world-map be open-ended so you don’t have to do much (tedious) backtracking.

Well! I finally installed a plugin to prevent spamming; comments are now allowed on news posts Nevermind.

Also, I disallowed registering most names in the forum because of spam. Alas, I can’t use plugins with it, so I don’t know how else to prevent bots from registering/spamming.

As for development updates go, I’ve kept on working. I’ve been having some steady free time, so I use it to work on the game or on film projects. The testers have been giving some feedback and I’ve been modifying some things, adding items to the inventory, etc. Still, there is one thing that is turning to be another project in itself: the animated cutscenes. I chose to draw and animate them only with pixel perfect tools and chose somewhat of a simplistic shading style. It is still a monster to do, though: once spriting the character’s actions is over with, I take it to After Effects to add some touches and then to SoundTrack to do the audio design. I decided to leave all this till the end and deal with it then, but it’s still around 22 minutes of animated cutscenes at at least 12 FPS. Maybe I need to find someone to help me with that or change the stylistic approach altogether. I’ve not explored vector animation too much–maybe this is a better option. Most of the time there are automated cutscenes within the game itself; maybe I should scratch the animated cutscene idea and only have in-game cutscenes. I’ll decide it later on. Otherwise, things are manageable.

(I’m sorry if this has turned into a diary of sorts. I’ll try to do this as less I can.)

Thanks for reading!